Noting that the population of Toronto is split equally between Canada-born and immigrants, Ordonez focused his design on the needs of the latter. Those communities live predominantly on the outskirts of the city, far from the neighborhoods they once built, such as Chinatown and Little India. The jurors commended Ordonez for his research and how he addressed the people for whom he was designing.
The program required that concepts remain flexible enough to adapt to different sizes with different inhabitant capacity requirements. Ordonez incorporated cross-laminated timber panels in both living and workspaces because they could be used at both apartment- and housing-unit scales. They would also allow inhabitants to subdivide rooms as households grew or create retail spaces tailored to the needs of recent immigrants.
The jurors also lauded Ordonez for his graphic representation. Ordonez’s stated goal was to project a sense of the futuristic and the progressive through the drawings. “I incorporated a ‘paper-esque’ aesthetic, as a reference to the phrase ‘paper architecture,’” said Ordonez, “because my project is hopeful and utopian in a way, like projects by Superstudio and Archigram.”
