Ontario Line - Exhibition Station
Exhibition Station is one of the country's most popular destinations for sports, concerts, and trade shows, not to mention family attractions like the CNE. As the western terminus of the new Ontario Line, The station will be a much-needed connection to the GO Transit rail network and bring the subway system closer to many homes and businesses in the growing and vibrant Liberty Village community. Exhibition Station will be a landmark above-ground station on the western edge of Toronto’s downtown. The surrounding area and the disconnect caused by the rail corridor prompted a need for safe and comfortable public access to the two sides of the rail corridor. The adjacent Exhibition Grounds and BMO Stadium required a station that could accommodate event surges in ridership with retail offerings and passenger amenities. The reference concept design of the station is part of a design approach for the more extensive Ontario Line. The Station is an elevated structure that provides optimal transfers between GO, Ontario Line Subway, and future bus, streetcar, and bike networks. An above-grade volume that bridges across created an opportunity with a significant constructability and cost-saving benefit whilst making an invisible station visible. From it emerged a needed civic amenity with added retail within the neighborhood. The proposed solution is an iconic station that is the image of a modern interchange station and community catalyst. The architectural expression is grounded by an efficient structural design with ultralight-weight ETFE roofing, that creates an airy interior and a light architectural assembly that acts as a lens to the Toronto skyline. While the roof is ethereal, the materials straddling the street edges and adjacent Gardiner Expressway are chosen to be traditionally similar in the palette of the industrial brick surroundings of Liberty Village and Parkdale.
Aqualuna
Aqualuna is a residential project in Toronto, Canada that is literally born out of its spectacular waterfront location. Its playful façade reflects the waves across Lake Ontario, while its terraces provide sweeping views of the water from nearly every suite. The original masterplan set the volume of Aqualuna to be a rectangular slab at one uniform height. However, with particular regard for the neighbouring buildings, and their views; it was decided to design a building as a landscape with two high points and a valley in between. By shifting these two ‘peaks’ slightly apart, one maximizes waterfront views from each unit; and results in the building having two fronts facing the water. This has resulted in daylight in the surrounding streets, views to the water from the neighbouring buildings, and sunlight on the Eastern promenade that benefits the neighbourhood and public realm. The curving wave-like balconies offer a unique design that has not been previously seen in Toronto. The inspiration for this design and aesthetic was to create a geometrical solution that solves both practical and design related issues. The geometry of the balconies is used to optimize the lake-views and the influx of daylight for each unit. The aesthetics of the balconies give the building a unique identity; create an impression of constant movement bringing life to the area; bring scale into the unit; and add a world class reference to the shores of Lake Ontario.
Brookfield Place (Toronto)
Office complex in downtown Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
307 Lake Shore Boulevard East
307 Lake Shore Boulevard East is a fresh and functional enhancement to Toronto's collection of high-rise buildings. This 49-story, pedestrian-oriented development aims to be a symbol of inclusivity by providing efficient living spaces in a transit-rich community. Each unit in the 430-residential unit project was intentionally designed for a comfortable living space that feels like home, prioritizing residents' needs. The design intention is reflected in the development's provision of 700 square meters of community space and over 1,500 square meters of indoor amenity space. These areas work together to foster a vibrant sense of community that embodies the spirit of Toronto. To create a symphony of artistry and purpose, the building's design draws from five foundational pillars: the vibrant public realm, the rich tapestry of community and culture, the embrace of inclusive and affordable housing, the harmony of sustainability, and the pinnacle of design excellence. The ground level of the site features a substantial setback, purposefully crafted to foster a pedestrian and cyclist-friendly environment, complete with a lively public realm along Lake Shore Boulevard. At the corner of the site, a pedestrian plaza has been created to encourage community engagement. This public area features additional amenities, such as seating, specially treated paving, trees, and vibrant screening from the road. In addition, this space creates a connection to an existing pedestrian trail, further enhancing the connectivity of the site. The lobby to the cultural space on the building's second floor is located at the forefront of the pedestrian plaza. Creative industries that will occupy this space are anticipated to bring an electric vibrancy to the public realm that benefits the existing community and future residents of the building. The inclusion of affordable units within the development is not only a thoughtful response to the community's pressing need for more housing but also a unique opportunity for young professionals to become part of a lively, well-connected community. The tower height and massing have been thoughtfully designed to complement the existing and planned conditions of the surrounding properties while minimizing built form impacts. The tower's thin triangular form follows the shape of the site, lending it a unique and memorable presence that captures the eye. The form enhances panoramic views out across the lake and to the city skyline. The tower's striking design is emphasized by offset triangular balconies on all facades, forming a visually stunning pattern. The exoskeleton balcony design not only adds to the tower's aesthetics but also serves a functional purpose by reducing thermal bridging and heat gain and providing much-needed shading to the units. With a masterful balance of form and function, the upper levels of the building step back to make way for lush outdoor amenity spaces featuring thoughtfully selected landscaping and materials. This harmonious arrangement of design elements and massing contributes to the very essence of the city skyline, elevating the tower as a multi-dimensional masterpiece that seamlessly blends aesthetics, utility, sustainability, and community, a true embodiment of the spirit that defines Toronto.
55 Yonge
In the heart of Toronto’s financial district, 55 Yonge is a landmark 70-storey purpose-built residential tower. The building will include nearly 500 new residential units that will respond to Toronto’s rapid population growth. 55 Yonge is part of a solution to expand residential housing in Toronto while pushing the boundaries of an ambitious architectural character that will define Toronto’s downtown landscape. In the case of 55 Yonge, its context houses some of the most important heritage towers in Toronto. The idea of “future heritage,” or starting to build an architectural legacy, became central in the design discourse. This means the tower requires a grace and form that is akin to the context and density it occupies, but also tells a new story on Yonge Street. This story emphasizes the possibility of an architecture that exhibits high quality, high performance, and a presence different than the current vernacular approaches to high-rises across the city. Our approach to achieving this architectural presence is through the concept of a façade as a performance textile. Much like the fashion industry uses draping to tailor a garment to the body, we see the rigid financial model – that is the building – as needing the requisite garment. To achieve this new standard, our first step was to design the tower’s “garment,” or its “textile façade.” For this drapery, we found inspiration in fashion and nature. We looked to Issey Miyake’s ‘Pleats Please’ fashion line and Lilian van Daal’s biomimetic lattices. Designed through a vertical, modular approach, the façade tightly hugs the building’s massing. To ensure financial viability and longevity, each panel of the façade is simplified to its smallest size possible, while still single or doubly curved to achieve the dramatic effect of a fabric being “draped” over the building. The result is a façade that blends the ground, podium, and tower into a single, sinuous gesture. The façade is a high-performance aluminum envelope that is 60% insulated. To reduce the amount of concrete and embodied carbon, it has undergone extensive analyses to incrementally reduce volumes as the frame ascends into higher floors. The design also uses more steel than typical concrete high-rises to reduce cross sections, enhance performance, and increase recycled material content. The façade design has undergone solar analyses to minimize the shadow impact on the nearby Cathedral Church of St James. The façade’s panelization system responds to varying solar intakes by implementing larger fenestration in cooler areas. The panels are thick, angled, and cast shadows on the glass during peak sunshine hours on the south and west facades. 55 Yonge is set to stand as a defining development in Toronto, blending innovative design with environmental responsibility and financial viability. In integrating aesthetic innovation, urban planners, developers, and architects alike are encouraged to think long-term in designing what will be the significant cultural and historical facets of our future urban environment.
