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Architects: Steven Fong Architect
- Area: 3000 ft²
- Year: 2024
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Photographs:Scott Norsworthy, Rémi Carreiro Photography
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Manufacturers: LOVEWOOD, Vicwest
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Lead Architect: Steven Fong
Text description provided by the architects. K-Town offers an architectural solution to the financial precariousness of small businesses in diasporic communities. You know those kinds of small businesses, where little restaurants, or little retail stores, with store frontages that are about 4.5 metres (15 feet), sometimes with a couple of storeys above them and other times with nothing above them. There are perhaps a dozen diaspora communities in Toronto, and so we thought this is applicable to Koreatown, but is also applicable to any of these communities, as well as many low-rise main streets in Toronto that are adjacent to residential neighbourhoods.
These communities share some of the same problems: they are like landing pads to people who have come to Canada recently. The small storefronts are economic tools for immigrants to start a business and get a financial foothold. But increasingly, these small independent storefronts are becoming unviable. And we asked: Is there an architectural solution to this? Is there a way that we could make things better, so that the landlords and the small business owners could have a greater chance at success? Our project is very much based on that.
We began by trying to figure out a way to maximize the leasable space. We noticed that the second and third stories on a lot of these buildings are unused because they're too dilapidated. And looked at some of these stores and restaurants, and we noticed that a lot of them are not attuned to what we call the "experience economy", that to create a value-added product, you have to offer consumers an experience. Our design is comprised of a renovation with a better-quality retail space and upper floors that have good-quality residential amenities, including private outdoor spaces. We aimed to mirror the value of a good-quality condominium. And lastly, even though this was pre-COVID, we thought about the notion of a contemporary, flexible space that could be used for Airbnb or co-working, or live/work. Consequently, our building has been outfitted so that it could be used in a variety of ways.
One of the things we noticed about the City of Toronto's official plan is that it tends to imagine that its actions are about permanent and fixed outcomes, and that it is also based on a notion of rational urban planning. And what we found in the diaspora communities is that a lot of these things are not so rational. They're about people who are trying to do something in the vein of self-determination. They're not thinking in terms of fixed and permanent solutions. Rather, these spaces are temporal solutions. And so this issue of urbanism is perhaps a temporal practice that should be discussed. How do we think about cities, not simply as the final, end game building that's put there, but also as a series of temporal stages that can be adapted as needed?
With a hospitality venture on the ground floor that is a coffee shop by day and a bar by night, and with both a leasable office and a residence on the second and third floors, we have created a proof of concept. There is an agency for entrepreneurship, which is about social purpose and social good, and there's potentially a model that can be replicated in other parts of the city.
