Please Don’t Look at Me!
I’m gonna look for my body yeah, I’ll be back real soon!
Pools expect us to expose ourselves and this demanded exposure can be both a liberating experience and one that keeps people from going to pools in the first place. Thus, how can we create a space for swimming that can ease us into exposing us into exposure while allowing us to choose to remain hidden?
Our building is divided into these 3 layers:
The foyer, which is the most ‘normal’ experience where people are censored by clothes. The pool zones, where people semi-clothed, but are distorted by water. The filter, which hosts the most private programs of change-rooms and showers that creates a meandering path of different spaces where people can get lost, hide, and find the space in which they feel most comfortable. The user is encouraged to be able to linger in a series of ‘backstage’ layers and pathways, in order to transition from the private seamlessly.
By creating these spaces that help comfort, the project hopes to encourage those who would feel uncomfortable to experience an easier transitioning of discovering one’s own body.
The natatorium building sits on the south side of the site, facing Eglinton and Hakimi avenue, becoming accessible to pedestrian and transit users on the LRT. The pedestrian promenade that surrounds the building plays with different textures of cobblestones to designate paths for walking and biking and stall-set ups while allowing the space and circulation to remain open
The Golden Mile is the site of an urban development plan which requires the existing buildings (such as big box stores, strip malls, industrial warehouses) to be demolished. Designating the north of our site as a dumping grounds, the project questions its future use and methods of recycling. Repurposing of the left-over materials, we plan on readapting the rubble from demolition into our walls to achieve our varying degrees of thickness/opacity – creating a gabion wall-like feature that would act as the façade and the texture of the center filter.
All drawings and models were done collaboratively with Irina Rouby Apelbaum