Wychwood Neighbourhood Branch Library Restoration and Addition
Originally the library was a quiet sanctuary for books. Today’s library is more outward-focused and engaged with its community. It is a lively public space where people meet, make connections, and join events. We like the metaphor of the “community kitchen,” the place where the party happens, where everyone wants to be. The Wychwood Library, designed by Eden Smith and Sons in 1916, followed Arts and Crafts design principles. In comparison to typical public buildings of the day, it was simple, well-proportioned, and stripped of unnecessary decorations. However, over time, the clarity of the original library was lost. A previous project had closed the original entry and obscured the south facade. We reinstated both and lowered the surrounding grade to match. This established the lower level as the main level, bringing the library in plane with the street and achieving full accessibility. The new addition was carefully inserted into this compact urban site, preserving the street presence of the original building, keeping back and below. A continuous skylight between the buildings retains the natural light inside the restored great hall while preserving the original form. The addition also takes material and geometric cues from the original, clad in slate similar to the original slate roof and picking up on the existing underlying geometry for its structural grid and the articulation of its façade. At the same time, the addition offers a new space between the library interior and the local neighbourhood. Garden walls and planters are used to create a sheltered entry court complete with services to host concerts or small outdoor events. Existing between the interior laptop bar and the busy street, this space extends the potential activity of the library to the outdoors, as well as inviting the neighbourhood to explore inside. From the interior, visitors have a unique vantage point to spectate lawn bowling matches from the exterior reading terrace. Integrated into the southeast corner of the library, the Wells Hill Lawn Bowling club house is as convenient to visit as the library book drop if patrons are interested in participating themselves. The project was designed according to Toronto Green Standards, meeting energy performance and storm water management requirements. Included in this design was the implementation of vegetative roof systems as well as civil infrastructure to capture and retain storm water on-site. The completed building which is three times the size of the original uses less energy than the original, and by repurposing the original building fabric preserves the embodied carbon. The completed project forms one unified space that embodies both the history and the evolution of the library. The project restores the clarity of the original, with its book-lined hall and cozy fireplaces, and pairs this with a contemporary twin that is open to the street and new possibilities. It integrates the best of both worlds.
Lawrence East Transit-Oriented Communities
The Lawrence East Transit-Oriented Communities (TOC) represents a bold step in rethinking how urban communities evolve in tandem with transformative infrastructure. Located at the intersection of Lawrence Avenue and McCowan Road, the site faces a series of formidable challenges: fragmented land ownership, a 5-meter topographical shift across the site, and limited pedestrian infrastructure. Despite these constraints, the project envisions a vibrant, inclusive, and transit-integrated community that redefines the standards of sustainable growth and social equity in Toronto's underserved suburbs. This development is the first TOC project to be publicly released with a public engagement session undertaken with the community, overall creating a milestone in a broader provincial strategy that balances the political imperative for improved transit with the economic realities of government-funded infrastructure. The TOC program leverages strategically located land adjacent to transit assets. Lawrence East, however, is no ordinary housing development. It exemplifies the evolving typology of urban intensification in Toronto’s periphery, where development block sizes, construction risk, and coordination with transit delivery present a new frontier for urban design. Extensive geotechnical investigations at the site revealed technical constraints that limited the proximity of tower cores to the station box. As a result, the design had to pivot, unlocking value across the site in a way that carefully balances maximum GFA with the structural needs of the transit system. This constraint led to a masterplan rooted in innovation: challenging planning policies where necessary to generate greater social value, and crafting a high-density, mixed-use neighbourhood with 1,276 residential units for approximately 1,914 future residents. The unit mix serves a wide demographic, from urban singles to growing families. Studio and one-bedroom units create demand for co-working spaces, quick-service restaurants, and urban retail, while two- and three-bedroom units attract families, generating needs for daycare, family dining, and home goods stores. This blend of uses creates a self-sustaining ecosystem that supports diverse lifestyles while ensuring constant street-level vitality. Topography was key to unlocking the design, enabling a ground floor with no "back" of the building. Services and loading are tucked below grade via a ramp from Lawrence Avenue’s lower elevation. This challenge became an opportunity: a terraced approach along Lawrence negotiates the steep grade with internal slabs, creating accessible street-level connections. Instead of retreating, the development engages the street – seamlessly integrating retail, transit, and residential entries. The frontage becomes a vibrant urban edge animated by public life and continuous pedestrian activity. To the east, the TOC transitions thoughtfully into the surrounding low-rise neighbourhood. A network of Privately-Owned Public Spaces (POPS) supports pedestrian flow, while lush tree canopies define a vegetated roofscape that softens the building edges. These green spaces act as buffers and connectors—strengthening community ties and enhancing the public realm. The project challenged conventional parkland dedication by leveraging the Minister’s Zoning Order (MZO) to deliver high-performance urban plazas instead of underused open space. These plazas emphasize pedestrian comfort, social gathering, and transit integration. More than just a housing project, Lawrence East sets a new standard for inclusive, transit-oriented growth in Toronto.
M1 & M2
M City is a 15-acre, 4.3 million-square-foot master-planned downtown Mississauga, Canada, community. Once complete, it will feature eight striking towers, providing over 6,000 residential units and a home for approximately 15,000 people. At its core, M City is designed to deliver a world-class urban experience that prioritizes walkability, livability, and a strong public realm—including more than two acres of new parkland. The client brief requested two landmark towers (M1 & M2) to anchor the community and serve as a dramatic eastern gateway to the city centre. The design was to be iconic, but it also had to maximize the efficiency of the floorplates and suite layouts to satisfy the project's economic goals. The towers, intended as the highest part of the whole M City development, will have a unique geometry that redefines Mississauga's skyline and befitting its role as a beacon for the entire area. Its characteristic undulating geometric presence is a series of twisted horizontal bands that form the entire shaft of the tower. There are 7 typical floor plate shapes (A, B, C, D, E, F, and G), beginning with a rectangle (D) and skewing first towards one extreme (G), then skewing back through D to the other extreme (A). The corners of each plate floor plate shift over 1m from the plate below. This is done with short shear walls that 'walk' along with the skewing and overlap above and below. The tower's unique appearance results from the rotation of the floor plates. Unlike other sculptural towers that sacrifice the livability of the units to achieve unique shapes, the precise geometric procedures we have used do not compromise the layouts of the rooms. In addition, continuous balconies made from translucent white laminated glass wrap every floor plate, extending the level of amenity further. In terms of appearance, this outer layer of glass extends 300mm below the slab to create broad horizontal banding and give the building its characteristic form. The floor plates accommodate approximately 13 units per level, each with a balcony. From top to bottom, the sculptural form is made up of these balconies, and great care has been taken to ensure this presence is uninterrupted by the unsightly mechanical equipment areas that mar the appearance of many high-rise towers. The singular expression of the bands reinforces the sculptural quality of the building, forming a dramatic baroque silhouette against the sky. The tower for phase 2 (M2) is envisioned as an 'identical twin' to the tower of phase 1 (M1). Rather than introducing a new material palette and geometry for the phase 2 tower, we simply rotated the existing design 90 degrees. By doing this, when one views the two buildings from any angle, the short end of one tower and the long end of the other will always be visible at the same time. The ground level is rounded out with retail units, two-storey townhouses, and landscaping, which creates a lively and interesting pedestrian environment.
