Architecture has traditionally been a profession of generalists, but can offer fulfilling opportunities for those who choose to specialize.

 This was the case for Bill Chomik, a Calgary-based architect who, over the latter half of his career, has become the world’s leading expert in planetarium design.

Chomik’s foray into this esoteric specialty happened largely by circumstance. In 1983, he was approached to perform some minor conceptual planning for the Calgary Science Centre. He eventually joined the Science Centre’s board, as well as helping write a closed RFP for retrofitting the building with the new style of planetarium—a tilted dome that allowed for upright seats, replacing the original flat dome that required almost fully reclined seats.

To complete the design, Chomik consulted extensively with suppliers. He also travelled to Finland to visit the just-opened Hereka Planetarium, by Heikkinen-Komonen Architects.

Chomik and colleague Urs Kick studied the new structure from top to bottom, and ultimately used it as a model for the Calgary planetarium.

At the grand reopening of the Calgary venue, suppliers approached Chomik saying that he was good to work with, and that—unlike many architects, whose designs undermined the ability of the projectors and other technical elements to perform at their best—he listened to what they had to say about their equipment. Chomik replied, “We’re Canadians, we listen and deal with everyone around us.”

A month later, he got a call from Athens: his name was put forward for a new planetarium being built there. He interviewed and got the job. Soon after, he was working on planetariums in Chicago, Guangzhou, Seoul, and San Jose. Although they were never the sole focal point of his practice, the firm took on these projects, and he continued to work on planetariums—one a year or so—after his practice was acquired by Kasian and he became a principal with the larger firm.

To date, Chomik has been involved in the design of some 18 completed planetariums, with another 14 projects currently underway. Now retired from Kasian, he is a sole practitioner who works as a consultant to firms leading the design of planetarium-containing venues. In this capacity, Chomik has worked with the likes of I.M. Pei, Ricardo Legorreta, MAD Architects, and Zaha Hadid Studio.

His scope now focuses on high-level conceptual design, and Chomik is glad for the opportunity to have a seat at the table, and for the travel his work involves. “I’d encourage young architects to try and develop a specialization if they want to have an interesting time in the prime of their career,” he says. “I made it a point 30 years ago to really understand planetariums—what clients wanted, what technologies were out there to support it, what flaws were out there that should never be repeated again—and became a world expert.” 

As appeared in the November 2024 issue of Canadian Architect magazine

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The slowness of the approvals process has been pegged as a key villain in the goal to increase the supply of housing in Ontario. But the truth is more complicated.

In recent years, the province has seen a flurry of bills in support of a provincial ten-year target to build 1.5 million homes. In October 2022, there was the More Homes Built Faster Act (Bill 23) and the More Homes for Everyone Act (Bill 109). Now, 2024 has seen the introduction of the Cutting Red Tape to Build More Homes Act (Bill 185).

A key theme in these Acts is the streamlining—and quickening—of approvals. Bill 23 removed the public meeting requirement for plans of subdivision, exempted developments of up to 10 units from site plan control, prevented third-party appeals on minor variance applications, removed the ability of municipal staff to require changes in exterior materials, and limited the role of conservation and heritage authorities.

Next, Bill 109 required site plan approvals to be completed by municipalities in 60 days, and to review projects requesting a by-law amendment within 90 days (or 120 days if the decision was concurrent with an official plan amendment application). To respond to what William Johnston, Toronto’s Interim Deputy City Manager of Infrastructure and Development Services, characterized as the “punitive legislated timeline provisions” of this bill, the City of Toronto hired an additional 150 staff to manage the workload. The new timelines did not allow staff to provide even a single round of comments about matters as basic as a building’s height or the size requirements of a new sanitary pipe, so comments were pushed to a mandatory pre-application consultation phase.

Bill 185, if passed, will remove the requirement for mandatory pre-consultations—reducing the ability of municipal staff to make any meaningful comments on applications, unless a developer voluntarily opts-in to this process. In many cases, this will have the effect of further shortening the timeline with which developers proceed along the well-trod route of appealing an application rejected on the municipal level to the Ontario Land Tribunal, which has the authority to override local decisions.

While this may be helpful in smaller centres where staff are less well equipped to evaluate applications, in larger cities, the move to further reduce the review and oversight process for development applications will almost certainly have an overall negative effect on the quality of buildings. Perhaps this is a worthwhile trade-off for a rapid influx of new homes. But will quicker approvals ultimately get us more housing? 

A 2023 report from Gregg Lintern, Toronto’s Chief Planner and Executive Director of City Planning, suggests that the answer is: no. It found that 103,638 residential units had been built between 2017 and 2022, and that there were an additional 203,793 residential units—twice that number—that had already been approved, but not yet built. Many of these properties, presumably, are held by speculators who strategically upzone without ever having the intention to build. An additional 409,896 units were still under review at the time of Lintern’s report. If all of those units were realized over time, this would increase the total number of dwellings in Toronto by one half—exceeding the city’s projected 2051 population of 3.66 million by 14%. 

The same year, the Regional Planning Commissioners of Ontario undertook a similar exercise. It reported that, province-wide, there were already over 1,250,000 housing units approved before Bill 23 even came into the picture. If stakeholders were to collaborate in getting these already-approved units built, the report implied, the province would get to its goal without rushing further approvals or removing environmental controls.

In response, a report commissioned by developer lobby groups Building Industry and Land Development (BILD) and Ontario Home Builders’ Association (OHBA), countered that there were only 331,600 “shovel ready” units, and that an additional 731,000 were in the application process, needing additional approvals, requiring a servicing allocation, or awaiting decision from a municipal council.

Perhaps a balance will come into place with an additional provision proposed in Bill 185—a “use it or lose it” provision that will give municipalities the option to specify the expiry of site plan approvals after three years.

All of this points to problems in housing supply that go beyond what can be solved by cutting red tape alone: a meaningful acceleration in homebuilding would require addressing systemic problems such as inflation and the lack of tradespeople. As Lintern concluded in his 2023 report: “Provincial targets are aspirational and their pursuit will not result in actual completed homes without a complete rescaling of the capacity of the development industry to construct new homes.”

As appeared in the June 2024 issue of Canadian Architect magazine

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This month’s issue of Canadian Architect is a celebration of award winners: it features the laureates of the RAIC Gold Medal, the RAIC International Prize, the RAIC Annual Awards, and the National Urban Design Awards.

As co-chair of the RAIC Awards Advisory Committee, and a jury member for numerous architectural awards over the past decade, I’ve had many opportunities to reflect on what makes for the most successful award programs—as well as the best award submissions.

Every awards jurying process involves deliberation, negotiation, and evolution of viewpoints among the jurors. In most programs with a substantial number of entries, jurors are given the opportunity to preview entries, and are often asked to scorecard them ahead of a jury meeting. But the best results are rarely the aggregate sum of those scorecards. Rather, the preliminary assessment is generally just a starting point for understanding how best to focus the jury’s time together.

Many juries are now convened online, and this has the advantage of being able to easily bring together jurors from different locations. However, I’ve found that with few exceptions, the quality of jury conversations is improved when juries meet in person. Like in any meeting, interpersonal dynamics interweave with the official business of selecting winning projects—and it’s easier to assess the values, expertise, and interests that each juror brings to a deliberation when you’re in the same physical space.

