Client and program
The owner wanted a mid-rise mixed-use building that would do more than stack residential over retail. The program was a vertical mix — ground-floor public program, middle floors as office, upper floors as residential — and the brief asked for a building whose architectural identity could carry across all three uses without forcing them to read as the same.
Site and constraint
The site is a downtown corner, with two street-facing edges and a depth that, if treated conventionally, would have produced floors with deep interior cores starved of daylight. The constraint was the floor plate’s depth and the desire that every program — office included — sit close to natural light.
Design move
We organized the building around an interior courtyard. The courtyard is generous enough that it functions as the building’s daylight strategy, the building’s amenity strategy, and the building’s circulation diagram all at once. Office floors face inward, with desks against the courtyard glazing. The residential floors above borrow the courtyard’s terraces as shared amenity. The ground floor opens to the street; the courtyard is the building’s interior public room.
Construction approach
Type IIIA construction with the courtyard’s massing and section the project’s most deliberate move. The terraces are sized to be useful — large enough for furniture, planting, and gathering — and the courtyard glazing is detailed for both privacy and view across the floor plate.
Outcome
Church Street Condos is currently in design. The project is the studio’s first mid-rise mixed-use development and is the test case for whether the studio’s larger principles — daylit interiors, generous shared amenity, architectural identity across program types — scale into a vertical building at this height.