Myhal Centre for Engineering Innovation & Entrepreneurship, University of Toronto
The Myhal Centre showcases an architecture that is disciplined and quiet. It is not about itself, but about the activities that will occur within it and change over time. This is an architecture that is robust and enduring. Located at the heart of the city centre campus, the Myhal Centre for Engineering Innovation & Entrepreneurship (MCEIE) serves the University’s wide range of engineering disciplines, from heavy mechanical engineering through to computer engineering. The Centre signals a new era for engineering education through a design that encourages group work outside the traditional seminar room, providing dynamic and flexible environments that break down artificial barriers between people, foster collaboration, encourage active learning and accelerate innovation. Occupying the last unbuilt site along the University’s historic St George Street, the building acknowledges its significant position as a building in the round, providing a transparent and permeable ground floor that creates both physical and visual connections to its surroundings. The eight-storey building includes a sophisticated 500 seat collaborative lecture theatre, workshop and lab spaces, innovation incubator suites allied to industry presence rooms, versatile design studios and a doubleheight extra-curricular club space called ‘The Arena’ large enough to allow for drone flight and testing. This 7,500 square metres of net programme space is balanced by an additional 7,500 square metres of non nett area, including shared social learning spaces, common areas, coffee bars, atria, and event spaces. Designed to be an exemplar of low-energy design for the city and university the building has an anticipated energy use intensity (EUI) of 100 kWh/m², less than half that of its university neighbours. Collaboration, active learning and innovation The MCEIE is designed to enhance the student experience and enable collaboration between students, faculty, alumni and, particularly, industry partners. The sense of how the building could facilitate this was a prime driver behind the design. Clustering accommodation around and within an atrium space not only allows visibility between the different users, but encourages informal meetings at open staircases, balconies and walkways. Transparency of rooms and open plan space which faces onto the atrium facilitates this, whilst adding life to this communal space. The design reflects the Faculty’s spirit of creativity, inclusivity and leadership, supporting and enabling the existing culture of innovative start-ups and patents coming from the school. University of Toronto St Georges Campus St Georges Campus in downtown Toronto is the oldest of the three University of Toronto campuses, made up of a mix buildings from the late 19th century to the present day. Located next to Simcoe Hall and fronting onto St. George Street, the Myhal Centre is designed to have a positive, transformative impact on both the streetscape and the campus at large. The transparent and permeable double-height entrance hall and exhibition space engages passers-by and creates a sense of vibrancy at street level. It opens onto a new forecourt with a colonnade that runs the length of the façade. The building’s expression is premised on a dignified and restrained architecture respectful of its academic setting in terms of material, composition and scale. The bioclimatic design of the façade results in four distinct strategies corresponding to the cardinal solar orientations – all without sacrificing generous access to light and views. Projecting vertical pre-cast fins shade the East and West façades. A dominant horizontal fin then shades the south façades. MCEIE was designed with a 100 year design life, and opens as one of the three most sustainable higher education facilities in Canada. Constructed to Toronto Green Standard Tier 2, it has anticipated energy use intensity (EUI) of 100 kWh/m², compared with 200–300 kWh/m² for the typical existing UoT Campus buildings. This figure represents a 25 per cent efficiency improvement over the Ontario Building Code. The annual energy production of the building is estimated at approximately 70,000 kWh. Some of the features leading to this enhanced energy profile include: • A high-performance building envelope, including R-22 walls and an R-26 roof • Energy-efficient LED lighting, with occupancy sensors and perimeter daylight harvesting controls • Collection of storm water for irrigation • Localized instantaneous electric domestic hot water heaters, to avoid the energy loss of a domestic hot water recirculation system. • An 80 kW rooftop photovoltaic system • Exposed thermal mass • Well insulated, shaded façade with optimised glazing percentages.
Ontario Line – OMSF “Operations, Maintenance and Storage Facility”
The facility is an opportunity to focus design narratives on an otherwise overlooked building typology. In keeping with the design initiatives and establishing a system-wide architectural language the OMSF building became an opportunity to reinvigorate the latent approach to these industrial structures. The facility is to be a model for future maintenance facilities as part of the Ontario Line Transit expansion as the project is part of a much larger network of transit identity. The dichotomy of the site with the industrial edges to the north and the vegetated hydro corridor to the south allowed for an architecture of polarity. The highly pragmatic plan was engaged to work cohesively with a dialectic approach to cladding the building in response to the existing site narrative and the exposure to natural light. The building stitches into the surrounding industrial vernacular with a neutral palette. The large low-lying structure is adorned with soft reflective metal panels that blend with the sky and surrounding landscape.
Proposed Innisfil Mobility Hub
Located 90 kilometres north of Toronto, the Proposed Innisfil Mobility Hub will be the heart of a future-forward, sustainable, inter-connected, transit city. Currently a municipality of small hamlets and verdant pastures, the city of Innisfil will reimagine the concept of the garden city by using the GO Station as its strong, central, civic core. The city will grow along a system of concentric trajectories, activated by the blended flow of commuters arriving and departing along an established framework of pedestrian, cycling, and vehicular routes. The design of the mobility hub responds directly to its function as a catalyst for growth. The building itself creates an east-west bridge across the existing tracks and connects the main access points around the stations. These areas of commuter activity are protected by an undulating canopy designed to emphasize the perimeter of the site while also being an attractive ‘fifth elevation’ for the future buildings that will look down on the station. At the pedestrian scale, the station establishes a well-connected community by extending into a landscaped plaza. This city plaza activates multi-modal connections and encourages the growth of an open-space network respectful of the protected watershed. At the city scale, the design establishes a clear identity by becoming an easily identifiable beacon at night meant to be seen from multiple corridors. Beautiful, elegant, and integrated into the environment, the Proposed Innisfil Mobility Hub is a landmark station for the future growth of the Innisfil community.
RIVERSIDE-LESLIEVILLE STATION
The Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area is growing fast and expanding the transit system is essential to connect people to jobs, schools and their communities. The Ontario Line, a new 15 station, 15.6km rapid transit line with at-grade track, elevated guideways and underground tunnels, will be built to fulfill this critical need. The vision for all stations is one of modest, timeless, and elegant pavilions that serve transit customers and integrate into the community. Elevated stations have a greater impact on their immediate urban context and the central challenge is to adapt the design to specific neighborhood contexts, yet still represent a cohesive identity for the system. Riverside-Leslieville Station is surrounded by a vibrant community consisting of low-rise Victorian houses, busy shops and restaurants, and an existing Metrolinx rail corridor. The station design embodies modern architectural innovation with a focus on sustainability. It was designed to integrate into the neighbourhood in a positive way, with a low-profile design blended into the existing rail embankment. The station design was streamlined by placing the new rail alignment adjacent to the existing rail corridor, simplifying platform and station access and minimizing the need for additional infrastructure. Inspired by the neighborhood’s unique heritage and character, the station’s exterior features a contemporary facade with warm tone structural girders and terracotta panels that allude to the brick row building facades of the surrounding neighbourhood. The exterior glass envelope of all the stations shares the same modulation that maximizes the daylighting and transparency. The station layout prioritizes seamless passenger flow, accessibility, and safety, ensuring a user-centric design approach. The scale of the building is minimized, with entrances and service rooms integrated into the bridge embankments, disguising the scale of the station, and improving the pedestrian environment under the bridge. Natural lighting, open spaces, and intuitive wayfinding elements enhance the overall passenger experience, creating a welcoming environment for commuters and visitors alike. The wood ceiling also provides an inviting presence and strong identity to the stations both when viewed while alighting trains and approaching from a distance. The project also enhances and returns green space to the neighbourhood through improvements to nearby parks, including integration of noise barriers, with a thoughtful application of graffiti protections and eliminating access points. Riverside-Leslieville Station symbolizes a progressive approach to transit infrastructure design, where functionality, sustainability, and community values converge to create a dynamic and inclusive space.