One of my favourite juries to participate on was the Toronto Urban Design Awards, about seven years ago. Because of the local nature of the program, much of the two-day process was spent driving around the GTA to see actual projects. This was an invaluable experience: as any designer knows, even a comprehensive set of photos, drawings, and even video cannot fully replicate the experience of being in a place. In some cases, seeing the projects nudged the jury’s assessment up, while in others, the reality proved to be disappointing compared to the submission package.

Increasingly, the submission of sustainability metrics has become a requirement for entering awards programs. But how are these metrics used in the assessment of projects? In the recent OAA design excellence jury, a technical jury, consisting of two members of the association’s sustainability committee, independently reviewed all of the entries, and assigned a sustainability score to each entry, using a clear set of criteria (with half of the points assigned to energy efficiency, and the other half assigned for additional sustainable features, including fuel-switching, LEED certification, mass timber, greywater reuse, and so on). The technical marks were presented to the jury, and were an important factor in its decisions.

What characterizes a winning entry? In most design awards, the quality of photos is important—there is a tangible difference in quality with professional photography. The inclusion of floorplans and other key drawings, even if not mandated by the award, is also key. In the cases where a limited number of images is specified, drawings can often be included as part of a composite image, placed alongside a relevant photo. Many award submissions allow for a short text. The clarity of this narrative is important, especially as it pertains to criteria like process or social impact, which may not be immediately apparent from the design. If videos are permitted, this can also be a powerful opportunity for storytelling about a project’s significance, and conveying the character of the resulting spaces.

It’s worth vetting the entire content of your submission to make sure every element is of high quality. The editor’s maxim “if in doubt, leave it out” is of relevance here. A significant amount of time may go into a well-composed awards submission; these honed materials can ideally be reused in websites, proposals, and marketing.

In the case of nominations for a person or organization to receive an honour, consider including letters of reference. The validation of peers, clients, and collaborators can be quite powerful—especially if the letters are not generic ones, but provide personal insight into the person or organization’s impact. Sometimes quantity can be impressive, too. I recently reviewed a nomination for a professor to receive an honour, which included several dozen letters of support from former students.

In the end, award juries and architects who participate in awards programs are supporting a common goal: to recognize the highest quality architecture and the industry’s most forward-looking practices and individuals. The effect, one hopes, is a progressive raising of the bar for architects, clients, and the culture of architecture in Canada.

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When North America’s building codes were first drafted in the late 1800s, they had strict measures to prevent the spread of fire—a reaction to conflagrations that consumed New York, Chicago, and other cities built quickly from wood. That legacy has repercussions to this day, including in Canada’s requirement for two exits from any multi-unit dwelling above two storeys. 

This turns out to be the world’s second-most restrictive multi-unit residential exiting requirement (Uganda requires two exits in all multi-unit buildings above a single storey). In Hong Kong, single staircases are allowed in buildings six storeys in height; in Norway, Australia, and New Zealand, the limit is eight storeys; Sweden and France allow single egress in buildings up to 16 storeys; China up to 18 storeys.

The stringency of Canada’s requirement is outdated, says intern architect Conrad Speckert, who works at LGA Architectural Partners, and who has spent two years researching the issue full-time. Now, over a century of building performance and fire mitigation measures provide more effective tools for fire safety. Moreover, says Speckert, updating the code would unlock the possibility for greater housing density and affordability. “After zoning reform and revisiting parking minimums, it’s the next most obvious barrier to building small multi-unit buildings,” he says. This is primarily achieved by freeing up more space, he notes: “A staircase is roughly the same floor area as an extra bedroom on each floor.”

In April 2022, Speckert and fire protection engineer David Hine submitted a code change request to the Canadian Commission on Building and Fire Codes (since restructured as the Canadian Board for Harmonized Construction Codes)—the body in charge of maintaining and updating the National Building Code. Speckert also petitioned Ontario’s Housing Affordability Task Force, in a letter co-signed by some four dozen local architects, planners, and developers—a who’s who from Shirley Blumberg of KPMB to Mazyar Mortazavi of TAS. 

Speckert emphasizes that the requests are based on maintaining—and in many cases outperforming—current fire safety standards. The proposal sets out the possibility of single stair access in buildings up to six storeys, with a maximum of four dwellings per floor, sprinklering throughout, and stringent fire separation and positive pressurization of the exit stairwell.

British Columbia’s architects are advocating for a similar change. Public Architecture recently completed a report with grants from BC Housing and the City of Vancouver studying how point access blocks could transform Vancouver. BC’s Ministry of Housing just closed an RFP asking for a policy and technical options report for single egress stair buildings up to eight storeys in height, paving the way for possible changes by this fall. “It’s a political priority—the province is sold on the benefits of this,” says PUBLIC senior associate Jamie Harte, who led the report.

The Canadian research is also helping to catalyze state-side pushes for reform. In the United States, single egress is allowed in buildings up to three storeys high—only a single storey higher than in Canada. Seattle, New York City, and Hawaii are exceptions: in these jurisdictions, a single stair is possible in buildings up to six storeys. Now, other West Coast areas experiencing housing shortages—including Oregon, Washington state, and California—are showing an interest in going higher.

Beyond creating more room for housing, the potential code change creates more room for creativity. “It makes all kinds of small apartment buildings more high quality,” says Harte. “Everything gets a little bit more flexible and more creative when you don’t have to drive a corridor through the middle of your plan.” 

What kinds of things would be possible with the change? Vancouver’s Urbanarium is running an ideas competition for mid-rise buildings that challenge the double-egress requirement and other existing policies. A comprehensive design studio at U of T’s Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design also allows for a single egress stair in its program for a 200-unit building “There are really good benefits for that typology,” says studio coordinator and SvN principal Sam Dufaux. “With more cores and more stairs, you get small communities within a building. You can put a lot more design ambition behind the project, and think about making great living spaces. It opens up a whole new world of possibilities.”

As appeared in the April 2024 issue of Canadian Architect magazine

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On December 5, 2023, the ongoing controversy over the award of the federal contract for the National Memorial to Canada’s Mission in Afghanistan came to a head in a two-hour-long debate on the floor of the House of Commons.

Over the course of the conversation, members of Parliament were asked by members of the Bloc Québécois to evaluate the assessment of the Standing Committee on Veterans Affairs, which “denounces the government’s about-face and lack of respect for the rules in deciding not to award the design of the commemorative monument linking the artist Luca Fortin and the architectural firm Daoust Lestage Lizotte Stecker, which won the competition conducted by a team of experts set up by the Liberal government itself.” The Standing Committee had held two sessions considering the situation, requested documents related to the selection process, and asked for the Ministers of Canadian Heritage and Veterans Affairs at the time of the decision, Pablo Rodriguez and Lawrence MacAulay, to appear before the Committee. (They both declined.)

At the end of the proceedings, 167 MPs concurred, including two Liberals and the members of all other parties, while 149 MPs disagreed with the statement.

MP Luc Desilets, a member of the Bloc Québécois, opened the topic. “The government held a public art competition to select a design concept for the national monument to Canada’s mission in Afghanistan,” he summarized. “There was a bidding process. The government put together a jury of experts to select the winning team. The jury, composed of experts with international experience”—including three jurors who had direct involvement or close links to Canada’s Mission in Afghanistan, a military historian, an architect, a landscape architect, and an art gallery director—“spent hundreds of hours evaluating the proposals and unanimously decided that the winning team was the one made up of architectural firm Daoust Lestage Lizotte Stecker, artist Luca Fortin and strategic advisor Louise Arbour.”

