W.E.T.: Water Education Tower

Located at the R.C. Harris Water Treatment Plant in Toronto, ON., The Water Education Tower (W.E.T.) aims to publicly provide further understanding of the urban water treatment process through a playful architectural form, and the tower typology. Inspired by the city of Toronto’s vast water infrastructure and scattered city towers, W.E.T. displaces water from the subterranean settling tanks, vertically into a Water Tower on the northern yard of the R.C. Harris site. The Water Tower provides a testing and research facility, which is an absent and arguably required program on the site. The Water Tower guides a revolving ramped circulation, capitalizing on views towards Lake Ontario and strategically billows to accommodate for exhibition spaces, a small library, and a board room. Subterranean columns rising from the settling tanks extend as the structure for the intervention, this expands on a dialogue between the existing and the proposed.