DoUC recently contributed to the John Street Ideas Competition held by the Toronto Entertainment District BIA with our submission entitled StairSpace. The competition called for a new public space concept as the centre point of what has been dubbed a major cultural axis in the city – John Street.
The current space is bland and oppressive, wedged beside the monolithic cartoonishness of an aggressively post-modern Metro Hall. The space is large but feels small, needlessly cluttered and obstructed by two follies and a raised concrete planter.
Our proposal StairSpace is a three-dimensional park that addresses the dense nature of its location by maximizing its program through vertical extrusion. Its structure is derived from the theatre uses directly adjacent to it, playfully intermingling the relationship between audience and stage, by inserting several stages into a staircase structure – after all in the public life of the street the spectator is also the spectacle. In the summer movies are projected onto the façade of the Princess of Wales Theatre and seats can be heated to allow for such events in the early spring and late fall. During TIFF, StairSpace becomes a platform for viewing celebrities and during the rest of the year, it serves as an iconic meeting place for concert-goers, workers, and tourists alike.
All the original uses of the space are re-mixed to allow for more diversity and dynamics. Metro Hall parking garage exits are housed under the structure as well as bike shed parking. An arcade runs under the structure on the south end and connects John Street to Metro Hall’s King Street entrance. The arcade also includes an elevator access point. The pre-existing garden is extruded and placed on the StairSpace stages.
Current Site Situation
stephanie
November 21, 2010
This is a great prototype for so many windswept public plazas at the base of all those towers where people scuttle about with flat bits of public art. It is the verticality that works here: a foil to an ineffective ground plane.
It converts the street to a performance space, it allows people to stop. It is the Spanish Steps, the old front to the BC Courthouse that became the Vancouver Art Gallery: a staircase that was a potent site for protest. Yes, it is definitely the vertical dimension that starts to establish a public voice.
StairSpace isn’t a memorial or a monument, it isn’t on the way to somewhere else, its only function is the adhoc use of such monuments or street steps. This is a brilliant inversion of function and perhaps how, making the infrastructure that supports the provisional, we should proceed in the city.
Jordan Allison
November 27, 2010
did you not make the finalist list?
The other staircase finalist is complete crap…as are most of the other finalists.
I like the project for it’s clarity. Don’t know if I need all the architectural fluff on the side — doesn’t really engage well with the building at 51 John.
brendancormier
November 27, 2010
Thanks Jordan for your comments. We were pretty disappointed, not making the finalist list – especially when viewing some of the other finalists. But in the end the jury decided to love skecthup cubes over us. If the same group of people ever end up on the same jury, you can be sure we’ll avoid that competition.