The Leslie Spit is an artificial island in Toronto, made from rubble of demolished infrastructure and architecture. After a study of the sanctity of Lake Ontario waters, the site conditions, some thoughts on life cycle, and archaeology, the site and project are conceived as a process derivative of its place. Water-buildings like ancient stepwells are both infrastructure and monument to water. They fold the concept of the site into the concept of the architecture; a stepwell transforms the ground but can only be truly “completed” until it rains. In a similar way, the site and architecture of this project - a tall gabion structure made of the site rubble - is conceived as a process, and embodies the stepwell forms and functions: a continuous descent, a guiding wall that retains earth and conceals buildings, and a stepped landscape for water filtration and circulation. The ability of the wall and the landscape to manage water on the site is not only to provide services and systems for human activities and program, but to improve the quality of the lake’s shoreline and water quality.
The main architectural element is the wall of gabion material, which exposes the rubble underbelly of the man-made site and allows the visitor to inhabit an architecture derivate of its place. The wall becomes a repository of the site’s own history elevating one’s understanding of the site’s history that is slowly being erased by nature as the artificial materials that constitute the ground are eroding. The wall in plan and section has a relationship with each building. Each programmatic space is separated by courtyards that connect buildings, allowing passage from either side of the wall, such that nature is not experienced in detached intimacy; the buildings are interlocked with the natural.
The symbolic context of the wall reflects the general narrative of the site. Its sublime aesthetic reinforces the conventional ontological divide between wilderness and city, nature and human. One visits to marvel at how nature always heals the scars of industrialization; the biotic communities on the Spit are left to flourish; one can imagine that once the rubble erodes and is covered by grass, the socio-historical origins of the artificial landscape will be forgotten.
The site is a landscape of memory, a product of demolition that still has recognizable remnants of Toronto’s built history. This wall is to expose the rubble underbelly of the site, to take the terrain and make it eternal, so we must immerse ourselves in the core of the landscape, to elevate our understanding of the site materiality. Aligned to the project’s life-cycle concepts, when the buildings no longer serve their programmatic uses they will be recycled while the wall persists as a ruin as seen in post-apocalyptic Toronto.
Well, Wall?
2020, Leslie Spit, Canada