Royal de Versailles' Rolex Boutique
Taking over the ground level of a modernist high-rise, the fluidly sculpted stone façade of Toronto’s new Rolex Boutique offers a magnetic juxtaposition against the existing steel exterior. The digitally-fabricated facade underlines a fidelity to craftsmanship and material, embodying the high-precision design and construction that has defined Rolex’s timepieces for over one hundred years. As a 21st century realization of progressive, future-forward design, the unconventional façade boasts a design solution that frees modernist architecture of its rigid constraints. Completed in 1970, the 14-floor modernist building was designed by the Canadian visionary architect and real estate developer John H. Daniels. Emerging from the staid conservatism of the early 20th century, Toronto in the sixties and seventies witnessed a budding architecture seeded in cultural ambition and urban regeneration. Situated in the neighborhood of Yorkville, the high-rise’s design mirrored Toronto’s late 20th century desire for the neighborhood’s revitalization. The Rolex Boutique’s new façade upholds this same zeal for design that is intended to be valued, preserved, and celebrated by future generations – an architecture that can become the heritage sites of tomorrow. At the intersection of technology and craft, the geometries of the watch are translated into architecture through the exploration of limestone, a durable and sustainable material. The seemingly brutal material is transformed into a delicate and airy medium through elegant contours and smooth bends. The language of the existing modernist façade seamlessly integrates down into the mullions of the storefront, where the rhythm of the columns recalls the patterns of a watch’s band links, and curvilinear windows reflect polished watch crystals. As the mullions trace down the exterior of the high-rise, they begin to slowly bend into subtle, graceful arcs that capture the essence between the existing structure and the distinctive Rolex geometries. On the east façade, a CNC parametric composition is carved out of the limestone. The composition was produced by an algorithmic design that was developed in collaboration with computational designer Arturo Tedeschi. The resulting forms follow the geometric logic of the engravings seen on watch face dials, while interacting in a generative manner that is unique to the structure’s elevation. As an inherently layered object, a watch’s most sophisticated features are not readily observable. In example, fluted bezels reflect light at different angles, making the watch shimmer with the wrist's movement. The same philosophy applies to the Boutique’s east façade, whose layered complexity is – as in a Rolex watch – perceived through the subtle vibration of light as it grazes the stone panels' micro-texture. Using algorithmic modeling tools and CNC milling techniques has made it possible to generate a digital model and realize a tridimensional texture as to give the stone a 'textile' appearance. The Rolex Boutique’s façade boasts a harmonious integration of innovative materials that capture the essence of Rolex’s quintessential design and craft. At the same time, the façade anticipates and responds to future-forward needs that accommodate changing values, all while adapting to the city’s existing infrastructure, redefining the future of heritage.
Stacked Habitat
This project poses the question of how a twin residential high-rise program can act as a platform for active resident interaction, similar to a small community project. Thus, by designing a smaller 10-storey block with stepped balconies and an active roof that meets the intended qualities of interactives, stacking the block four times to reach the unit requirements, the Habitat Stacked becomes a 40-storey twin residential tower with the qualities of a small project. The Habitat Stacked is situated in Toronto, Canada- a country heavily framed in zoning by-laws and codes for residential buildings that typically constrain architects to facade-only designs due to predefined building shapes. This project’s program required two towers that had the opportunity to break free from only a facade design and have an interactive form and program between the two towers and away from the property line. The design strategically stacks and rotates the smaller blocks so that their stepped balconies face each other, enhancing resident interaction. However, to comply with mandatory setbacks and to optimize views, sunlight, and ventilation, each block is positioned to diverge from its counterpart. At the 10th and 30th levels, the aligned blocks form outdoor roof spaces programmed as communal amenities, fostering community between the towers. These spaces are connected and shared by the two towers via a bridge. These stacked blocks are placed on a structural core; thus, no columns that block the view of the stepped balconies will be required. The geometry of the podium is hollowed in stepped pathways that open up circulation. The podium holds commercial programs and offices that look into the stepped openings. The roof of the podium is used as a public platform that the city can interact with and hold different activities.
Unveiling Connectivity: Back-of-House Reconnecting a Pedestrian Network
The design for the four-storey commercial re-development at 111 Yorkville Avenue is rooted in the duality between old and new. In the late 1980s, the existing Victorian house structure underwent several functional and design alterations, distorting it from its original character - thereby eliminating heritage and cultural value within the Yorkville Village neighbourhood. Removing public functions from the courtyard, the rear was converted to Back-of-House functions and cut from the Public Realm network. Taking cues from a sister building located a few steps away on Hazelton Avenue, our team proposed a contemporary interpretation of the building that allowed retail functions to be accommodated behind a Victorian-inspired façade that opens up and revives the once significant courtyard. Based on the desire to maintain and celebrate the unique character of Victorian houses in Yorkville, the design integrates a rebuilt and re-proportioned historic facade and functions as the redevelopment’s main frontage on Yorkville Avenue. Replacing the existing, out of context red bricks, historical-size yellow bricks pay homage to the brick modules from the historic Yorkville Brickworks once located in the nearby Ketchum Park. Complimenting and standing behind the historic building is an angled geometric volume that houses the nearly 20,000 sf of commercial and restaurant programming. The Back-of-House, formerly a parking lot and garbage disposal area, becomes a southern courtyard, reconnecting to an adjacent laneway and Old York Lane, thereby transforming a derelict space into a warm and welcoming experience. The reflective glass on the front facade of the angled volume reflects the historic house roofline, and the added terrace reveals the dimension of movement and activation with pedestrians on the sidewalk below. The thoughtful approach to massing and materiality of a historically prominent Victorian house demonstrates a newfound connectivity to the urban retail neighbourhood’s latent network of courtyards and pedestrian passageways.
Western North York Community Centre
On track to be one of Canada’s first ‘Aquatic-Based Net-Zero Energy Building’, the new Western North York Community Center is co-designed with community residents; City of Toronto Parks, Forestry & Recreation Department; Children’s Services; and a diverse consultant team. The Western North York Community Center (WNYCC) will provide this diverse and expanding community currently lacking a public social gathering space, with new social and wellness infrastructure, including aquatic, fitness, recreation, childcare, and community programming. It is designed to maximize spaces for inclusivity, versatility, and animation, as a community-focused and welcoming hub. The 1.9-hectare lot is bordered by the high school and its parking lot, as well as, residential backyards to the north and west. The site is long and thin, with a narrow address off Starview Lane along its southern boundary. To establish strong neighborhood connections, the building’s massing has been configured to the west of the site. The building edge and public promenade reinforce connections across a previously divided neighborhood, delivering a site that is safe, accessible, and encourages pedestrian access. The goals of zero greenhouse gas emissions and net-zero energy status on a site with limited space for photovoltaic panels meant that almost every measure would have to be investigated to lower TEDI and GHGI enough to minimize the scale of on-site energy generation. Highlights of the integrated strategies include: high-performance building envelope; user-controlled operable glazing to provide natural ventilation; regenerative media filters, wastewater heat recovery, and automatic pool covers to minimize aquatic hall loads; interior environments that prioritize occupant comfort over air temperature; exterior shading devices for glare and heat gain control; mechanical systems optimized for low energy, open-loop geo-exchange; and site and building integrated photovoltaic system to achieve net-zero energy use. Early site investigations revealed that a buried river valley and aquifer run under the site with heat exchange capacity to handle the building’s peak heating and cooling loads, lessening EUI by 47%. This reduced the scale of the photovoltaic system required to achieve site-sourced, net-zero energy, allowing the seamless and strategic integration.
White Box
White Box The office is located in one of the venerable iconic black steel towers designed by Mies Van De Rohe as part of his vision for the TD center in downtown Toronto in the 1960‘s. InstarAGF is the young infrastructure investment arm of AGF financial advisors. Their new office is located on the 34th floor of one of the Mies Towers. Surrounded by a Miesian sea of pristine black steel and glass, the concept was to create a dynamic, bright intervention, a white glowing box unlike any in the suite of surrounding black towers. This was in response to the progressive, energetic, and venturous culture we discovered at Instar. To create the glowing white box, all the main office surfaces were designed in white, oftentimes highly reflective finishes. Exiting the lift lobby, the front entrance greets visitors with white Statuario marble floors and feature walls, as well as a wall of polished white Venetian plaster for future artwork display. The main office flooring is made entirely of high gloss white epoxy flooring that reflects light and brings reflections of the outside skies and skyline deep into the office. At night, the office gives off a white glow. The office was based on an open plan, but elements such as the new white ceiling grid, and building core wrapping offices tied rigorously into the Miesian structural and window grids. A wide plank 360 degree walnut sleeve-like enclosure in the board room is the only material that goes off white palette grid and offers relief to the otherwise relentless white box concept. A few other exceptions include the suite of CEO office custom designed furniture that feature a desk, credenza and coffee table. These pieces were designed and custom built in bronze, with white Calacuta marble tops and accents.
