MARKHAM COMMUNITY LIBRARY
Ontario, Canada, 2022

Following the thesis semester on relationship between digital rendering and faux material constructions, I returned to suburban Toronto to explore the twinship with a pilot project. The site is a residual parcel—church land left unviable by single-family subdivision logic—repurposed by the city into a public library concealed among the homes. Surrounded by a development of repetitive house models dressed in varied faux materials, the library adopts this same camouflage. Conjoined house profiles feign a quiet monumentality. The ground abandons the suburban lawn, allowing wild grasses to fill paved cracks. In section, the building negotiates two conditions: lifting at the parking entry for presence, while sinking at the street to form a garden. The architecture deliberately misreads domestic tropes. Dormers become oblique skylights; jack posts act as columns; polycarbonate panels glitch the courtyard light like a screen. Faux finishes slip thinly across the roof, wall, and ground, destabilizing material boundaries to produce a continuous, unanchored rainscreen facade.

Advisors: Michael Young;
B.Arch Thesis at the Cooper Union;
William Cooper Mack Thesis Fellowship Award

TIANYANG SUN