Deployed throughout the South Parkdale neighbourhood in Toronto, this project responds to the area's lack of public services. In addition to public restrooms, it includes essential amenities such as water fountains and urban furniture. During our site analysis, we identified a shortage of green and public spaces: an observation that strongly informed our subsequent conceptual thinking. This project aims to be more than a public facility and to become an urban living space.

Given the density of the urban fabric, we sought to leverage existing laneways as potential sites for these installations, thereby promoting spatial equity by distributing public restrooms throughout the neighbourhood. The design is intentionally subtle, allowing it to blend harmoniously into its surroundings while avoiding a visually heavy or overly assertive form. Nevertheless, the installation has the potential to become an iconic landmark, shifting the social perception of public restrooms and destigmatizing their role in the urban landscape.

Wishing to introduce more greenery into the neighbourhood, the project draws inspiration from the layered density of a forest. The path through it reflects the experience of moving through the woods, highlighting the interplay between space and perception. Typically, the transition into public restrooms is marked by a rigid, defined boundary. The proposed project instead adopts a voxel-based design, allowing the public installations to gradually densify, creating a smooth and continuous transition between the street and the restrooms, inspired by a hiker’s path to a private space in the forest. This gradual shift helps preserve the site's visual permeability, addressing one of the competition's key criteria: safety.

The project's sustainability is ensured by a demountable structure composed of steel tubes and removable connectors, allowing for easy replacement of damaged components.

This project received the award for best concept and digital use in the internal competition of the ARC-2042 course and was published in the Memento journal of the Université Laval School of Architecture (2025 edition).