“To everyone’s great surprise, the government ended up ignoring the jury’s decision and giving the contract to a different team,” he continued, referring to the government’s announcement, a year and a half later, that the memorial would be designed by a team comprised of Adrian Stimson, Visual Artist; MBTW Group, Landscape Architects; and LeuWebb Projects, Public Art Coordinators.

The government has said that it based its decision on the results of a public poll surveying respondents on their reactions to five shortlisted proposals. The poll received 12,048 responses, many of which came from respondents who participated in Canada’s mission in Afghanistan, family members of those who participated, veterans, or current members of the Canadian Armed Forces. Overall, more than half of the poll’s respondents favoured the Team Stimson proposal, which was selected about 25 percent to 50 percent more often than the Team Daoust proposal, depending on the question asked.

But the government’s own analysis, based on documents dating back to 2021, points to the weaknesses of making a decision based on the poll results. A more recent report on the poll, commissioned from market research and analytics company Léger by the Bloc Québécois, points to several flaws in methodology, concluding that “the online survey conducted for the National Monument to Canada’s Mission in Afghan­istan does not respect the basic criteria of a scientific method, and the results cannot be interpreted as the opinion of members of the Armed Forces, nor of the Canadian public.”

While there is a valid and fruitful discussion to be had about the role of public consultations in decisions around public art and architecture, the core of the matter, in this case, is simpler: upholding the integrity of public procurement processes. The rules of the competition were clearly laid out at the outset, and the process of evaluation was led by a jury of experts with the support of a technical evaluation committee. Consultation with veterans was part of the initial process of putting together the competition brief, veterans and the families of the Fallen were represented on the jury, and the results of the public poll were taken into consideration by the jurors.

The reversal of a jury decision, by a poll as by a more overt political process, taints public procurement for public art and public architecture—and could have a chilling effect on the willingness of artists and architects to participate in such processes.

What happened between November 2021 and June 2023 to make the government decide to overturn the jury’s decision?” asked Desilets on the House of Commons floor on December 5. Some 400 pages of internal documents, obtained by the Committee on Veterans Affairs, reveal uncomfortable conversations between Veterans Affairs Canada and Canadian Heritage, ongoing efforts by staffers to maintain the jury decision, the involvement of the Privy Council Office and Prime Minister’s Office, and the knowledge by all parties that replacing a jury decision with the results of a poll would be a risky endeavour.

A routine use of surveys

What, indeed, happened during those two years? In the documents, things start off normally. Following the jury’s selection of a winning design, Canadian Heritage recommends that, as per regular procedure, the contract should be awarded to Team Daoust. According to its report, the Team Daoust proposal, which centers on a pair of mashrabiya-inspired screens offset to frame a view of the Peace Tower, was chosen by the jury, among other reasons, for its clear expression of the mission’s focus on democracy and human rights, both encompassing and transcending the conflict to communicate a message of hope.

Staffers at Veterans Affairs make minor comments to a memorandum formally notifying the ministers of Canadian Heritage and Veteran’s Affairs of the jury’s choice of winning design. According to the memo, Canadian Heritage would contact Team Daoust, who would proceed towards detailed design, with the monument expected to be completed in time for Remembrance Day in November 2024

From the beginning, there appear to be some questions about the jury’s decision being at odds with the survey results, which staff from Canadian Heritage and Veterans Affairs treat as normal concerns. Canadian Heritage explains that it will manage communications to explain the fact that the winning team was not the design concept preferred in the public polling, and notes that they’ve handled similar situations in the past. As they are preparing to notify the ministers, a manager from Veterans Affairs’ Commemoration Division drafts a series of notes on the survey’s role, detailing that “Canadian Heritage routinely uses surveys in juried design competitions as a tool for assessing broad trends in support for individual designs,” and that “Surveys are designed to assess reactions and preferences on a spectrum, rather than a simple analysis of the popular vote.” She adds: “It should also be remembered that the survey is just one element of broader consultation around the project, which included visioning exercises and consultations with a broad range of stakeholders as well as the composition of the jury itself.”

Responding to what appears to have been a request from higher-ups at Veterans Affairs to segment the data further, isolating responses from veterans and their families, she notes that “Production of a segmented report after jury deliberations have concluded creates the potential for the jury’s decision to be unfairly criticized at a later date based on information that was not available to them.” Cross-tabulated survey results were nonetheless produced in December of 2021.

The memorandum notifying the Ministers of the jury decision in late November 2021 addresses the survey results explicitly. It explains that “The Team Daoust proposal was the second most favoured design concept among survey respondents and received generally positive comments” and notes that “survey respondents only had access to limited information on the finalist team’s proposals (a summary of the design intent, four images and a 90-second video),” while the jury’s evaluation included “the entire design proposal, including the full design intent; a comprehensive, itemized budget estimate, a detailed technical description of the concept and information on support team members; information provided by the design teams as part of the presentation of their concepts to the jury; input from ACPDR [the National Capital Commission’s Advisory Committee on Planning, Design, and Realty] members and from technical experts in conservation, landscape architecture, engineering and costing; and feedback from stakeholders and the public obtained through the online survey.”

The Privy Council and Department of Justice weigh options

Team Stimson’s name first appears in the correspondence in January of 2022, in a three-page document prepared for use by a director in Veterans Affairs for an upcoming briefing. The note, sent by a director from Veterans Affairs’ Commemoration Division, seems to address a new argument that Team Stimson’s proposal should be preferred since it includes the names of Fallen soldiers. “It is notable that the Team Stimson design concept, which received between 52 and 62% support across all questions, includes the names of the Fallen and significant thematic/educational content, although these elements were not required in the Program and Design Guidelines. In addition, the video puts a strong emphasis on visitor interaction. The Team Daoust design concept, which did not present these elements, received between 23 and 40% support across all questions, with its lowest result in its potential to educate visitors.” It adds: “Team Daoust demonstrated openness to including the names of the Fallen in their monument design in response to a question by a jury member during their presentation on May 20, 2021.”

In conclusion, Veterans Affairs writes: “The only options at this point are to award the contract to Team Daoust or to cancel the design competition and retender. Cancelling the solicitation without just cause will put the Crown at risk for negative press and any bidder can pursue legal recourse again the Crown (potential lost earnings, etc.). The recommendation of PCH [Patrimoine canadien/Canadian Heritage]’s Contract and Material Management Directorate is to proceed with contract award to the winning bidder, Team Daoust.”

But the matter continues into February, when representatives from the Privy Council Office—as well as Canadian Heritage’s legal team—become involved. The agenda for a meeting planned between these parties on March 3, 2022 includes looking at the advantages and risks of three options: “issuing a contract to the team selected by the jury,” “cancelling and retendering the competition,” and “issuing a design contract to a finalist not selected as winner by the jury.” In advance of this meeting, a director at Veterans Affairs discusses their “recommendation/mitigation actions” of proceeding with awarding the contract to the winning bidder of the design competition, and hosting a series of consultations with Veterans and other stakeholders after the award of contract, focusing on “possible additions to winning design (names of Fallen, additional educational content).” (A Veterans Affairs note from around the same time adds the caveat that “we have some concerns about including names of the Fallen—including names is counter to some of the fundamental guidelines and vision of the monument.”)

The Department of Justice weighs in on April 1, issuing an eight-page legal opinion, followed by a three-page follow-up in mid-May. These are redacted in the public record, but presumably address the advantages and risks of the three tabled options.

By that time, a new meeting had been planned for May. In addition to including the Privy Council Office, the Minister of Canadian Heritage, and the Minister of Veterans Affairs, the meeting would also involve a representative from the Prime Minister’s Office.

