Faculty of Design

Environmental Design

Pantea Rafiey

Dundas Square

The rising urban density affects our mental being and can cause anxiety. The impacts of spatial qualities on our senses can be concentrated to encourage stress recovery and apply a sense of order to public spaces.For my thesis, I transformed Dundas Square's chaotic and unsustainable characteristics into a dynamic and efficient public space through a multifunctional approach by implementing a life cycle throughout the square that offers diverse daily and night programs.The concept during the day includes adding cameras that project the background of the billboards on them. This benefits the square in multiple ways. It lowers the skyline and visually eliminates the billboards so they don't block in and enclose the space as the visual clutters caused by advertisements do. Another measure is switching windows with transparent solar panels that help generate electricity that can be used both in the daytime and at night. At night, billboards will tilt and rotate to activate new programs. One billboard will serve as a main stage, and the rest of the adjacent billboards will turn to provide ambient lighting for the area. These soft twilights will be synchronized with the time and act as virtual alarm clocks that regulate the body's biorhythms.