Primrose Hill
Primrose Hill is a playful approach to humanizing purpose-built rental development, with a focus on civic regeneration, affordability, and community-building. Located in Moss Park, a historically underserved neighbourhood in downtown Toronto, the project prompted a series of guiding questions: How do we reinvigorate our existing urban fabric, creatively and responsibly, on sites that are in relative disrepair and can accommodate more intensification? How can we build social equity and density, with an emphasis on bringing more joy, colour, and visual intrigue to the staid and sterile development landscape that characterizes Toronto’s downtown core? Simply put, can rental be both beautiful and affordable? Our proposal resuscitates an outdated tower-in-the-park development that currently houses two 1970s Brutalist apartment blocks. The scheme introduces two new vibrant towers (39 and 40 storeys, respectively) for a total of 692 new rental units and a whimsical skybridge that creates coherence and connection. The towers’ shifting volumes — stacked in a collage-like fashion, like oversized building blocks — invert traditional high-rise massing by growing larger as they rise, leaving more open space at grade for community use. We’re exploring the facade’s colour palette alongside British artist Adam Nathaniel Furman. A current iteration deploys bold transitions and rich gradients to soften the visual weight of the existing buildings — an optimistic and spirited contribution to the city’s skyline. The base and mid-level volumes feature precast arches that reference the Brutalist context. The skybridge is the project’s defining architectural gesture: perched above the roof of an existing apartment block, the bridge frames the latter and provides a physical connection between the two new towers at the 17th floor. Featuring an elevated terrace, infinity pool, and panoramic views, the bridge doubles as a communal space in the sky, granting tenants access to an exhilarating amenity experience. At its core, Primrose Hill reimagines amenity design as a vehicle for inclusion. With over 1,500m2 dedicated to outdoor space, the development also offers an array of ground-floor amenities, including a daycare, café, pet spa, demonstration kitchens, arcades, party rooms, and wellness spaces. To realize this ambitious project, our team was challenged to troubleshoot a series of complex site constraints alongside material and structural considerations. An overhead flight path prohibits the use of cranes, requiring us to rethink how high-rise construction unfolds and specify lightweight components for the fabrication of the upper volumes, which will be assembled without traditional lifting equipment. We worked with a multidisciplinary team to resolve engineering challenges related to the cantilevered forms and the underground parking garage. The latter will require the introduction of new foundations within the existing shell to support the towers above and provide shared servicing infrastructure below. These technical maneuvers are extensions of the project’s LEED Gold sustainability mission, which is to achieve lightweight systems that reduce embodied carbon; a 60/40 solid-to-glass façade ratio; precast rain-screen cladding; high-performance glazing to enhance thermal efficiency; and advanced mechanical systems, including air source heat pumps, in-suite energy recovery ventilators, and stormwater reuse tanks, linking environmental performance with urban regeneration.
Tyndale Green
Tyndale Green is a 23-hectare (56 acres) mixed-use development in collaboration with Tyndale University, an interdenominational seminary in North Toronto. The vision for Tyndale Green sees several exciting precedents for affordable housing in the City of Toronto. Key drivers of the master plan include: high quality affordable rental housing, a vibrant green public realm, sensitive integration to the neighbouring community, excellence in design quality and environmental stewardship, and sustainability and respect to the ravine landscape. The planned development expands and transforms the university campus, which includes amodernist cathedral at is centre and the original motherhouse of the Sisters of St. Joseph, the Roman Catholic congregation of women founded in France circa 1650. The master plan aims to evolve the campus into an affordable mixed-use community with a university at its core while taking into consideration the distinctive and natural setting at the edge of Toronto’s ravine system and recreational trail network. Set in a pastoral landscape, the Tyndale Green neighborhood comprises 12 buildings ranging in height from six to 24 storeys, with all but two buildings between six and eight storeys tall. The two taller buildings are located strategically to mitigate shadow impacts and create appropriate transitions to the surrounding neighbourhood. Set to be one of the largest privately delivered affordable housing projects on private land in the City of Toronto, it will include 1500 purpose-built residential rental units, including market and affordable units, including workforce housing, a new daycare facility, and a new community recreation centre. Design excellence, heritage preservation, environmental sustainability, walkability, and livability are key drivers of the design concept. New residential buildings will frame a series of public open spaces, including two new public parks and a central ceremonial “academic green” shared by residents and members of the university community. The project will also deliver ambitious sustainability features, including a geothermal renewable energy exchange program, which will provide zero emissions heating and cooling to the entire residential component, as well as best-in-class sustainable stormwater management principles including on-site collection, rainwater gardens, permeable pavers, and a sustainability-first landscape plan. Over 40% of the site will be conveyed to the public as protected ravine lands. Along the top-of-slope line, the client and design team worked closely with Toronto and Region Conservation Authority to establish a variable-width ravine buffer zone that exceeds the land area of a typical 10-meters-wide. New residents, neighbouring community members, and the existing Tyndale University community will share a lush and walkable system of pedestrian pathways that meander through the setting, connecting all the public spaces and knitting together the ravine trail system and the existing neighbourhood fabric. Tyndale Green is conveniently located within walking distance of bus, subway and regional train service exemplifying how Toronto’s inner suburbs can be transformed into complete, walkable communities that provide much-needed housing supply in a growing city, while also providing benefits for existing community members.
Toronto Media & Innovation District
Located in the district-based developed city of Toronto, the Media and innovation center is carefully sited close to similar culture and entertainment-based districts to be able to make a connection with the existing buildings both in functional and physical ways. By addressing social resiliency in this area, the project is designed to become a suitable place for everyone, providing an exciting space for learning, practicing, performing, and exploring. To ensure this concept will extend to the form of the buildings and evoke a sense of curiosity, they are designed organically to become an eyecatcher among the cube-shaped neighboring buildings. Inspired by the cross sections of nationally loved maple trees, the buildings take organic forms with open and green spaces on the upper levels mimicking the dark spots visible on cross sections of dead maple trees. These shapes get reduced by the size as they get closer to the sea surface where they will be placed on bearing pilots reaching deep into the water. To seek out a solution for the emerging natural disasters like the drastic rise of sea levels or massive floods, the buildings are piloted high above the water to resemble the nearby trees floating on the surface of the water giving it a sense of lightness while providing safety in time of need. Also, there are two different types of access routes designed for these buildings on two levels, one is deep in the ground and reaches the buildings from below providing quick access to the city’s public transport like metro stations, while the other one is located 15 meters high above the body of water giving access to the buildings from above. These two routes both are designed and specialized for bicycles and pedestrians, they not just provide safety during a natural disaster but also creates a shelter from the cold and windy weather of the northern seashores. This Media district consists of four different zones each hosting 3-6 separate buildings, working together to create a calm and suitable place for artists, citizens, visitors, and also workers. The innovation zones include the Educational and Recording/Performing zones which are located next to each other, having some shared spaces in between to be able to work and connect more easily while the cultural and entertainment zones are considerably distanced from them to be more distinguished from them, providing a sense of privacy for the innovation zones. The location of each zone is precisely chosen to require the shortest possible routes to connect the buildings to each other while having enough open spaces between them to provide a safe route for maritime transportation, from massive ships to cruising boats. The buildings shapes and the choice of Bio-Based materials have shaped water resistance massive forms which will survive strong floods and continue to function in higher levels of sea surface. Unlike most buildings founded in water. With bio-based materials, organic forms and structural solutions, these building are shaped and designed to create a better connection between architecture, technology and nature.
