A Concrete Approach: Recontextualizing Brutalism Through Threshold Design

The overcrowding, pollution and sprawl of the modern city outgrows and distorts its original framework. The building, land, and street relationship becomes a focal point in designing for the human scale. The existing urban fabric shifts along with society. Built many years ago, the buildings lack evident design strategies that successfully integrate the surrounding context with its architecture. By redefining threshold as a three-dimensional human experience rather than a point, line, or moment in space, the threshold and surrounding framework becomes significant in adapting the building to meet contemporary social agendas. There becomes a necessity to blur the boundaries between its architecture and environment integrating both the interior and exterior to appropriate the human scale. The ability to preserve these decaying forms through the means of threshold design will effectively contribute to Toronto’s Identity as a whole and successfully play a more significant role in an ever-changing modern city