The Prime Minister’s Office gets involved, and a push for more consultation

In preparation for the meeting, a detailed flowchart, created by Canadian Heritage with feedback from Veterans Affairs, points to a new option: additional consultations could be planned, and the jury asked to re-deliberate the competition taking into account the results of these consultations. The caveats, laid out in the chart, are that unanimous consent for new consultations must be agreed on by the five bidders, and the jury must agree to reconvene and consider the new elements. There is also the possibility that, at the end of all this process, the jury could maintain its original selection.

Some version of this option seems to have been the one selected in the meeting. The Privy Council follows up the next month with Canadian Heritage: “Did you get any clarity on how they [Veterans Affairs] want to proceed with the consultations? […] There is a lot of interest here on next steps and starting to hear requests about another 4C [four-party meeting] which we’d like to avoid, so just need a bit more information to reassure the folks next door [presumably the Prime Minister’s Office, which shares a building with the Privy Council Office] that things are well in hand.”

A seven-page legal opinion (again, redacted) is prepared in June, with a series of follow-ups, presumably to address the selected approach. Either at the May meeting with the Office of the Prime Minister and Privy Council, or in response to the legal advice, the consultation takes a slightly different format—one that avoids seeking the agreement of competitors and jurors to re-evaluate the competition results, but instead has an eye towards either confirming a winner, or cancelling the competition altogether.

In July, while “awaiting further direction from above,” Veterans Affairs moves forward with preparing for this further round of consultation. A draft version of the consultation documents states their purpose as: “to gather information to inform the decision regarding whether or not it is in the public interest to proceed with the current procurement process or reset it and start a new process” [italics original to document].

In order to do this, the consultation would consist of a poll asking respondents if the original vision for the monument—to “recognize an important chapter in Canada’s history and pay tribute to the commitment and sacrifice of Canadians in helping to rebuild Afghanistan”—was still valid in light of the current situation in Afghanistan.

A document in November, outlining an even more comprehensive option to “revalidate the design considerations,” details that this round of consultation would be positioned as a response that considers the takeover of the country by the Taliban in August 2021. “This potential shift in perceptions of the legacy of Canada’s engagement in Afghanistan means we need to consult further and ensure the design for the Monument is sensitive and responsive to the needs and wishes of all those who served in Afghanistan […] and the Canadian public,” it states. The document outlines a two-phase consultation, with an online survey followed by qualitative consultation that “could include round-tables, one-on-one interviews, etc.”

This consultation approach is never employed—suggesting that the goal of the exercise was not to ensure that the selected design was supported by more robust consultation. The Privy Council Office asks for an update in November of 2022, suggesting that political pressure may also have been mounting.

By January 12, 2023, the Minister of Veterans Affairs has made their final decision to award the contract to Team Stimson. Veterans Affairs realizes that this is risky. To maintain its “critical path” of successfully announcing the winner, it notes several key hypotheses: including that the competitors do not file a complaint with the Canadian International Trade Tribunal, that Team Daoust accepts an offer of 10% remuneration ($34,200), without further discussion or negotiation, and that families of the Fallen are supportive of the decision.

In further correspondence in early February, Canadian Heritage continues to note that while its contractual team would usually correspond with the designers, it is uncomfortable with conveying this decision;
as a result, Veterans Affairs agrees to send the letters indicating that the contract is being awarded to Team Stimson. In May 2023, the Minister of Canadian Heritage signs a document with their required assent for the contract to be awarded to Team Stimson.

“What is the reason behind it?”

Team Stimson has accepted the contract, but the government’s actions are still under scrutiny. “Would the government have asked for a legal opinion and offered money to a team if it had acted legitimately?” asked MP Luc Desilets in the House in December. “The reasons given by the government to justify pushing the Daoust team aside and choosing the Stimson team just do not hold water. What is the reason behind it? […] I think we all agree; it is not hard to grasp that the decision came from high up and there was interference. At the moment, there is no other credible explanation.”

In defense of the government, MP Kevin Lamoureux said, “It is important to recognize that monuments play a very important role for our entire society. Recognizing that, it takes time to do the consultations and to work with people to ensure we get the right monument, which is what we are seeing with respect to Afghanistan. I believe that, once it is complete, all of us will be proud of that monument.” He continued, “I support the government’s initiatives we have taken to date to support our veterans. […] I have confidence in Canada’s civil servants to ensure that there is a process that is reflective of being fair and transparent. I believe the information that was gathered is in fact accurate. […]  Unless there is evidence to demonstrate that there was something wrong with what the civil servants or whoever conducted the questionnaire, or survey, did, I would suggest we accept it as we have done on many other policy points.”

“I believe the monument being proposed and constructed for the people who served in Afghanistan is the appropriate one,” said Lamoureux. “Ultimately, I look forward to its completion and dedication.”

MP Blake Richards, of the Conservative Party, replied: “In the original talking points of the government about this, when it was planning to announce it back in 2021, it said why it was important to follow the jury’s decision above that of this survey. Now it is using this survey as the reason for it, so everyone knows that is not the truth. That is not [the] reason it is not proceeding with the monument originally chosen by the jury.”

Conservative MP Pierre Paul-Hus added: “The battle that we are waging today is not necessarily about whether we personally prefer the Daoust team’s monument, the Stimson team’s monument or one of the other […] monuments that were proposed. It is not about that. It is about respecting what was done as part of a clear government process, with specific rules. What we are seeing today is an insult to those government processes. When I talk about the concept of an institution, I am talking about an organization that has principles and rules that should be followed. What we are seeing right now is a lack of respect for the institution, a lack of respect for the rules and a purely political decision […].”

NDP MP Lindsay Mathyssen also weighed in: “I simply do not understand why, after going through so much of that process over eight years and after having that jury determine the winner and artist of the monument design, the government would do such an about-face.”

A need to set higher standards

Many answers have been provided in the past months, but a few questions remain. First, how best to move forward with the Monument to Canada’s Mission in Afghanistan? A year and a half ago, the government considered three options: cancelling the competition, moving forward with the winning design, or moving forward with another design. Given the public scrutiny of its present choice, it would seem wise to admit to its error, and either move forward with the winning design, or, if it feels that the conditions underlying the competition brief have sufficiently changed, cancel and restart the process.

In tandem with this, there is a need to ensure that open selection processes—in public art, architecture, landscape architecture, and all other fields of procurement—are informed, objective, and free from political patronage and the appearance of influence from behind closed doors. More robust public consultation tools can also be part of selection processes, but their methodology must be fully considered, and the use of these tools in the evaluation of bids must be fully transparent at the outset.

Where did the decision to award the project to Team Stimson, as opposed to Team Daoust, come from? The initial concerns about the survey’s disparities with the jury decision, and the later concern about including the names of the Fallen on the monument, both seem to be robustly addressed by Canadian Heritage and Veterans Affairs staff. The involvement of the PMO’s office and Privy Council Office suggests that there may have been political interference from a higher level. Even though the Minister of Veterans Affairs at the time of the decision, Lawrence MacAulay, owned the decision when it was made earlier this year, he has remained silent. This included declining to speak during the House of Commons debate—even though he was sitting in the House during the debate, and is now Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food in Canada.

What does this mean for Canadian architects and artists? It’s rare that the procurement of a work of public art is the subject of more than two hours of Parliamentary Committee hearings, and an additional two-hour debate on the House of Commons floor. Our MPs were sitting through that debate—doubtless the longest exposure they’ve ever had to a discussion about the processes underlying public art or architecture design competitions. It provided a rare occasion to help inform them about the value of public art and architecture, and the importance of fair, transparent procurement processes—an education that has the potential to provide lasting value beyond the current memorial.

