Studio VAARO

We are thrilled to have received an Award of Merit in the Concepts category at the 2026 AZ Awards by , for Impossible Toronto: On the Courtyard, Learning from European Blocks. Written in collaboration with for the .

Viewing Rooms’ brief, to design three interconnected spaces for landscape, sculpture, and photography, offered a strong framework for a spatial narrative grounded in perception and reflection.

First in the sequence, the landscape court is enclosed on all sides but open to the ground and sky. A circular void in the roof captures shifting light and weather.

A pivot door leads to a deep threshold, opening onto the sculpture gallery beyond.

Dupont Housing - Located on a corner lot along a busy Toronto thoroughfare, this six-storey multi-unit residential building is defined by geometric clarity and bold colour. A mineral base of vertical, pigmented concrete panels establishes a resilient and tactile material presence at the pedestrian scale. Above, the upper levels are clad in pigmented corrugated metal, shingled at an oversized scale and carefully aligned with the Juliet balcony guards to create a unified façade language.

We conceived the envelope as a repeatable system, allowing the architectural expression to be deployed across a range of urban conditions while maintaining a strong and recognizable identity within the client’s growing portfolio of missing-middle residential buildings. This emphasis on modularity and replicability informed both the massing strategy and the planning logic, enabling adaptation to sites of varying scale and configuration.

At grade, the building engages the street through a flexible ground-floor space designed to accommodate either office or café use, contributing to the vitality and social life of the neighbourhood.

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