Concealed underneath Toronto’s dense urban fabric is a 33 km long pedestrian concourse, Toronto’s PATH system. However, the expansive civic scale of the subterranean network is not reflected in its entrances. With over 70% of the PATH’s entrances residing within privatized walls, the underground network has become an underutilized labyrinth, disconnected from the city whose decline in pedestrian traffic has only continued to decrease since the pandemic.

This research began with an extensive process of documenting and cataloging various threshold conditions in the city of Toronto, which revealed the capacity for these liminal spaces to connect and mediate contrasting spaces while simultaneously pointing to moments of disconnection, disjunction and fragmentation in the city. Through this research, an investigation of Toronto’s PATH system became a lens through which the disconnected nature of the metropolitan condition could be addressed and ultimately transformed.

This thesis embraces the messiness of the metropolitan condition, creating unity through fragmentation by attempting to concentrate many programmatic possibilities into the increasingly small footprints in the downtown core. Through a series of relief cuts into voids in Toronto’s financial district, this thesis marks and releases the PATH by projecting it as a vertical volume. As a result, the PATH transforms from an ultra capitalist infrastructure to a vertical public space.

The vertical appropriation of void spaces not only enables the possibility to host a dynamic coexistence of activities, designed as a framework capable of absorbing new meanings and extensions, but also provides visible gateways into the city’s underground network. In embracing the messiness and tangle of the city, these beacons would also anticipate varied appropriations, from hosting art exhibitions, protests, parties or providing platforms for trees to float above our heads in the sky. In this regard, these interventions act as beacons, simultaneously connecting the subterranean domain to the space above acting as a wayfinding system within the city of Toronto, which is truly a culture of congestion.