With an overt nod to Habitat 67 in Montreal by Moshe Safdie (similarly made up of many smaller modules, as show below), this new, undulating, mixed-use megastructure has been approved for construction in Toronto, Canada.

The King West Street development from Bjarke Ingels’ firm BIG looks like a series of rolling hills, or in the words of the architect: “peaks and valleys.” The firm has overtly called it “Habitat 2.0” informally as well.

“With King Street West, we wanted to find an alternative to the tower and podium you see a lot of in Toronto and revisit some of Safdie’s revolutionary ideas,” said Ingels in statement  “But rather than a utopian experiment on an island, have it nested into the heart of the city.”

The structure ranges from a few up to sixteen stories with balconies and terraces for all residents, aimed at maximizing natural light. “The topography of the peaks and valleys provides terraces for larger units, while others have balconies stacked along the building’s perimeter,” explains BIG.

“Each pixel is set at the size of a room; rotated 45 degrees from the street grid to increase exposure to light and air. An undulating design allows light to reach neighbouring King Street all year round.” In the middle, a central courtyard can be shared and used for urban farming, too.

It looks more like an optical illusion or photo edit than a real dwelling, but this hundred-year-old halved townhouse really stands (out) on the streets of Toronto.

54 1/2 St. Patrick was built in the early 1890s as part of a set of six homes with shared walls. Starting in the 1950s, owners of the neighboring units started to crumble under pressure from a developer, slowly selling their domiciles one at a time.

As a result, each of the other structures was torn down with surgical precision. When the occupant of the final house in the row refused to sell at any price, they cleaved off the other half of the building and the shared structural wall running down the middle was reinforced and covered in concrete.

The neighboring Village by the Grange opened in the mid-1970s. According to author and photographer Chris Bateman, “54 1/2 St. Patrick is currently vacant. No-one answered when I knocked at the door and the front room has been stripped to the floorboards. Perhaps it’s being spruced up, it would surely be worth it. The current assessment on file with the city lists the value at $648,000.”

A new urban park in Ontario will take sheltered but unused space below a raised roadway and turn it into a place for walking, cycling and outdoor performances.

A project of urban designer Ken Greenberg as well as Marc Ryan and Adam Nicklin of Public Work, the Under Gardiner design approach treats the area as a covered streetscape, taking advantage of rain and sun shade provided by the vehicular thoroughfare above.

Its surface programming also bridges institutional uses on either side, including aquariums, museums and other cultural buildings.

From architectural thesis research into reusing derelict land under viaducts, this article’s author can attest to the advantages of using such sub-street spaces. Noise and air pollution levels are actually lower directly below than they are adjacent to raised roads, for instance. Contrast those factors for a moment with the qualities of a typical urban park at ground level, either narrow (Golden Gate in San Francisco) or small (Squares of Philadelphia). Popular city parks are generally surrounded by traffic noise from directly-adjacent vehicles, yet many (including the above examples) remain well-used.

The biggest type-specific concerns of an elevated park are seismic, which in turn are tied to regional risk factors – problematic but addressable for any kind of enclosed or sheltered space, architectural or otherwise.

Like extensive raised-park designs in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, London and elsewhere, this new breed of sub-infrastructure (even underground) parks is changing the way urban planners and designers think about unused public spaces.

Existing columns and beams of the surrounding infrastructure will naturally divide the spaces into sections that act as exterior rooms while also providing ways to hang signage, wayfinding mechanisms and announcement billboards.

The project is being launched with the help of a sizable $25,000,000  donation from Toronto philanthropists Judy and Wil Matthews.

“The passion and financial assistance of a major donor is joining with the City and Waterfront Toronto to plan and build new infrastructure, and to showcase a new model of city building for Toronto,” said Waterfront Toronto.

Bringing healthy and organic fruits and vegetables into low-income areas of Toronto lacking grocery stores, this converted bus is much more than a normal food truck – it looks like an ordinary vehicle until it stops and deploys its colorfully-stocked shelves (images by Laura Berman).

As in many cities, there are ‘food deserts’ in Toronto in which it is hard to find fresh seasonal produce. Using a vehicle donated by the Toronto Transit Commission, LGA Architectural Planners helped convert this vehicle to address this issue.

“Even in a city as dynamic as Toronto, there remain neighbourhoods where residents are unable to access the foods essential to a healthy diet. This happens for a variety of reasons, including low-income, lack of access to public transit, and long distances to groceries and markets. Such conditions make it extremely difficult for individuals and families without access to a vehicle to find and purchase healthy foods. Senior citizens who might be less mobile are hit especially hard by this type of isolation.”

Lettuce, berries, okra, yucca, broccoli, apples and more fill the fold-out shelves extending out from the side of the Mobile Good Food Market. Inside, bins of additional veggies and fruits can be accessed by walking or wheelchair, a handy feature for cold and wet weather.

The project  was commissioned by FoodShare Toronto in partnership with the City of Toronto and United Way Toronto in a joint effort to help supplement unhealthy local options in neighborhoods starved for good and fresh foods.

“The design also offered the opportunity to shop from the inside in inclement weather,” notes Dean Goodman of LGA, pointing out that as a former Wheel-Trans bus, ramps for ease of entry and exit were already in place. “Good food is beautiful when displayed well, so when we decided we wanted this to be a feature we worked out the mechanism so one person could fold out the shelves, restock as necessary and display the food so it was attractive.””

Without harming the forest that supports it, this streamlined tree house design is stabilized by a central trunk but ultimately suspended from the branches above to minimize negative environmental impacts.

Tree houses typically rely on being either attached to trunks or translating their loads to grounded supports – in short: they either harm trees or are not truly ‘treehouses’. Farrow Partnership Architects proposes a middle path, relying on the tree without constricting its growth.

And while the structures are open-air for a camping-style experience, they are not lacking in luxuries (at least in terms of what one normally expects from architecture in trees: bedroom, bathroom and living room spaces complete with composting toilet and graywater shower.

The streamlined bent-wood structures are designed to be oriented around site-specific views, hung with thin metal wires and covered in semi-translucent material to provide a degree of shade and privacy while letting in natural light during the day (and becoming a kind of glowing lantern at night).

This series of sky villas is set to be deployed in a national park near Toronto, Canada. Plans call for them to be sufficiently spaced out so that residents of one structure will not see the other, but simply the forest through the trees.