Talia Ghandour

The Point

“Social space that fosters connection through food” This thesis explores how food can be used to bring people together through architectural space-making rather than through food alone. It focuses on the processes of food production, preparation, and sharing as opportunities for social connection and collective learning, and asks how these processes can be spatially organized to encourage interaction, visibility, and overlap. The project reimagines an underused armoury and transforms it through interior architecture that emphasizes movement through space, vertical relationships, and lived experience as active design strategies. The Point reimagines the historic Fort York Armoury in Toronto as a hub for food, culture, and community gathering. By organizing market, learning, growing, and communal programs through a vertical sequence inspired by farm-to-table systems, the project positions food as a form of social infrastructure, meaning a spatial framework that supports everyday encounters, shared activity, and civic participation. Architecture becomes the means through which this social infrastructure operates, using circulation, thresholds, shared gathering spaces, and visual connections to shape how people gather, interact, and participate across different ages, cultures, and communities.