Toronto Venue + Hotel
Situated on the hallowed grounds of Exhibition Place in Toronto, the performance venue and hotel is uniquely positioned to deliver exceptional entertainment and hospitality to Torontonians and visitors from around the world. The building massing provides for a compelling composition - the performance venue delivers an iconic presence along the waterfront and the hotel serves as the anchor of the composition, unifying the two building programs yet allowing for separate and distinct internal functions. The arrival experience begins with passage through Princes’ Gates, a triumphal arch and monumental gateway at Exhibition Place. Movement west along Princes’ Blvd. offers the first glimpse of the development, revealing a prominent series of cascading cantilevered floors which provide protection over the open plaza area and main hotel entry below. A grand staircase straddles the glazed hotel entry, allowing venue patrons to ascend to the podium level before entering the interactive grand lobby and pre-function hall. Perched atop the cantilevered floors is the slender hotel tower which offers unobstructed 360-degree views of the entire vicinity, including Lake Ontario and the remarkable city skyline of Toronto. It is at the intersection of the hotel and the venue that a variety of hospitality offerings are positioned, including the terrace pool, which is surrounded by an integrated green roof design. The green roof then gently ascends toward the south along the curved roof volume of the venue, covering it in a sustainable green blanket of grasses and plantings. A key attribute to the site is its pedestrian access. The design allows for pedestrian movement along its entire eastern and western elevations as well as the ascension of the public onto the podium’s southern porch – a prominent open space with stunning views. Once inside the venue, the interactive pre-function hall serves as a mixing bowl for venue patrons, hotel guests, business executives, performers/entertainment, esports gamers and staff. The design of the theatre was neither conceived as a sports arena nor an opera house, rather, a new typology that straddles the two – a state-of-the-art performance venue. The theatre architecture creates a merger of the old and the new: the old channeling the rhythmic repetition of historic landmark theaters, and the new integrating the progressive forms of avant-garde twenty-first-century design. In combination, a symbiotic balance delivers a one-of-a-kind theatre architecture, unique to Toronto and the world. Finally, the theatre’s historic verticality combined with the fluid horizontal cladding of its premium balconies ties together in a series of proscenium arches that envelope the primary walls and ceilings of the theatre, culminating in an austere framing of the stage akin to a twenty-first century Radio City Music Hall. From the onset, the design approach focused on leveraging the energy of the venue with the offerings of the hotel to deliver a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. In total, the project will elevate the City of Toronto, providing exceptional entertainment and hospitality experiences that draw people together in remarkable ways.
Box Beautiful: Production to runway
Located on a large irregular site at the Toronto Pearson International Airport, the manufacturing campus for Bombardier Business Aircraft is comprised of two main aircraft buildings and several support structures. The principal buildings, an aerostructures manufacturing assembly line and a flight test hangar, take the functional program as a starting point to resolve a series of volumes limited by many site constraints. Closely following Louis Sullivan’s famous phrase “form follows function”, this project developed during the global 2020 pandemic and the uncertainties associated with air travel, is an example of lean and efficient design. Our approach to the design of the 80,000 sm manufacturing facility aimed at an in-depth understanding of the client’s core business and current operational challenges. Taking this as a point of departure, we identified three primary design challenges and opportunities. First, merging the scalar and programmatic requirements of two seemingly dichotomous programs – office space and aircraft manufacturing, characterized by the large extents of the distinctive transonic wing design. Second, negotiating through the challenging site and Transport Canada zoning requirements associated with the close proximity to runway 05-23, the busiest in Canada. Third, creating architecture that would challenge the typical aircraft hangar typology, being cold and impersonal, and fostering a human scale atmosphere and culture of collaboration through program adjacencies and natural light. Each building program is organized around the aircraft work center positions, serviced by lineside industrial areas, engineering offices and support functions. By proposing a stacked layout of the office spaces and isolating them into three distinct volumes, the approach allowed diffused natural light to enter from all four sides to the production floor, breaking the common notion that aircraft hangars have less than 50% natural light. In addition, the lineside support areas were programmed with breakout spaces within 1min walking distance from any point on the shop floor. These carefully dispersed gathering spaces maximize the employee’s use of short 15min breaks, also allowing for a quick return to their work zone. In addition to maximizing natural light onto the production floor, the stacked office functions encourage social interaction between engineering, procurement, quality, logistics and pre-flight functions, and shorten walking distances, promoting vertical mobility through use of stairs. The exterior facades break away from the typical monotony of horizontal strip windows and propose a series of barcode-like vertical strips of translucent polycarbonate and complimentary tones of metal panels. Viewed from a distance, the campus appears as a cluster of buildings with a richness of scales. This volumetric play is not only driven by the tight restrictions of the Obstacle Limitation Surface at the airport, but also the intentional material shift to translucency is used as an intuitive wayfinding strategy. While providing ample diffused natural light to the production floor, single strip translucent panels are aligned with glass doors at exit corridors allowing the employees to “follow the light” in case of emergency. A functional and dynamic proposal of massive spans, limited by functions of straight lines and fixed aircraft proportions, yet designed for people.
CAMH Research Centre
The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) is a PAHO/WHO Collaborating Centre and Canada’s largest teaching hospital and the world-leading research centre in its field. The new Research Centre culminates a 20-year Master Plan vision to transform its downtown campus into an urban village inspired by the masonry fabric of Toronto’s heritage residential and industrial neighbourhoods. The goal with the new research building is to remove the stigma associated with mental health institutions and reflect the evolution of CAMH’s leadership and expertise. Every Building Implies a City: The design reconciles the past, present, and future of CAMH’s Queen Street campus by honouring the deep Indigenous, pre-settlement origins of the site as a place of gathering, retreat, and security. The curvilinear, transparent design set within a green landscape provides a highly visible and accessible counterpoint to the darker history associated with the former 19th-century palatial asylum that stood on this site, memorialized in remaining fragments of the Heritage Wall built by the residents of the asylum. In this way, the design recovers the original meaning of the word asylum as a refuge, an oasis for compassion, care, dignity, and respect. Its distinctive form creates a welcoming presence and all its entrances and pathways are sited to be pedestrian, bicycle, and public transit-friendly, from the TTC on Queen West to the King-Liberty SmartTrack Station which will be accessed from the south-west corner of the campus.
FlyOver Canada Toronto
FlyOver Canada is challenged with expressing its attraction-based programming while responding to intense urban conditions in Canada’s most active public plaza. Its core program is a flying-theatre housed in 2,600 m 2 of architecture. It is located in an extremely active plaza directly below the CN tower, beside the Rogers Centre stadium, and across from the Roundhouse public park. It will contain two immersive pre-ride experiences, and a fully articulating motion simulation ride moving in concert with a film flying across the Canadian landscape, taking 88 guests on a 6,000-kilometre 4D journey across Canada. Like many entertainment-focused buildings, the FlyOver Canada program requires the main programmatic elements be encased in solid volume as a “black-box” theatre, yet they must also create intrigue and an expression of its unique content. To express the programming architecturally and engage the public realm, the exterior is activated with three main gestures to provide connection points with the surrounding dense urban realm. The ride volume is sculpted around the ride in an honest manner, presenting itself as an object to the public. The ride rests within the “black-box” portion of the architecture, which moulds itself to the surrounding pedestrian context. The public circulates around this portion of the building on the upper concourse level, and down an exterior stair element to the plaza, the materials guiding their journey around the exterior of the building. The façade becomes transparent to reveal how the ride volume can be accessed from the interior, and the lower portion is carved away to reveal a large transparent and accessible entry. The landscape functions as a mediator between the architecture and existing plaza by providing integrated seating and planters with a vegetation describing a Canadian narrative. The materiality of the building is inspired by the Canadian landscape. The solid base is clad in cement panels evoking the jagged forms of the Rocky Mountains as the hard-exterior shell. The spherical ride is clad in dichromatic panels that mimic the aurora borealis, catching and reflecting light throughout the day and night. The wood lattice supporting the glazed wall against the plaza is indicative of Canada’s forested geography. In addition to the representation of each material selected, the landscaping and planting has been carefully curated to exhibit the southern forests at the south end of the building, transitioning into the northern landscapes at the north point of the building. The architecture fuses symbolic representation of the Canadian landscape with the formally expressed programming, while being sensitive and responsive to its active and intense public context.
