the unignorable tower
A campaign to raise awareness about the affordable housing crisis in Toronto, the Unignorable Tower was designed to visualize the number of affordable housing units urgently needed for those who are unhoused or still waiting for access to affordable housing.
We collected data on the number of families and individuals who were either unhoused or on the waitlist for affordable housing in the Greater Toronto Area, just over 116,000 in 2019. We worked with KPMB architects to design a building with enough units for everyone in need. The final dimensions were staggering - the tower footprint would need to be as large as an entire city block, and still the tallest building in the world by a significant margin.
We treated the launch like the announcement of a real condo building, with architectural renderings by Norm Li Studio shared in the press and on social.
We created a physical presentation centre, showing the size of the tower in context of the City of Toronto’s official city model, with educational information on the issues of affordable housing and general poverty that the United Way is working to combat.
The augmented reality app was designed to render the tower for everyone in the city to see in real time, at 100% accurate scale and with real-time lighting changes to make it feel like a real part of Toronto’s skyline. AR podiums were placed at popular vantage points around the city to prompt residents to see the scale of the problem for themselves.
The campaign resulted in 141 million impressions in its first week, a 10,000% increase in donor traffic to the United Way, significant coverage in the media, as well as thought-provoking online discussion of the issue.