There is an opportunity for the government to change its mind, honour fair process and transparency, and set higher standards for the fair procurement of public art and architecture. Let’s hope they do so.

This article was originally published on December 12, 2023. It was updated to add subtitles and minor grammatical corrections on January 25, 2024. It has also been published in the February 2024 issue of Canadian Architect (below).

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Toronto’s Koffler Centre for the Arts is currently presenting a small but powerful exhibition on The Synagogue at Babyn Yar. Designed by Swiss architect Manuel Herz for a client group that included Canadian architectural historian and Holocaust scholar Robert Jan Van Pelt, the building is a reminder of architecture’s fragile but poignant ability to offer hope and healing.

The woods of Babyn Yar, in western Kyiv, Ukraine, are the site of one of the Nazi regime’s worst massacres—the so-called “Holocaust of bullets.” On September 29th and 30th, 1941, 33,771 Jews were shot and killed by German troops in a deep ravine on the site. Over the following months, some 40,000 to 70,000 more Jews, Soviet prisoners of war, and others were murdered at Babyn Yar. 

In 2018, a two-stage international competition was conducted to create a Holocaust museum on the site. A winning entry was selected which minimized its above-ground presence by extending four storeys underground. However, it soon became clear that because Babyn Yar was the site of mass murder, the construction would be disturbing what Jewish tradition viewed as cursed ground. The project was shelved.

Through his involvement with the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Foundation, Van Pelt suggested that a more appropriate response could be to build a synagogue—an active place of worship. He recommended Manuel Herz as the designer, based on the young architect’s innovative synagogue in Mainz, Germany.  

Herz’s design hovers atop the ground, supported by shallow strip foundations, and folds away—literally—when not in use. Jews self-identify as the “People of the Book,” and Herz combined this idea with the magical wonder of his infant son’s pop-up books. The building’s slab-like form is manually opened by the congregation, unfolding to unveil the central Bimah (a reading platform for the Torah), benches, and a balcony. An open-air design aims to demystify Jewish ceremonies, and build bridges between Jewish and non-Jewish residents of Kiev.

Inside, the walls have been colourfully painted with iconography from wooden Ukrainian synagogues dating back to the 17th century, which were destroyed in WWII. Constellations on the ceiling recreate the night sky on September 29th, 1941. The building is made from oak, salvaged from barns and other structures across Ukraine: the trees are old enough to have witnessed the massacre. Wood is intentionally chosen as a fragile material that must be regularly oiled and cleaned.

The project moved quickly—going from initial commission in the fall of 2020 to realized building in only five months, in time to mark the massacre’s 80th anniversary. That year, the building was used regularly for synagogue services. Russian’s invasion of Ukraine—less than a year after the synagogue’s completion—has so far left the synagogue intact, but there has been a tragic loss of life in the vicinity.

“On 1 March 2022, rockets struck just 150 meters from the synagogue,” wrote Manuel Herz shortly after the invasion began, emphasizing that the building’s survival is nothing compared to the loss of a single human life. “Only a few months after its inauguration, the synagogue is caught up in war, which only celebrates death. What is the point of commemorating history if the lessons to be learned are forgotten and ignored so easily? It leaves me speechless, numb, and powerless.”

Nonetheless, the synagogue remains in use.  “I pray for the people of Kyiv and of Ukraine, that the savagery of the war end as soon as possible,” writes Herz, “and I hope that the synagogue can eventually regain its community, so that the lessons of fragility are not drowned out by the cruel noise of war.”

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In late October, hundreds gathered by The Ring at Montreal’s Place Ville Marie’s to commemorate the life of landscape architect Claude Cormier, who died at age 63. We assembled around the hot pink casket that Claude had asked his friend Jacques Bilodeau to design: he meant his friends and colleagues to smile, even at his memorial.

 I first met Claude after writing my earliest freelance article for Canadian Architect, back in 2003: a thought-piece on kitsch in Quebec design, accompanied by a photo of Claude’s Lipstick Forest in Montreal’s Palais des congrès. Shyly, I knocked at his home-turned-office in the Plateau with a copy of the printed magazine in hand. The door was immediately flung wide: “Perfect!” I recall him saying. “We need a writer for a proposal we’re working on, you can help us!” 

Claude’s positive energy uplifted so many. His wit, joy, and ability to create places with universal appeal was evident in works like the pink (and later rainbow) balls that hung above St. Catherine Street’s Gay Village for nearly a decade, the dog fountain of Berczy Park in Toronto, or the split-in-half fountain of Dorchester Square in Montreal. He was also involved in dozens of other projects that paired architecture with landscape: from the National Holocaust Monument in Ottawa with Daniel Libeskind and Edward Burtynsky, to the multi-layered streetscapes of The Well in Toronto.

In a time when design is increasingly concerned with collaboration, Claude’s way of working offers lessons for all designers. He galvanized people around the strength and clarity of his ideas, and simultaneously created space for others to exhibit their talents. One of the last times I spoke with Claude, before knowing of his illness, was interviewing him about The Ring. I remember pressing him: a ring is such an open symbol, what was his core idea? In that firm, but kind way that he had, he told me: he’d done his job in creating the idea as a physical piece in the world. It was my job, as a writer, to articulate the idea in words. 

“Yes, the work environment was intense; Claude never stopped until things were perfect,” writes landscape architect Marc Hallé, who began working with Claude as an intern in 2003 and is now a co-president at the firm founded by Claude, now rebranded as CCxA. “But for those who knew him, he radiated light with a positivity and a proactive outlook that kept clouds far at bay. He took every measure to make sure it never rained on our picnic. Although his sunshine came with its fair share of heat, it also motivated people to be their best.”

At the centre of that positivity was a love for the work itself, and a desire to make places that embodied his philosophy of “serious fun.” “It was never about Claude when you spoke to him, and not about you either, but about the work and the joy it brings to others,” writes landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburg. “His designs remind me of the inherent optimism of our field, which goes hand in hand with Claude’s attitude about life. While some insist that the members of a landscape architect’s ensemble stay in their assigned roles, Claude celebrates the anomalous and the episodic: a painted stick standing in for a blue poppy, or an exuberant 50-foot catalpa suddenly endowed with equal parts whimsy and gravitas as it is captured in a perfect, circular, tree-sized island. Claude empowers plants (and people) to do their own thing—the way that he has always done his.”

Claude’s positive energy continued to the end, when he was dying from complications of Li-Fraumeni Syndrome, a rare genetic condition that predisposes carriers to multiple cancers. “I want you all to know: Guys, I’m OK!” he wrote to friends, through a mailing list managed by a close group helping him through palliative care. “I’ve lived a life much longer than I ever expected. Since I was a teenager, I always knew I would die young. My father died at 44. My sister died at 52. I’m 63. I never expected so many years. It was always hanging over my head. All my relatives on my father’s side, 12 of them, all died of cancer. Plus many of my cousins. So I feel very fortunate. My life has been PHENOMENAL. Je suis un homme excessivement privilégié!”

“I feel the love you’re sending me from all over the world—big time! That’s why I’m at peace. Keep sending it! It reinforces all the achievements I’ve had, but I was never really aware of, because I was too busy working to see it all clearly. So keep sending the love. I want to give it back to you!”

The love is still coming, Claude—and the legacy of your projects, and of your way of being, will continue to give so much love back to the world, for decades to come.

