Solar Steps
Solar Steps explores how thresholds define relationships between residential programs. What architectural interventions can exist between interior and exterior and between domestic and public program? How can thresholds can be pushed and pulled to merge or define layers of separation and create gradient degrees of transparency? This layering of thresholds and inhabited intermediary spaces imagines a dynamic form of collective living where the individual resident’s relationship to their neighbours and to the broader community become at the same time more connected and more flexible: Agency over where and how to draw the boundary between personal and community space is given to the residents themselves.
Hiding Meadow
Hiding Meadow creates a distinct microclimatic contrast between the surface condition and subterranean depth by juxtaposing opposing climatic, textural, and temporal qualities. While the tall-grass meadow appears homogeneous from the surface, visitors discover a series of underground pools only upon physically approaching their edges, creating recurring moments of revelation and surprise as ordered and rectilinear geometry bursts unexpectedly through an otherwise wild and organic landscape. Formed from offshore alluvial deposits, over time wind, current, floods, and erosion, in combination with land reclamation, hard-shore construction, channeling, Indigenous activity, and colonisation, have shaped and reshaped the Toronto Islands over the centuries. Drawing from the layered influence of the natural, human, and historical forces on the site, the project investigates themes of depth, inhabitation, and temporality, drawing attention to our connection to the land, and by extension, our connection to history, asking: what is hidden underneath our feet, invisible to the surface eye?
Arch Hive