The Power Plant
Integration of green ramps in a community art centre. Explores how green infrastructure can be meaningfully woven into existing urban buildings not as an add-on or mandate, but as a structural and social gesture.
Integration of green ramps in a community art centre. Explores how green infrastructure can be meaningfully woven into existing urban buildings not as an add-on or mandate, but as a structural and social gesture.
My thesis explores how green infrastructure can be meaningfully integrated into existing urban buildings, rather than treated as an add-on or city mandate. The project focuses on The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery at 231 Queens Quay West in Toronto's Harbourfront district. The proposal introduces a green ramp that takes you up to the building's roof, opening it up as a publicly accessible landscape.
The site sits at the edge of the city where our dense urban fabric meets Lake Ontario. Rather than inserting a separate rooftop garden, the ramp becomes the architecture itself — a continuous surface that people can move through, rest on, and experience as both building and park.
This approach grew out of a longstanding interest in how cities can reclaim underused surfaces for community life while also responding to real environmental pressures. The goal is to design something that is ecologically responsible and actually used by people in growingly dense urban environments.
