The Interjunction
The chosen project site is the Junction neighborhood located between Bloor Street, Dupont Street, Lansdowne Avenue, and Dundas Street West. At the core of the Junction lies the Bloor GO station- a mobility hub which connects regional and rapid transit services throughout the greater Toronto area.
The guidelines for the project focused on the creation and integration of a public market around the Bloor GO station. The market will not only serve the Junction neighborhood at large and enhance the Green Line parkway that is adjacent to the Bloor GO station, but will also host a small Center for Asylum Seekers. The role of this center is to support newly arrived asylum seekers in Toronto, providing them with training and cooking areas, stalls, and various basic services.
Our proposal embodies a layered hierarchy that starts at the urban scale and translates to the architectural design. There are multiple circuits of connectivity present around our proposed site. At the urban scale the circuits represent the issue of unrestricted access to restricted access. Applying a similar logic to our site, we end up with circuits of connectivity from public to private. This idea informed the creation of programmatic layers in our design scheme. The inherent difference in access between public and private programs will determine how layers are arranged; with the most public being at the bottom and the private ones being pulled to the top.
The transition from public to private is translated into our spatial arrangement as a shift from ground floor to the top. In order to further develop this basic hierarchy, we rationalized our design strategy by considering moments of connection, sunlight and space requirements. In addition, by studying the spatial quality of smaller programmatic units such as living room and communal spaces, we are further able to organize the programs within the overall hierarchy. We have also explored the possibility for programs that may lie within two layers of access and thus create the opportunity to generate program spaces that overlap. This creates a larger sense of integration within our design. In all of this, we have catered our project to the specific timeline and movement constraints of asylum seekers, shoppers and commuters of the GTA.
In creating our design elements, we have aimed to capture a sense of movement and connectivity that reiterates our hierarchies through the use of curved ramps and floors. While the swooping ramps create a sense of connectivity from the exterior to the interior, the rounded floor plates aim to direct movement. The floor circuit is larger and more open at the more public level of the market place whereas it gets smaller and more nested at the private level of the asylum seekers center. In order to manifest a similar design element between programs transitions, we have created smaller rounded spiral ramps. As our final design move, a simple glass facade is created to keep the emphasis on our program hierarchies.