This hospital brings health care back to the forefront of our national and now cultural identity by turning the hospital into a cultural centre. It combines the general program of a typical courtyard typehospital with a central core of cultural programs.

The hospital thus creates the culture it displays from imaging to surgery, diagnosis to labs, from education to medication.

Of the multiple institutions catering to the drug using population of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, few are comprised of drug users advocate for themselves.

A new headquarters for The Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users creates an institution and space that engenders self-organisation and self-governance while still dealing with the health and social issues endemic to this population.

Filling in the alley side of the existing building allows for an expansion of space and program. Intersecting volumes lift off the ground, culminating in a plane roof protecting the alley. Inside, street and alley circulatory rhythms add a sense of familiarity to the building.

My research into Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside was based on an investigation of the institutions that cater to the area population. Looking at the programs, people and their interactions fostered an understanding of the intersection between the mandate of the organisations and architectural considerations.

Following this analysis, I turned to the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users as an exemplar of an institution with tremendous growth opportunity. Borne from a critical public health epidemic of 1997, VANDU has evolved to an advocacy group of and for intravenous drug users. After a decade, the organisation is a crossroads as questions of expansion in program and reach come to the fore.

Parallel to these explorations, readings of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the Body Without Organs as well as Foucault’s ideas on Biopolitics informed my understanding of the forces surrounding the drug using population of the Downtown Eastside.

While based in Toronto during my Masters of Architecture degree, I made frequent trips to Vancouver to enhance my thesis research. This resulted in countless interviews with advocates and drug users, as well as visits and access to the institutions in the area.

Here is a selection of photographs from my stays in Vancouver, the Downtown Eastside and the current Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users building.

Master of Architecture Thesis defence - December 17, 2009.

The Big Box store has a terrible reputation. Often associated with poor worker treatment, low wages, traffic issues, endless parking lots and the bad side of globalization it is easy to look down upon their suburban, and now urban, aspirations. Despite this negativity, perhaps there is a place for the Big Box store where it just... fits.

St. James Town is a Corbusian Tower in the Park concept area in the east of Toronto. With a population density rivaling that of Manhattan, the low-income and predominantly immigrant residents live in what is touted as a World Within a Block. This world, however, is crumbling.

Charged with revitalizing this area of Toronto, this project looks towards the big box store as a tool, rather than a blight. Exploring the economics and architecture of Walmart as a case study lead to the creation of a big box city providing the economic vibrancy that this population needs.

This project does not argue for the ubiquity of the box store, but re-imagines it as a tool for positive development.

Los Angeles’ highway ecology spills onto the beach, creating elongated pools into the ocean.

Reverberations from this extension create recreational spaces. This new horizon/facade on the beach is viewed from the Pacific Coast Highway and the canyon access roads.

The Drive on the Pacific Coast Highway is interrupted, transformed from the scenic to the scene.

Proprioception - The unconscious perception and sense of one’s movement and spatial orientation. The ability to keep your eyes on the ball, as opposed to your feet, legs, torso, shoulders, arms and hands.

Colour is employed as a innate indicator of programmatic location, as well as an unconscious ambiguation of the senses when in use.

The West Donlands of Toronto is a master planned neighbourhood currently being built over old, contaminated land. Of high import to any community is a school and gathering space.

Centered around the concepts of accumulation of knowledge, this school for the West Donlands of Toronto seeks to absorb (and be absorbed into) the new neighbourhood, while cradling its students and the wider community in their nascence.

Bruce Mau Design

Several 1:75 models for the redesigned home for the New York Giants and Jets were built. This facilitated the design of the interior spaces.

As a sponsor driven entity, a variety of areas were reprogrammed and charged to create dynamic areas. This included conceptual design of sponsored atrium, field skirts and scoreboards.

Michael Maltzan Architecture

As a central feature for a new development on the west side of Los Angeles, the Playa Vista Central Park provides the public with a variety of possibilities: a Bento box of leisure.

Each land-bridge becomes a new venue of exploration and activity. They offer different perspectives and unique experiences to its users.

American Institute of Architects — design competition winner
NEXT LA Citation Award - Los Angeles, California - 2008
Juror comment: "this park brings provocative design thinking to an environment that needs it."

Mississauga is a burgeoning city just minutes from Toronto. Its history as a bedroom community for Canada's largest city has been shed as immigrants and suburbanites settle in the city.

However, as planning goes, Mississauga is much like Las Vegas: too big for the pedestrian, too small for the driver.

As we reimagine this city, density becomes key, but decreases as one gets to the core of the city, creating a new valley for activity.

Culture and the Metropolis — models and drawings exhibition
Mississauga Civic Centre Great Hall - Mississauga, Ontario - 2007

The Made-to-Measure Clotheshop is an urban center in the Queen West Fashion District, for the creation and display of clothing prototypes.

Much like clothing, The M2MC's form is derived from and tailored to both the site and program. Through the extension of intersecting connections from surrounding buildings, a double skin is formed, cloaking the site and creating three interior/exterior voids for program.

On the first of October 2007, I set out on a journey across the continent. I packed a used Chevy and set out on a drive from Montreal to Los Angeles. For several weeks, my car was home, haven and hardtop. In May 2008, my travels continued as I drove up the Pacific coast, then Across Canada from Victoria to St. John's. The views out my windows provided constant ephemeral panoramas as I passed from desert to valley, from mountain to forest.

