The Distillery District is a heritage protected Neighbourhood of Toronto, the site of the former Gooderham and Worts Brewery. Designated as a National historic site of Canada, it is an important destination that has been developed with special care to preserve and highlight its industrial and Victorian aspects. In part II of this design project, students were asked to pair their ideas and massing studies to create a thought provoking church in the middle of the distillery district. This iteration of a church is differs in scope and in realization from the church in the first part of this project, partly because it explores designing a contemporary non-denominational church rather than one that is traditional Roman Catholic.
Non-denominational churches are removed from the strong architectural pasts of older sects of Christianity, and non-denominational, globalized Christian churches can be tied to the rise of international modernism in terms of their stylistic timeline. With this in mind, a new architecture was to be communicated. Worship spaces of Catholicism normally communicate a sense of fear, of unknowing and insignificant scale of human beings, but the vast variety of the many versions of Contemporary Christianity, and their respective places of worship, communicate more of an inclusive and less daunting, personal understanding with God.
The church was designed to fit a community and one thing that is very missing in the distillery district is a park or green space. A park would help to generate interest in the church’s presence while capturing a relationship to the street. Being a quite serpentine site and still needing to achieve certain requirements of different programmed areas, it was decided that there should be multiple levels. These levels were paired with the seven days of creation for each level.
The church’s elevation, aside from the roof is split into 5 alternating faces, which act as both barricades to the ramp for safety purposes, but also the main façade of the building itself. The geometry of the faces follow the golden section, and alternates heights due to the programming of such spaces.
The existing building on the property, belonging to the City and rather dilapidated, acts as a restored building that houses a daycare and the officiant’s residence.
There is a difficulty in introducing accessibility to the site, so instead of creating ramps to access the roof garden, an elevator accesses the rooftop garden for exterior masses during spring. This elevator also forms a belltower on top at the very last landing of the rooftop garden.
