❷ OASIS AS A DIFFICULT WHOLE
❸ ABOUT JUNK & HANGING OUT
❹ ATHENS, AN EFFORT TO LOG
❺ POINT THE KNEES TOGETHER
❻ IT TAKES A VILLAGE
❼ SPRAWL OUT SORAUREN
❽ BREAK
A proposal for a public pool facility at Ontario Place,
preceded by a series of form-making exercises,
with prof. Shane Williamson.
The instinct, when tasked with a public pool in Toronto, was to propose an oasis - both for the users of the pool - but also for the city and the water.
Incisions are made in the island: for the building, which is cradled by the land and the sculpted topography cascading towards the lake. The cut made by the retaining wall, parallel to the Toronto waterfront, aims to provide relief from the city. The perpendicular conceptual move acts as a filter, to sieve and reframe.
The ground is at the forefront of the project, and the building becomes a quiet intermediary between the bridge and the pool, the city and the lake as it burrows into the ground. The reciprocating ramps are the primary figure—they allow users to descend into the landscape and into the building, which, from certain views, become indistinguishable. The line between building and cliff, boulder and furniture dissolves.
The building is a conduit for the topography and the planting scheme, as the project uses both, along with its architecture, to establish a series of threshold conditions. These then serve to buffer and filter out both perceived and objective consequences of the sharp edges of the urban metropolis- the noise off of Lakeshore Boulevard and the Gardiner, the vastness of the adjacent parking lots - as well air and water pollution. The latter is done through the re-wilding scheme and the introduction of limestone boulders. Limestone, ubiquitous in Southern Ontario, has, conveniently, a basic pH, and is able to effectively neutralize the polluted acidic waters of the lake.
As the project seeks to rewild the urban land, it is also interested in working with the existing urban site as is, establishing itself as part of a larger network of islands of the Toronto waterfront, as well as the city at large. If everything is laid to waste - if the site is purged, for whatever reason, as the studio brief proposes, how can we repurpose rather than cast away?
For the artificial islands of the Toronto waterfront, historically shaped with construction and demolition debris, what is removed is just as important as what is built. The rubble of the city, such as the rubble from the proposed demolition of the Budweiser Stage, as well as the remnants of other many projects across Toronto, are to be woven into the proposed landscape and building. Alongside the limestone boulders, salvaged concrete and stone blocks become the island’s hardscape.
The rocks anchor the design, and propose a rewilding that is not a departure from the urban, but rather a dialogue with it - a reclamation of what is already here, bound to what can grow anew.
What began as a linear building has unraveled into a kaleidoscope of imaginations: the dystopian, where urban ruins dominate; the post-urban, where cities return to the wild; the utopian, where human ingenuity harmonizes with the earth; and others, all imagining an intersection of decay and renewal, questioning what it means to build, destroy, and rebuild in the current moment. The project becomes an artifact of speculation: a reel unwound into fragmented frames, each a provocation.
At the end, I dream of an oasis amidst (or post-) the Anthropocene: with cyan mirrors of pools, pillars of trees, and buttresses of boulders. Over the building, grass will grow. Water will flood. It will embrace both, imagining the archipelago of rubble at the Toronto waterfront as a site of coexistence, as much as confrontation.