See all articles in the November issue 

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This year, the Ontario government has continued to unfold plans for Ontario Place, on Toronto’s waterfront. In 2021, the province pledged to retain Eberhard Zeidler’s 1971 Cinesphere and Pods. But in the scheme currently going through approvals, two private developments occupy prime spots on the property: an aquatic recreational facility run by Austrian company Therme, and a 20,000-person concert venue run by LiveNation.

While the East Island will boast significant parkland and the public area encircling the Therme facility on the West Island has been expanded from its initial design, the prominence of the private facilities is still significant. In a submission to a joint City of Toronto and Waterfront Toronto Design Review Panel in late March, the Therme development occupies over half of the West Island, and its greenhouse-enclosed pools top out at 45 metres—50 percent taller than the Cinesphere. The panelists were largely supportive of the public realm master plan for the East Island, but raised concerns about the “fortress-like” Therme buildings and their “dominant scale and massing,” according to meeting minutes. “The main Therme building feels oversized for the West Island, overwhelming the proposed public realm and the existing heritage attributes, including the ‘pods’ and Cinesphere,” the panelists report. (Architects Diamond Schmitt will be resubmitting a refined design to the City in August.)

The proposal for the site as a whole includes necessary public investment—$200 million will be spent on the repair of infrastructure, erosion, and flooding damage, along with restoration of the site’s heritage structures. And initially, a suggestion that the Ontario Science Centre would occupy the Pods and Cinesphere seemed a positive fit. But this spring, the province announced that the Ontario Science Centre would be entirely relocated to Ontario Place, occupying the heritage structures and topping a new underground parking garage. The proposed Science Centre Pavilion site is a fraction of the size of the Therme and LiveNation developments, and only provides half the space of the Science Centre’s present facility. The existing Ontario Science Centre, a Centennial project completed in 1969 by Raymond Moriyama, would be demolished.

The ministerial announcement of this plan was accompanied by reference to a business case for the move, but at the time of going to press, Infrastructure Ontario had not yet been able to provide that document to me. (It seems unlikely that such a business case would have explored a full range of options. In response to a request for estimates of the costs to update the current Ontario Science Centre, the ministry responded that they “are currently developing feasibility and options for stabilization and rehabilitation, and do not have any information to share at this time.”)

In the meanwhile, the province has moved with alacrity, issuing a call for proposals for a planning, design, and compliance consultant for the relocated Ontario Science Centre, setting the stage for a P3 competition.

Bureaucratic processes may slow down the timeline to allow for reconsideration. A provincially led environmental assessment, issued in July, only covered the public realm of Ontario Place, excluding the large tracts slated for redevelopment by Therme and LiveNation. Advocacy group Ontario Place for All is appealing to the federal government to conduct an impact assessment on the entire site. 

Toronto’s new mayor, Olivia Chow, is opposed to the redevelopment, and the City owns 16 acres of land necessary to access and redevelop Ontario Place. The province has indicated that they would expropriate the land if needed, but Chow has suggested she wouldn’t give it up without a fight. “Expropriation is a blunt instrument and it takes time also because what we don’t want is to waste a lot of money in court, but that is available and hopefully we wouldn’t get to a stage where we have two levels of government seeing each other in court,” she has said.

When they were constructed, both Ontario Place and the Ontario Science Centre exemplified the innovation and sensitivity to landscape that put Canadian modern architecture on the global map. In an era when environmental sustainability is of paramount concern, Canada once again has the chance to show leadership in caring for its heritage, while crafting places that foster meaningful interactions between built and natural environments. The future of Ontario Place and the Ontario Science Centre may initially seem to be a local matter, but we would be wise to take a bigger picture of the significance of these sites, and what they are able to offer to Canadians—and the world—both now and for the future.

The post Editorial: The Case for Ontario Place appeared first on Canadian Architect.

When my mother graduated from McGill’s School of Architecture in 1973, her class set a record for the number of women that convocated. From the 60 students that started with her, 43 finished the degree; of those, nine—21 percent—were women.

Women’s rights in Canada, particularly the rights of mothers, were still nascent at that time. Until 1971, Manitoba fired women municipal employees who married; pregnancy was considered a valid basis for layoff or dismissal in the Canada Labour Code until 1978. Two years after that, Public Service Alliance of Canada workers for the federal government went on strike for better maternity leave provisions, resulting in an increase from six weeks to three months of leave after having a child. (This came too late for my mother, who was working in property management for the federal government when she had me.)

It was a hard time for women to make their way in architecture—a field dominated by male architects. And although things have improved, there is still much progress to be made. In 1975, women earned 60 cents for each dollar made by men. As of 2019, accounting for wages, salaries and commissions, Canadian women still made just 71 cents to every dollar earned by Canadian men. While women now match (or outnumber men) in architecture classes, as they do in pursuing university degrees in general, the pay gap persists: Canadian women who graduate with a bachelor’s degree earn an average of $69,063 annually, while men with a bachelor’s earn $97,761.

Parental leave benefits in Canada are luxurious compared to what’s available in the United States. But for many households, earning a maximum of $390 a week over 18 months means a sharp tightening of household budgets—particularly if a young family is living in a city with unaffordable housing relative to average household earnings, like Toronto or Vancouver. 

Added to this are concerns about career advancement, in a field where internship and studying for licensing exams is a major undertaking. For many women in architecture, it can make for challenging decisions about when—and even if—to start a family.

To Canada’s credit, there is continual progress being made in parental benefits. When I had my child about six years ago, my husband took six months of unpaid paternity leave—a decision unprecedented in the architecture firm where he worked. Now, federal parental leave is mandated to be shared between the two parents—with a “use it or lose it” five weeks reserved for the second parent (in most cases, the father). This has lasting benefits for the family, and for the mother: men who take paternity leave are more likely to be involved in childcare in the future. 

Organizations such as Building Equity in Architecture Toronto (BEAT) are also helping to level the playing field, by creating community-building, networking, and mentorship opportunities focused on women. According to its mission statement, the volunteer-run organization “believe[s] that empowering women in the design community improves and enriches the practice of architecture, the quality of the built environment, and ultimately, the human experience.” 

“My women architect friends, they all worked hard,” my mother told me. Of her classmates, three started their own practices and one became an executive in a large international firm. As a women, and a mother, I’m now privileged to have greater access to opportunities in the world of architecture, built largely on the success of these—and other—women of my mother’s generation. So this one’s for you, mom: happy Mother’s Day.

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Toronto is the fastest-growing city in the developed world—a fact evidenced by real estate prices that remain well beyond affordability thresholds despite interest rate hikes, and towers that continue to crop up across the city. In late 2022, the city had 252 cranes operating on construction sites, by far the largest number in any North American city. (The runner up, Los Angeles, had 51).

This rapid growth is a prime concern for architects, as well as for students of architecture in the city. A recent exhibition at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design asked: how can the suburbs absorb more density? Meanwhile, a symposium convened by the Master of Architecture students at Toronto Metropolitan University’s Department of Architectural Science asked: how can urban design and architecture in development hubs better address this growth?

For urban affairs journalist John Lorinc, one of the panellists at the TMU symposium, Toronto’s anti-density mindset dates back to the city’s roots as a colonial city which placed a high premium on homeownership and private property. “Vestiges of this are baked into how the city thinks about things,” he says, citing Toronto’s lack of major public places, and a suspicion of apartment buildings as housing lower-income folks and others who would make for undesirable neighbours. NIMBY-ism among homeowners, who dominate the tax and voter base, is rampant, and “the political system rewards politicians who defend the status quo,” he adds.

