small edges Interval House Memorial Garden, Toronto
landscape | gardens by ruth mora and paul whelan
yards retreat memorials refuge topography
The ambitions are small – to reclaim a patch of unused space and navigate a steep slope.
Sometimes small projects are posited as a forum for testing ideas that can then be parlayed onto a larger stage. Interval House Memorial Garden is not scaleable. It occupies a left-over unusable slot of space squeezed between the side of the building and a wood fence. Interval House wanted to create a garden as a quiet refuge for women and their families. At the same time they wanted to use the garden as a place of memory for a former client who had died. And at a very practical level, the lower level needed emergency access to the upper street level and the existing sloped areas needed erosion stabilisation. We seized on the narrowness of the space as its defining spatial attribute as well as a platform for a memorial narrative. The narrowness has been exaggerated by creating three parallel bands of surface to accentuate the length and further compress the width. Three donated wood benches provide shaded seating for quiet contemplation or simply a place to seek a few quiet moments with a cigarette. A stream of stones in a simple trough connects
the benches, slips behind a backlit memory plaque and ends at the top of the steep slope. The narrow garden wood deck walkway ends at a look- out promontory also behind the backlit plaque. A run of stairs connects the narrow garden to the lower deck. This area is more open and provides seating for mothers to supervise a future play area to the immediate north. The secure garden is heavily shaded and requires lighting, particularly for spring and fall use. Lighting is deliberately ‘soft’ with under-bench footlights along the upper garden. The hub of the garden at the top of the stairs is lit by the memory plaque and the stairs are illuminated by backlit acrylic panels set in the horizontal wood siding. The lighting has the feel of candles and diffused light. Interval House Memorial Garden is a muffled and intimate space providing security for families and a connection to the beauty and healing power of a Toronto ravine. — Paul Whelan
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On Site review 23
Small Things
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