The Mews

The design of this new commercial development arose from the important question what street-level urban retail in twenty-first century is, and more specifically in an urban neighbourhood, undergoing yet another transformation and densification, such as the Bloor-Yorkville area. With the intent of acting on the public realm by adding public spaces to the city, the proposal merges civic and commercial life. Taking cues from the immediate context and researching the neighbourhood’s urban fabric and history, led to the main design consideration for the building – a diagonal passage, known as the mews, cutting through the site. The mews restores a key lost connector, once vibrant through the neighbouhood, expanding the unique and characteristic feature of Yorkville Village – its pedestrian laneway network. Due to it strategic location between downtown and midtown Toronto, historically Yorkville Village has served as a natural urban connector. Owning to its Victorian-era heritage, Yorkville has an inherent and rich urban fabric of laneways and passages. Over the years, some of this fabric has deteriorated around the lost and interiorized laneways. The project’s diagonal is the natural urban response to reviving the lost fabric of Yorkville while also providing the only fully accessible, open to the sky connection through the neighbourhood. Conceived as a space with diversified uses, the mews provides a “democratic”, open to everyone passage with several commercial units opening up and creating a vibrant environment as one passes through. Animated through a series of “urban rooms”, namely the fore-court, the passage and the courtyard, the design challenge was focused on a community-centered approach and what defines a three-dimensional public space. While the diagonal cut provides the shortest and most direct route, it is the massing and the architecture that shape the mews experience. The main design feature of the building is nested in the definition and sculpting of the mews walls. The three distinct buildings vary in height with the tallest sitting on the east to maximize the mews sun exposure and quality of light. An noon, the sun penetrates straight down the mews, gently grazing through the stone masonry facades. The prominent kink on the lower, west building, creates a juxtaposing experience of compression and reflection in the lower portion of the façade, while opening up to the sky in the upper. The careful selection of local to Eastern Canada, natural, sun-absorbing stone with a distinct layered texture, creates a rich human-scale material tectonic, drawing the user close to the façade. As one moves along the mews, guided by an undulating wood soffit, a sense of discovery is encountered as the sun-lit quant courtyard opens up. Located in the south end of the site, the building massing has been sculpted to maximize its sun exposure, create a sense of openness, warm materials and a space for contemplation, repose, community events and art integration. The project is conceived as a symbiotic merging of future urban retail experience, public realm, iconic, yet deeply contextual architecture. Ultimately, we hope the project serves as a lens through which to question what urban retail experience is becoming in the digital age, and how to shape it for the benefit of the built environment and the vibrancy of our neighbourhoods. The overall material palette hints at the former residential heritage of Yorkville, while also responding in a contemporary language which reinterprets traditional brick masonry and the architectural character of the neighbouring mansard slate roofs. Two-storey stone masonry walls gently floating above the pedestrian realm fit into the surrounding Victorian-era landscape. The elongated random-length stone modules echo the legacy of brick and tile manufacturing once prominent in the contours of today’s Ramsden Park. In juxtaposition to the dark masonry walls, the exterior cedar-clad sweeping canopy guides the eye through the mews while giving the public realm a warm, residential feeling. The mew’s distinctive kinked west wall provides a moment of compression, followed by an open framed view of the sky. This dynamic vertical façade necessitates a creative structural bracing system while also allowing the honest and poetic use of stone masonry modules – corners are articulated as custom-cut pieces, the joints are recessed and the façade kink is achieved through gradual stepping of the 90mm-deep modules. Recessed from the presence of the stone walls, two glazed lanterns occupy third and forth levels. Perceived as white elements, the volumes reflect the sky, the clouds and the neighbourhood during the day, while revealing the interior activity with a soft evanescent light at night. With glass sizes in two-to-three-width ratio, the lanterns create a rhythm that is further defined by the digitally-printed glass pattern. Clear openings in the pattern create roofline look-outs offering views over Yorkville Avenue, the courtyard and the neighbourhood beyond. The simple palette of three materials – stone, wood and glass is further enriched through their material explorations, cutting, lamination and finish techniques, creating a rich mosaic of color nuances and textures allowing the three materials to find their expression throughout the project in diversity of applications – exterior masonry, paving, slatted screens and a continuous soffit.