Architect Peter Clewes, principal at architectsAlliance, further explains that in 2006, the Ontario government directed a large amount of the province’s growth in the coming 25 years towards the GTA, but that the City of Toronto did not enact wholesale zoning changes to accommodate this growth. “So effectively, there is no zoning regime,” he says, explaining that developers must undergo a lengthy zoning application and negotiation for virtually every individual mid-rise and high-rise building in the city. 

Graig Uens, who worked as an urban planner with the City of Toronto for 12 years before recently moving to the private sector, says that part of the solution is a need to reframe planning practice. “Politics has grown to be too great an influence in our work,” he says, describing how difficult—yet crucial—it is for city planners to provide their best professional advice to City Council, rather than defaulting to the responses that councillors would like to hear. “How can we think of housing as infrastructure, and how can we be more flexible in where we grow?” he asks, suggesting that more nodes of density would enable interesting things to happen in a greater number of places. 

Urbanist and former mayoral candidate Gil Penalosa calls for a “renovation revolution” that would allow houseowners to subdivide their properties into four units as an as-of-right, ending exclusionary zoning. He also suggests imitating the example of Melbourne, where all transportation corridors into the suburbs were densified, allowing for buildings six to 12 storeys in height. In Toronto, this would open space for 1.2 million units, he says, and making it an as-of-right would save developers two to three years of “expensive negotiations, lawyers, and banks.”

The need to increase density in a systematic way is urgent, all of the panellists agree. Architect Naama Blonder, principal of Smart Density, says that “grey is green,” explaining that the greatest single thing that Toronto can do, from a sustainability perspective, is to densify. Clewes says that even with their heavily glazed façades, the typical condo unit only experiences 12 percent of the heat loss of a single-family detached home—let alone the emissions benefits that come from expending less embodied energy on construction, and less fuel on personal transportation. Blonder is living the urban lifestyle herself, raising her family, including two kids, in a 92-square-metre condo, with no car—an arrangement she notes would be very common in many of the world’s major cities.

The City has made some strides in the past few years: the removal of parking minimums is notable for several of the panellists. But the wholesale removal of swaths of regulations brought about by the recently passed Bill 23 may not be the ideal way to proceed, either; one of the effects of that legislation is to encourage growing sprawl by removing important environmental protections. 

Ultimately, the fast-growing population of Toronto may be part of the solution: 47 percent of the city’s population was born abroad, and on the whole, the city’s population is younger than the rest of Canada. The city’s new residents, like its architecture students, come with the expectation—and, indeed, the demand—that the city does better, for the envi­ronment, as well as for all those who live here.

The post Editorial: Growing Up Fast appeared first on Canadian Architect.

As we head towards the winter, many offices are settling into new patterns of work—some maintaining hybrid work options established during the pandemic, some returning to in-person work in offices. Still others are pushing to move from the former to the latter.

Many smaller firms are back to in-person work—a number of them only left their offices during mandated pandemic lockdowns. In cities like Winnipeg, where many architects live near offices in the downtown core, a full return to in-person work is more common. But many larger firms, particularly in bigger cities where longer commutes are the norm, have been seeing less than half of their staff return to the office. In cities like Vancouver and Toronto, where housing prices have risen sharply in recent years, some staff permanently relocated outside of the city during the pandemic.

Toronto-based dkstudio architects says that it’s been challenging to bring their 24 people consistently back into the office. “The main struggle is with the younger group,” says co-founder Karen Mak, noting that “they don’t have the experience to work independently, yet they don’t want to come to the office.” Her strategies for enticing staff to return range from prioritizing those who show up for design-forward projects and raises, to getting an office puppy and bringing in unexpected treats (the other day, mochi donuts). 

Maxime Frappier of ACDF, a 100-person firm in Montreal, says that in their case, many of those working from home are senior staff, who feel more productive without the disruptions that come from working in an open-plan office. “But that’s part of the job, you are paid to be interrupted!” says Frappier, who is concerned about the loss of informal mentorship that comes from being able to walk over to a desk to ask a question, and the learning that comes from overhearing conversations. In the meantime, to compensate, he says: “I’m talking louder.”

While working from home can save time on commutes and help in balancing family obligations such as school pickups, it also comes with an emotional and psychological toll tied to higher rates of burn-out, according to a recent study at Simon Fraser University. “Working from home means losing out on those water cooler conversations and casual collisions with coworkers—which have a surprisingly profound impact on well-being,” writes social epidemiologist Kiffer George Card, one of the study’s leads. “Furthermore, considering how important workplaces and schools are for finding and building friendships, a loss of these spaces could have serious long-term consequences for people’s social health—especially if the time spent with others at work is now spent at home alone.” His team’s research suggests that hybrid work arrangements offer the best of both worlds—with 87 of those working in a hybrid mode reporting good or excellent mental health, compared to 54 percent of those that worked only in-person, and 63 percent of those who worked only at home. 

In Vancouver, VIA—A Perkins Eastman Studio has aligned with their parent company’s policy for staff to work in the office three days a week. “Our office has been experimenting with a number of ways to encourage people to work and connect in the office,” says senior associate Anne Lissett. “My feeling is that in-person collaboration is really valuable, so I hold my team meetings together in the office, and I connect with other project managers informally there too.” She adds that “happy hours, along with occasional office breakfasts, lunches, and other activities that emphasize the fun of being together in real life, are also perks to in-person work.”

Toronto-based MJMA has similarly requested staff to be in the office for three days a week, Tuesdays through Thursdays, with Mondays and Fridays as optional work-from-home days. “For the sake of office culture, and the vitality of the workplace and business efficiency, we are focused on having everyone back in the office on the same three middle days of the week,” says partner Ted Watson. “Interestingly, what has become clear is that our meetings online have become more and more successful and equitable when we can use Miro, Enscape, and Bluebeam, and have access to all our files and screen-sharing of internet content simultaneously and together,” he adds. As a result, the majority of MJMA’s meetings are held online. “Our meeting rooms have never been less used—to the point that we are considering if we can delete half of them in order to create higher value space for staff.”

“Conversing, socializing, and learning from proximity are goals we believe in. We’re focused on fostering and retaining this by having everyone back together, sharing space, lunch and stories,” says Watson. “But remote working, in some form, is here to stay.”

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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2022 report focuses on the impacts of climate change, and the capacities of natural and human systems to adapt. Among its findings, it notes how the implementation of low-carbon practices within specific sectors—including buildings—is key to mitigation.

The report highlights strategies such as using more wood in buildings to lower emissions, the wide deployment of green roofs in urban areas to reduce extreme heat, and using passive design strategies for heating, cooling, and ventilation.

But there are also implicit trade-offs: for instance, enhancing space conditioning in buildings can tame the health risks of extreme heat, but comes with a carbon cost. Tightly sealed buildings reduce energy consumption, but may also lead to moisture build-up in envelopes. Increased insulation without shading and ventilation can come with a lowered ability to benefit from nighttime cooling. And while policy changes can be effective, they can exacerbate inequities. “Changes to design standards can scale quickly and widely, but retrofit of existing buildings is expensive, so care must be taken to avoid potential negative impacts on social equity,” write the report’s authors.

