REACH OUT
With prof. Shane Williamson.
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.
Originally conceived as a film reel, the project has spiralled into a series of mediations on Toronto in the Anthropocene. 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.
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.