PROJECT The Fold, Toronto, Ontario
ARCHITECT Ja Architecture Studio
TEXT Peter Sealy
PHOTOS Sam Javanrouh Photography
Last year, a daringly sculptural residence took form on a quiet street in Toronto?s leafy Trinity Bellwoods neighbourhood, just west of the downtown core. Although small in size, the completed house, called the Fold, is a compelling and sophisticated piece of urban design. Its distinct materiality and powerful massing assert the house?s own autonomous presence while speaking to its surroundings. The result is a robust, yet jewel-like exercise in the typology of the urban attached house?one which honours Toronto?s history of Victorian eclecticism without sycophantic emulation.
A folded copper roof wraps around an outdoor room and distinguishes the house from its neighbours. The house?s most striking move is a diagonally sloping folded roof that negotiates the difference in roof forms between its northern and southern neighbours. This reconciliation of the house to its urban situation did not unduly constrain Ja Studio; rather, it provided the Toronto-based partnership of Behnaz Assadi and Nima Javidi with an opportunity for the complex formal expression which has become the studio?s trademark. As with many of their recent projects, the outcome is an intriguing and successful contribution to their adopted city?s heteroclite architectural catalogue.
While the lower half of the main façade remains clad in its original brickwork (the Fold is in fact a forceful ...