Fold House
Fold House is a residential property in Hamilton, Ontario that “folds” into the contours of a hillside through its undulating wood and steel structure. The two-story residence is concealed through the land’s topography with the pool pavilion nestled into the lower part of the hill and features an eighty foot long by ten foot tall sliding glass facade that provides sweeping views from a burrowed vantage point. The undulating structure disguises the ninety-foot steel structural beam that creates a cantilevered canopy making the front of the pavilion appear as though it is floating. The facade and Interiors deploy compression-bent wood, an artisanal fabrication technique typically used on furniture and musical instruments, and rarely deployed at this scale. The roof has a significant wave-like curvature that is visually striking from the exterior of the building as well as from the inside of the pool room. opens space to cradle the cascading external steel staircase and creates a sculptural slope in the white oak ceiling of the pool room. To minimize environmental impact and follow the Niagara Escarpment’s regulations, a 3D scan was performed to finetune the structure’s positioning. The green roof blurs the distinction between landscape. In order to maximize sunlight in all seasons and reduce solar gain in the summer, the windows are structured in a checkerboard pattern along the guest houses and the pool room features south-facing glazed sliding doors with deep overhang. The pool house is embedded within the landscape, which helps to regulate temperature and improves overall energy consumption. A green roof consisting chiefly of succulents, which are resilient and low-maintenance, covers the entire area of the pool house (1935 ft2). The south-facing glazed sliding glass doors of the pool house maximize sunlight in all seasons, while the deep overhang minimizes solar gain in the summer. The large, operable sliding glass façade also allows for natural ventilation in the warmer months. Eramosa limestone—a rock unique to Owen Sound—was locally sourced for the pool house floor tiles. The flooring, in combination with the exposed concrete interior walls, create a thermal mass that drives significant energy savings. The concrete walls were formed using reclaimed barn wood. Fold joins a handful of architectural projects that deploy compression-bent wood, typically used in the artisanal fabrication of furniture, instruments, and installations. Our team tested the possibilities and limitations of compression-bending in-house by building a 1:1 prototype of the double-curved wood ceiling. We subsequently designed a CNC’d waffle structure to support and hang the double-curved wood for the build.
The Royal
Over a decade, Giannone Petricone Associates (GPA) transformed a dilapidated 1881 Victorian railway hotel in Picton, Ontario into the first upscale hotel in Prince Edward County (PEC). The Royal Hotel’s restoration is contributing to PEC’s reputation as a burgeoning food and wine region. Central to this mission, GPA embraced the area’s culture and history to establish a distinctive design of global standards. A key challenge was restoring the 31,000-square-foot hotel, while also elevating it to a glorious 21st century version of itself. When the project started, the building’s staircases were lined with moss and the roof caved in. The design team salvaged three brick walls and reconfigured the back of the building to add terraces and open the interior to increased natural light. They established 28 guestrooms, a café, three bars, and a fine-dining restaurant, plus a gym and spa. The former stables were also rebuilt as an annex with five guest suites suitable for families, extended stays or even staff accommodation. PEC is a destination with tremendous seasonal change, so flexibility of space and function was crucial to the hotel’s operation. The café and parlour shift from bright and lively to low-lit and atmospheric. In place of a grand lobby bar, an armoire in the parlour opens to reveal a “shake it yourself” cocktail bar, appropriate for the informality of the locale. A retractable roofed porch enables the fine dining restaurant to expand and contract with the seasons and events, and a garden terrace with a fourth bar and fireplace patio leads to a swimming pool. Playing on the expectations of The Royal Hotel’s name and history, GPA embraced the quintessential tropes of a Victorian railway hotel by abstracting and then reinserting them, creating a rich contrast between the formalities of British tradition and the informalities of rural Ontario. In the dining room, the typical Victorian ceiling rosette is atypically reinterpreted to emulate the underside of a mushroom. This contrast treats guests to an experience that is transporting yet deeply rooted in the local context. Vestiges of the original hotel’s white glove approach are now expressed in ways that delight modern travelers. Scalloped bathroom vanities and the parlour’s undulating fireplace mimic starched linens being pressed into service in new ways. This “petrification” of Victorian textiles is one of the hotel’s foundational design concepts, guiding key materials and motifs. Tartan is rendered in stone mosaic tiles in guest room bathrooms and wood-framed cross-stitched headboards recall embroidery still in its hoop. The Royal’s former state of deterioration is also paid tribute, reimagined to evoke a state of sublime decay. White oak millwork resembles exposed wall studs and rippled ceiling rosettes reference the hotel’s once waterlogged state. The appearance of construction-grade materials seemingly left exposed during the reconfiguration deepen the narrative. Guest room fireplaces are finished in fluted concrete as if awaiting their cladding, and gilded industrial-grade metal reinstates the quintessential Victorian elevator cage. By embracing the imprint of time, the hotel pays homage to its past and future legacy.
Royal Ontario Museum
Museum of world culture and natural history in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
210 Bloor
The development is located in the Bloor Street West corridor, an east-west Major Arterial road and subway corridor. The north side of Bloor Street is favourable ground for a series of new emphatically urban buildings. While highly prized for proximity to the city’s premier high street and cultural institutions and extraordinary south-facing views, the development of this swath of nascent urbanity is nonetheless constrained by small lot sizes. Along with the challenge of intensifying these lots where the buildings are typically designed with one or two units per floor, assuring a high level of privacy and autonomy, similar to a house. This emerging urban typology has been taken up in North American cities, including New York and Vancouver, where the various monikers for these buildings include the “super-skinny” and “pencil tower.” Qualification in this unique club generally includes buildings with approximately a 10:1 height-to-frontage ratio. The subject site is rectangular and has a total area of 783m2. It has 13m of frontage on Bloor Street and a depth of 61m. A two-storey commercial property currently occupies the site. The envisioned project is a 29-storey structure blending residential, retail, and parking facilities. It will house 42 residential units, offer 126m2 of retail space at street level, and include three underground parking levels accessible from a rear alley. This development aims for a gross floor area of 15,589m2 (168,000 sq.ft.) achieving a density 20 times the lot size. The building’s canyon-like design stands approximately 111 meters tall. It adheres to current zoning policies and is positioned to preserve existing view corridors. The design aspires to integrate seamlessly with the surrounding architectural landscape, enhancing the block’s innovative yet harmonious appearance. It emphasizes transit and pedestrian accessibility. To improve the pedestrian experience, the building is retracted 3.1 meters from the boundary line at street level, widening the public sidewalk. The second level is set back an additional 1.7 meters, with minor encroachments into this space due to window configurations. From the third to the sixteenth level, and then from the seventeenth to the twenty-second, and finally from the twenty-third to the twenty-ninth level, the building’s north and south sides are characterized by sheltered balconies, adding rhythm through a series of progressive recesses. Each of the floorplates has been configured to provide two residential suites up to the 8th level. Levels 9 -16 allow for custom configurations, and the top four floors are designed to accommodate two side-by-side duplexes, each with interconnected levels. The building has been planned to allow for the individual design of the residential suites, offering a level of customization typically only available in a freestanding house. Architecturally, the building is distinguished by an undulating pattern across its front and back, generating visual appeal with a triangular, tessellated design on the east and west sides extending to the property’s edge. The triangular panels’ reflective surface enhances the interplay of light and shape, enriching the building’s aesthetic appeal.