Overlapping with my drive, Google has deployed a worldwide fleet of cars to take photographs for their Street View feature in Google Maps, creating a permanent collection of global panoramas. However, despite the breadth of images, Google's Street View is altogether beguiling. Removed from humanity, these photographs are perhaps not memory, but information.

Several moments are distilled through two photographs: one from my drive and another from Google Street View. When gazing through the viewing-windshields, the images merge while still remaining perceptually separate. However, despite the asynchrony of the two images, some sort of commonality still exists within the two.

A t-shirt created for the Threadless.com ongoing design competition. It tells the story of the universe's creation. It's reference point: me, as the planets are in proper orbit for my date of birth.

A Bubbly Beginning was chosen as winner and was printed for its first rst run on March 12, 2007.

It sold out in 10 days.

A Bubbly Beginning has recently been reprinted and is almost sold out yet again.

Through my graphic design research, I strive to create something static that acts dynamically with people around it.

I am inspired by elements such as repetitive textures, photography, textbooks and work in simple two or three step operations.

These procedures bring something unexpected to familiar images.

The Mezuzah is a religious artifact found on the doorposts of most Jewish homes. It contains a parchment inside with passages from the Torah. The front of the casing is usually inscribed with the the letter shin. This mezuzah uses three letters, (shin, daled, yud), and lofts between them to form the casing. A red tube in inserted within the loft to protect the parchment.

Looking at a site in Mississauga, Ontario, the ravine and its water stood as a defining, yet under-resourced element.

In Las Vegas, water was used in multiple, novel ways;
Water as landscape.
Water as deluge.
Water as backdrop.
Water as reserve...

Sequencing still images, a film was made branching all the elements together.

This film explores a future where medical procedures are a form of entertainment for the population at large. People come to the hospital to watch, surrender themselves, and confront their own mortality on and off a theatrical gurney.

Medical and theatrical images are incised by Brecht’s Epic Theatre, medical murals, stars of the stage and so on. The resulting hybridisation challenges the hospital environment, medicating and mitigating its institutional feel as well as place.

This series of films explores movement of people and cars within Toronto's Distillery District.

They come in pairs, first showing enigmatic circles travelling through space, then the trick is revealed as the data is exposed in the second film.

The Untitled Vaudeville Models are 1:50 scaled representations of three theatres that existed in Toronto at the turn of the 20th century.

The Yonge Street Theatre, Shea’s Victoria, and The Hippodrome were all owned by the Shea Family.

The models were recessed behind a temporary wall allowing visitors to peer through windows and experience a prototypical view: several rows back from the first balcony, on the right looking at center stage.

The Castle and other works — installation
in collaboration with Annie MacDonell
Gallery TPW - Toronto, Ontario - 2006
Artspace - Peterborough, Ontario - 2008

Once marked by bands of prehistoric rivers, modern Toronto has long since buried its namesake: there are no longer any trees staked up in the waters. While the water system was vital for the survival of York's first settlers, most creeks and ravines have been filled in, buried, and banished from public view.

The Garrison Creek is one such river. Affectionately known as "Toronto's most famous waterway never seen," the creek began its exile in the late 19th century to a brick laid sewer pipe running from above Willowvale Park (currently Christie Pits) down to its namesake, Fort York.

This investigation of the Garrison Creek evaluates the disconnect between the creek's excision in the name of the Cartesian street grid, and its current manifestations above ground through the Situationist Derivé.

Two installations are proposed to bring attention to the unseen river and bring it above ground. One reflects the veracity of city signage of the creek. The other bores at the creeks existance.

An 8" rhomboid, lined with photosensitive blueprint paper, is nested within a larger 12" cube and exposed to sunlight light at three 2-hour intervals. The cuts in the outer cube are mimicked by openings in the inner rhomboid.

From the three exposures, an axonometric time mapping drawing is created with six interpolations. The 2 dimensional exposed areas were then rotated 90 degrees and assigned opacity based on the incoming direction of the original light through the cubes' faces.

Toronto's King Street passes through disparate neighbourhoods representative of Toronto's nature. Walking along, the skyline shifts with these changes, engulfing pedestrians in the downtown core or disappearing near the developing areas.

Rather than looking on the built environment directly, the focus is on the sky framed by its surroundings.

Intersection by intersection, the sky was recorded and transformed into a formwork for concrete.

The object was then sent to be modified by other participants in the competition before being cast.

Canadian Architecture Student Association: Ignition — concrete competition & exhibition
Royal Architectural Institute of Canada Conference - Toronto, Ontario - 2007

A survey was conducted in Toronto’s Historic Distillery District exploring the various wines offered by area restaurants.

There are seven places within the Distillery District to order wine. While all offer a by the glass selection, the Young Centre does not offer bottles of wine for sale and is thus used as a zero datum.

Using a Voronoi algorithm, the boundary line diagram reveals the closest dispenser of wine within any area of the Distillery District. This diagram acted as a starting point in the creation of a sculptural map.

Data on price and selection of wine vintages is compiled and represented in the model. The surfaces represent the prices of wine while the columns display both the location of each restaurant as well as the number of vintages offered.

Mapping Toronto — maps & sculpture exhibition and presentation
Placing Creativity Conference - Martin Prosperity Institute - MaRS Centre - Toronto, Ontario - 2009