16 new work

interior stair

In the second instance the project is about working within zoning regulations and urban densification. Because of the size of the studio, it wasn’t allowed in a residentially zoned area; the place best suited to our combined programme was a main street. Only landform- impeded to the south (by Lake Ontario) Toronto has always been able to easily spread out to the east, north and west. As a result, the height and density of many of these main streets - most of them a mix of residential and commercial uses – has changed little over the years. However, recently some have been newly punctuated by new, mostly high-rise, condominium buildings. The city’s new official plan sees these mixed use areas as a weapon in the fight against costly sprawl.

Long under-developed, the plan envisions main streets as the areas that will ‘absorb most of the anticipated increase in retail, office and service employment...in the coming decades, as well as much of the new housing.’ Not able to find a building at the right price that would accommodate the programme, we decided to build out our own, gutting, adding on to and rebuilding a two-storey building on a main street west of downtown. Part of a low-rent strip of mixed

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