Dawes Road Library
In response to a client brief that called for an authentic embodiment of Indigenous culture and the next level of integrated sustainability, the design team formed as a collaboration between an Indigenous-led architecture practice and a design firm with strong credentials in sustainable design and public buildings. The team led a highly collaborative design process which included The Toronto Public Library (TPL), the City of Toronto’s Social Development, Finance & Administration Division (SDFA) and a broad range of Indigenous and non-Indigenous community stakeholders. The resulting design is inspired by the metaphor of an Indigenous star blanket, which embraces, protects, and celebrates a community of learning and discovery. The adoption of the star blanket as an architectural metaphor is intended to honour the work that will continue within the Dawes Road Library as cultures come together to share knowledge. From an architectural perspective, a blanket is fluid, wrapped around with no square edges or corners, providing continuous areas of colour and texture that convey a sense of motion. Blankets have a personality and spirit. They communicate something about their maker and the nature of the techniques used in their making. Blankets also protect us from the environment, offering a strong analogy to the role of an architectural envelope. Dawes Road is located in Toronto’s east end. Targeting Net Zero Carbon under the CAGBC Net Zero Building standard and meeting the design teams living design framework, Dawes Road Library will prioritize health and wellbeing, accessibility and inclusion, site regeneration, and climate and social responsibility. The design will be fully electrified, with a rooftop photovoltaic array and borehole field below the building for geothermal heating and cooling. The metaphor of the star blanket is supported by the articulation of a high-performance envelope with a low percentage of glazed openings. The Library occupies the ground and second floors, offering space for collections, maker spaces, and performance. The SDFA Community Hub occupies the third floor along with a community kitchen and a ceremonial roundhouse. These spaces all open on to a large roof terrace featuring traditional indigenous plantings, gathering space and a ceremonial fire. The design emerged as a direct result of two principles: a sensitive and studied urban design response to the scale of the neighbourhood and the need for outdoor public space; and a commitment to manifesting the ambitions of the Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities, heard through an extensive consultation process. Over a year-long period, TPL and the design team engaged in conversations that shaped the design. These discussions uncovered a wealth of opportunities for programming and helped to define an architecture in which everyone feels welcome.
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.
Aga Khan Museum
Museum dedicated to Islamic history, artifacts and art pieces in Toronto, Canada.
School of Continuing Studies
York University’s existing School of Continuing Studies (SCS) was dispersed on campus throughout a series of temporary accommodations - a critical shortcoming for faculty and students. In response, the University articulated the need for a dedicated building to assert the School’s identity and culture, define a campus gateway, and meet ambitious sustainability targets. The bold twisting form shapes a new pedestrian plaza and accommodates highly flexible learning environments, social and collaboration spaces, and offices for students and faculty. The project brings the programs together into a single home with lofty, bright spaces that promote community, culture, and identity for the faculty’s students and staff. The core project goals are to reduce embodied carbon and improve occupant health. The design explores the potential for Net-Zero Energy and Net-Zero Carbon and targets LEED Gold certification. The use of high-performance envelope combined with highly efficient HVAC and energy systems reduce energy loads greatly, minimizing the extent of the renewable energy production needed to aid the project achieving the Net-Zero Energy target. The design approach creates a formal departure from the surrounding built fabric with a strict economy of means, deploying a rigorous geometry that optimizes the repetition of standard, off-the-shelf components. Thus, the building’s dynamic form is generated through a simple geometric logic, with rectangular floor plates rotated around a common centroid. The rotation of the overall form introduces a two-way curve into the north and south facades. As the building rotates about its centroid, a triangulated panel pattern takes advantage of regular and biaxial symmetry to create zones of repeat panel shapes on both the long and short facades of the building. Through this simple twisting gesture, the brief of creating a striking new home for the School of Continuing Studies, which promotes the combined agendas of energy efficiency, occupant well-being, and campus building, is accomplished. One Total System Building Skin: A high-performance unitized curtain wall creates a continuous, taut, and efficient building skin that maximizes views while reducing energy use to approximately 100kWh/m2a. Triangular openings allow seamless panelization and expansive eye-level transparency. Steel Frame: The building twists to create two new plazas on a tight campus site. Perimeter columns change angle along the length of the building, while inboard columns are plumb, reducing steel weight. Interior Planning: Program blocks are treated as interior pavilions, while student study and lounge space occupy the perimeter of the plan. These dynamic spaces offer a range of bright and distinctive environments for study and socialization. Cores: Low-carbon concrete cores efficiently brace the building’s twisted form. Campus Room: At grade and below, the building is an extension of the campus, with openings that bring daylight to all levels. Gateway Plaza: The building’s twisting form creates a new gateway plaza that connects to the campus’s evolving transit network. Systems: Direct outdoor air ventilation and active chilled beams throughout the building reduce energy use while maximizing fresh air, supporting occupant health and learning outcomes. A future PV array will support 100% of the building’s energy needs.
180 Steeles
In Toronto’s near suburbs, the sensitive redevelopment of low-density post WWII sprawl is a win-win opportunity whose time has come. Our residential condominium project is at the vanguard of this emerging phenomenon. The 2.5-hectare site ticks all the boxes- located along an underutilized arterial road in a forward-looking suburban municipality that has developed new planning guidelines for urbanization. Proposed at 6.46FSI, the density of our project is a model for development that addresses the housing shortage while at the same time establishing an environmentally responsible benchmark for preserving open space. The context for this project is Steeles Avenue West, a rapidly transforming transportation corridor in Vaughan, Ontario where mixed use housing developments are replacing car oriented retail plazas. Our design will have six towers and their associated five and 9-storey podiums. The massing and spatial configuration introduces the legibility of streets-and-blocks urbanism, establishing a repeatable pattern that forms the nucleus for an entire urban district. Our design will have six towers and their associated five and 9-storey podiums. The massing and spatial configuration introduces the legibility of streets-and-blocks urbanism, establishing a repeatable pattern that forms the nucleus for an entire urban district. The heart of the project is a tree-lined boulevard consisting of a 20-meter-wide right-of-way, with a 9-meter carriageway running down the middle sharing space, 3-meter landscaped flanking strips, 2-meter-wide sidewalks and a .5-meter buffer strip. The two flanking buildings closest to the main road have retail uses at the base, and so there is an additional 1.5-meter setback with attractive pavement enhancements. Above the retail base, the condominium towers are 35 and 45 storeys. The back towers furthest from the main street are 16 storeys with grade-related townhouses providing a transition to the adjacent residential neighbourhood. The total development is 161,391 square meters, adding 2,080 residential units to this area of Steeles Avenue West. Approximately 50% of the units are one bedroom and 25% are units with two bedrooms + den. The remaining 25% of the project is a mix of studios, three bedroom units and townhouses. The towers typically have 1,200 square meter floor plates with 12 units, which makes slender masses that minimize overshadowing of open spaces. These towers are wrapped with architecturally distinctive strips of balcony. These curvilinear balcony-ribbons soften the profile of the towers, creating an organic sculptural presence in place of the the typical boxiness of towers. The design intention is to introduce a level of architectural sophistication that enhances the status of this emerging neighbourhood. Our proposal introduces contextually sensitive massing onto a nascent pattern of streets-and blocks, establishing typologies that can be replicated on other sites along Steeles Avenue to create a coherent urban precinct. At the same time, the forms and materials of the project give an exciting identity to this development, setting a high bar for Steeles Avenue West to evolve into a highly desirable mixed-use neighbourhood.
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Open in Atlas MapFrequently Asked Questions
How long does the Toronto architecture walking tour take?+
The self-guided walking tour covers approximately 20.2 km with 8 stops. Allow approximately 7 hours including 20 minutes of viewing time per building.
Is the Toronto architecture tour free?+
Yes, this is a completely free self-guided walking tour. You can view the route on the interactive map, export it to Google Maps for navigation, and explore at your own pace.
Do I need to book the Toronto architecture tour in advance?+
No booking is required — this is a self-guided tour that you can start at any time. All buildings can be viewed from the outside. For guided tours with expert commentary, we recommend checking GetYourGuide for local architecture tours.
What is the best time to do the Toronto architecture walking tour?+
Morning light (before 11am) is ideal for photography of building facades. Weekdays tend to be less crowded around commercial buildings. Allow a full half day for the complete tour.