Kipling Station- Mehdi Hosseini

1-Residential


There are just a few residential apartments next to the Kipling subway station.




2-Traffic
Rush hour time at the main intersection close by Kipling station.

3-Bussines Size

Most businesses are small and having a few customers because of less population comparing to the central area of Toronto.

4-Transportation

Kipling station is located in the furthest west in the TTC and the city of Toronto. The need of transportation is the force that made city of Toronto to build the station in Kipling area.

5-Vehicles

Most of the vehicles were in the lower class; cheap and old. There were a lot of trucks indicating the type of jobs in which most residence having in that area.

"PROJECT ONE: PART ONE: DON MILLS STATION: Nancy Huang."

FAIRVIEW MALL : Central place of social gathering.

TRAFFIC: Rush hour! Don Mills and Sheppard.


PARKING LOT: I observed alot of space for parking.

APARTMENT BUILDINGS: There are many apartment buildings that tower the area.



VEGETATION: All the apartment buildings have beautiful well maintained flower beds and nice front lawns.

downsview station

Project One/Part One: McCowan Station/Katie Felton

STREAM/NATURAL BELTLINE: Nature is plenty in certain spots and the hum of crickets can be heard almost everywhere over the traffic. A small stream cuts through the suburb, accompanied by a marsh-like natural habitat that permeates the urban landscape.


RELIGION: Down a single block linking Bellamy and Ellesmere, there are at least half a dozen churches representing different religious groups and sects.

CONSTRUCTION/TEAR DOWN: There is a lot of construction happening on every corner of this suburban stretch. This is a photo of a sign notifying local residents of the pending tear-down of old buildings and an area renovation...now long since heeded, it stands rusting in the shade of a tree behind a mall parking lot.

CORPORATE TAKEOVER: The streets have names like Progress Rd. and Corporate Ave. There are many new corporate buildings such as the one in this photo, and even a local baseball field is owned by Toyota. However, small businesses can be found in a small effort to diversify some of the commerce such as a bakery, a music school and an organic food shop.


REPETITION: Buildings, shapes, materials, rows of trees and shrubs have all been placed into like arrangements.
Rows of identical benches, condos, cars, churches, houses and so on, everything felt like a planned pattern.

Project One : Part One-ANAHITA KIANI

Project 1:1 - FINCH

HIGH DENSITY: FINCH, PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION HUB

A series of photographs complied to create an animated documentation of people descending from a bus intended to give an idea of the traffic flow and density.

A recording of the typical sounds you will encounter on your way to the Finch bus terminal. Imagine yourself walking down the street towards Finch station, past the buses, entering the terminal and finally into the subway system. The abundance of sound is directly related to the high density of people and vehicles. When stepping off a quiet bus, it is not unusual to feel bombarded with these sounds and slightly unsafe.


NIGHT AND DAY: THE CONTRAST IN OLD KOREA TOWN
In the older part of the Yonge and Finch area, there are several Korean bars, eateries, hair salons and other commercial spaces scattered about. This area appears to be unkept but comes to life at night; it becomes a popular place for people to eat and socialize.

PARKING: CREATING A CEMENT WASTELAND
Above ground parking lots take up almost 20% of the area and are usually, in themselves relatively large. There is poor supervision, thus, when evening comes these lots become potential criminal zones.

DEAD SPACE: ON YONGE STREET?
There is an abundance of dead space in the area. This makes the area look disorganized and incomplete. High-end Condominiums juxtaposed with garbage filled lots is not uncommon.











PROJECT FINCH: Amanda Compagnone, Eve Zorawski, Mike Pham

Project One Site Assignments

Below are your assigned sites for Project One, Part One (click to enlarge).

There are precisely four students per group. If absolutely necessary, you may switch groups, but you must ensure that the number of students per group remains the same. Please email me if you switch groups.

"Excerise two: Nancy Huang."

Exercise Two: Michael

My Bedroom

My House

Map Of my Neighbourhood

Project One, Introduction and Part One

Project One
Suburbia
Social Space in the Planametric City

The map is open and conneciable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group or social formation. It can be drawn on a wall, conceived of as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a meditation.

from A Thousand Plateau by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, 1980

Mapping is a fantastic cultural project, creating and building the world as much as measuring and describing it. Long affiliated with the planning and design of cities, landscapes and buildings, mapping is particularly instrumental in the construing and constructing of lived space. In this active sense, the function of mapping is less to mirror reality than to engender the re-shaping of worlds in which people live.

from The Agency of Mapping by James Corner, 1999

OVERVIEW

In teams of four or five, you will investigate and interpret a large-scale suburban environment. Through a series of mapping studies, derived from personal observation and supplementary research, you will isolate and represent the historic, cultural, economic, ecological and spatial conditions that characterize your site. Subsequently, through the creative recombination of these variables into a synthetic analytical drawing, you will reveal insights into the challenges and potentials of your site.

The five sites in question will be the termini of each arm of the Toronto rapid transit system: Kipling Station, Downsview Station, Finch Station, Don Mills Station and McCowan Station.

Don Mills Station

Downsview Station

Finch Station


Kipling Station


McCowan Station

Your preliminary observations should cover a minimum area of approximately one kilometer square: 500m from the station exit in all directions.


PART ONE: DUE SEPTEMBER 25, 2008, 8:30AM

With your team, visit your site. Actively observe the forces at play. Record your observations through a combination of media: writing, sketching, photography, audio recording, video recording or any other technique you may be comfortable with.

On returning, review the results of your observations. Post five items to the blog - passages, images, clips or a combination - that you feel are representative of five different forces that affect the social space under investigation. In one or two sentences, describe the force that you are representing.

Possible forces include, but are not limited to: traces, decay, transformations, momentous occasions, groups, ethnicities, locals, festivals, boundaries, ownership, traffic, government, tags, formal exchanges, informal exchanges, illegal operations, scales, business type, business size, employment, employees, venues, variety, waste, production, human habitation, wild space, vegetation, forgotten places, water flow, toxicity, traffic, vehicles, corridors, forgotten places, vacancy, density, geometry, grids, axes, repetition, edges, hierarchy . . . to name but a few.

Lastly, please read James Corner's essay The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention.


EVALUATION

Annotated Observations: /5

Exercise Two: Eve

Exercise Two: Anna Totska