Junction Function

 This week's challenge: to reimagine the Bathurst/Adelaide corner. This is a busy intersection close to the Boys and Girls' Club. We asked for a streetscaping feature to animate the sidewalk for pedestrians.

This inventor constructed a  little free sidewalk library out of cardboard. These community book exchanges are popping up all over the city. The book slot is in the front and the blue roof flaps open to reveal an array of slots for storage. This library is also designed to hold small knick knacks for pedestrians to help themselves to.

This designer made a sidewalk drum kit for musically inclined passersby.

This team wanted to put a corner skate deck and parkette. Their design includes a burrowing tube with a skylit garden hub and various interconnecting bridges to skateboard over. 

In this design, there is a multilayered seat and a shelter that doubles up as a wheelchair accessible viewing platform.

 This team are missing Ontario Place, so they designed a play pool with convertible recliner chairs that can be used as mini slides (green), a life guard seat on wheels (yellow) and a dive deck (transparent) with a detachable pod slide (blue).

                    Quite a range of different ideas this week. Well done kids!

Streetscaping

Well designed streetscaping can humanize and animate public spaces, by providing eyes on the street, accessibility and information. In our streetscaping challenge, we asked the kids to design something to improve the sidewalk.

Many of our students thought about being on the move. They didn't just design transit stops, they designed whole transit hubs.

For our city by the lake, this team designed a transit stop for a hovercraft.  

Tired of waiting for the bus? Then ascend the striped observation tower (in an internal elevator), so you can see if it's coming. Want a thrilling way to get on the bus? Cross the well lit street to the roller coaster ramp. Make sure not to wear your seat belt and you'll be flung from the coaster into the waiting bus. Riding the Rocket has never been this exciting (and possibly scary) before!

This transit stop had a kind of fairground quality to it.  Passengers wait for the bus on the elevated orange disc (seated on comfortable cushions).  While you're waiting the disc gently rotates, giving you a circular view of the city and its goings on. When the bus arrives, sensors on the street trigger the disc to stop moving and a ramp (lowered from the disc), allows passengers to embark.

In these two futuristic looking transit hubs, waiting passengers have the option of hanging out inside a gridded shelter with moulded plastic seating and a modular cafe table. In one design (top) the dimpled roof is retractable to let in natural light into the shelter in dry weather and a slatted fence adds security. In the other design (bottom), the roof is transparent so that "you can see the sky and the bottom of the streetcars up above".  The roof is engineered with steel girders in an attractive criss-crossed pattern. Passengers can use a ramp to get to streetcars arriving up top. 

The design above is a multifunctional sidewalk hub. It is a bike rack (clear stand on left) and also a safety unit. In an emergency, you can use the shield (tube and board) the mallet (white) or the night stick to defend yourself.  Careful construction went into this neat unit. Next design step is to figure out how to restrict access to just the good guys…

...and in case anyone else noticed snowflakes this morning, how about a sidewalk sauna?