Altogether, “building today for resilience and lower emissions is far easier than retrofitting tomorrow,” notes the report. Some $90 trillion USD is expected to be invested in new urban development by 2030. It’s “a global opportunity to place adaption and mitigation directly into urban infrastructure and planning,” write the report’s authors. “If this opportunity is missed, if business-as-usual urbanisation persists, then social and physical vulnerability will be not so easily confronted.”

These issues were top of mind for speakers at the Facades+ conference, which convened in Toronto this summer. While many individual architects and researchers are developing expertise in highly sustainable construction, how do we instigate a change in construction culture, so that higher performance buildings are the norm, rather than the exception? Can we create buildings that radically reduce their reliance on—or entirely eliminate—mechanical heating and cooling? And how do we balance operational energy efficiency with sharp reductions in the embodied energy needed to create buildings?

“We cannot continue with a myopic focus on operational energy, full stop,” said Kelly Alvarez Doran, Senior Director of Performance & Provenance at MASS Design Group. As director of the Ha/f Research Studio at the University of Toronto’s Daniels Faculty, Alvarez Doran has led research on how to halve the embodied carbon emissions of new buildings in Toronto, using currently available materials and technology.

With his students, he has identified key drivers of high embodied carbon in Toronto’s mid-rise residential buildings—including underground parking areas (made with high embodied-carbon concrete) and aluminum extrusion-based glazing systems (the highest embodied global warming potential by volume of all materials in their study). They’ve also done a deep dive into mass timber buildings, revealing substantial upfront and operational emission reductions achieved by reducing window-to-wall ratios and incorporating mass timber into façades.

Considering façade construction, panellist Cathy McMahon, of Moriyama & Teshima Architects, asked: “How can we be growing the things that clad our buildings rather than extracting them from halfway around the world?” Her firm is collaborating with Acton Ostry Architects on Limberlost Place, under construction for George Brown College in Toronto. They’re aiming to achieve both low operational and embodied carbon: the 10-storey building boasts a mass timber structure and was originally designed with terracotta tile cladding (later revised to metal panels due to weight), and has a projected thermal energy demand of 54 kwh/m2/year.

The project team is also geared towards sharing knowledge around the project’s development and design: a three-hour workshop on the afternoon of the conference detailed the technical decisions, construction coordination, and technologies used to design and manufacture Limberlost’s high-performance prefabricated façade system. Its structure, too—a beamless system that achieves nine-metre column-free spans, an optimal depth for daylit classrooms—is a non-proprietary system developed by Fast+Epp. “Anyone in Canada can use this,” said Phil Silverstein of Moriyama & Teshima.

We’ve packed this issue of Canadian Architect with recent research and practices in low-carbon construction that we hope will be useful to your work. To move with the speed needed to address the accelerating climate crisis, we will need to learn from each other—and work together.

The post Editorial: Building Resiliency appeared first on Canadian Architect.

Are we headed towards a recession? And if so, what should architecture firms be doing to prepare?

Over the past months, the Bank of Canada has steadily increased its policy interest rate, in a bid to control inflation and find a “soft landing” for the economy that tames excessive spending, while avoiding a recession.

“Higher interest rates will help slow demand and allow supply time to catch up. Consumer spending will moderate as the pent-up demand from pandemic restrictions eases and the cost of borrowing increases,” said Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem in a press conference in mid-July. “Housing market activity is already cooling rapidly from unsustainably high levels during the pandemic. And slower global growth will reduce demand for our exports.”

John Mollenhauer, president and CEO of the Toronto Construction Association, has said that since the construction sector is currently so busy in his city, even if a full-blown recession were to hit, it would only result in a modest reduction in activity.

Some firms have economic resilience built into their business model. Architect Oliver Lang and partner Cindy Wilson are co-founders of Vancouver architecture firm LWPAC as well as a sister company, Intelligent City, which produces modular, mass timber housing.

“Housing is probably the most price-sensitive, interest rate-sensitive product there is,” says Wilson. “In times like this, when the cost of materials is so high and interest rates are rising, how do you de-risk projects?” She and Lang started Intelligent City to create affordable, sustainable urban housing through a process that allows them to control the quality of the end result. The company has recently opened an automated manufacturing facility for modular, multi-unit housing and raised $30 million in funding.

Sustainability is key to Intelligent City’s buildings, which are produced from mass timber and are highly energy efficient. “Over the lifespan of a building—and especially for the operator of a building if it’s rental housing—the maintenance and operating cost is almost more important than the initial cost,” says Wilson. She sees the demand for rental housing, especially in the non-profit sector, continuing to grow even as Vancouver’s property market begins to cool.

For Natasha Lebel of 12-person Toronto firm Lebel & Bouliane, much of the economic information we’re getting from the United States doesn’t apply to local conditions in Toronto, where the city’s growth and prosperity will continue to fuel the construction sector: “We’re in the most successful city, in one of the most successful countries in the world.” She adds that her firm, which divides its work between commercial, institutional, and residential sectors, has seen renewed growth since the end of July, when they closed out a number of projects that had experienced significant pandemic-related delays. They are now energized by starting on new projects.

Lebel does believe that the Covid-related job site closures, labour shortages and supply chain issues will have a significant, but temporary, effect on the construction and architecture sector. “We’re currently feeling the bullwhip effect of a very inefficient construction process from the past year,” she says. “The bullwhip will snap, and things will realign in 2023. Firms in Ontario and Toronto will be fine—we’re not in a recession, and I don’t think we will be.”

“Whatever’s going to happen this coming year, I hope it loosens the reins on everything,” says Lebel. “It’s not good to have little available labour or mobile labour, in architecture as well as in the trades. It’s stressful to have too much work, to have work you can’t do, to be working people very hard because of the inefficiencies of the market and because it’s difficult to hire.”

“The softening of the economy—what everyone calls the doom and gloom of a recession—it’s a good thing. It’s a chance for everyone to exhale, to play musical chairs and figure out where they should be,” says Lebel.

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In architecture competitions, the runner-up scheme is sometimes the most interesting one. That’s the case in the recent Re-imagining Railways design competition, run by RIBA and Network Rail, which aimed to rethink Britain’s over 2,100 small and medium-sized railway stations. The winning proposal, by Edinburgh-based 7N Architects, is an elegant design with a beacon-like clock tower and a modular station layout. But a more impactful and unexpected re-thinking of the nature of infrastructure can be seen in the proposal by Toronto’s Workshop Architecture, one of five finalists selected from over 200 entrants.

Workshop co-founder Helena Grdadolnik was familiar with rural British rail stations from a stint working in the UK. “They were often an unpleasant 30-minute walk outside of town, and not that visible from the road. If you didn’t know where you were going, you wouldn’t necessarily see them,” she says. The fact that many of the buildings are shuttered, more than half of the stations are unstaffed, and few have washrooms, all make the experience even more uncomfortable—especially, say, for a woman travelling alone at night. According to Network Rail’s surveys, 61 percent of passengers do not feel safe at its 1,192 unstaffed stations.

Workshop determined that the core issues with Network Rail’s stations wouldn’t be solved with nice new buildings, but would need to start instead with having a person on-site at each and every station. In their vision, a station agent—not an employee of the railway, but a local selected through an open call process—holds the keys to the site and fosters its use by other local groups.

“The agent could be an individual, a collective, a not-for-profit or a social enterprise. They could be a gardener-in-residence, an outreach worker or a yoga instructor. They could manage a community kitchen, run a farm store or a book exchange,” writes Workshop. “The role can help to remove the operational barriers that keep Network Rail from allowing small stations to have green landscaping, public amenities and a fence with wide openings and multiple entry points.”

While paying for an extra person may make the project seem like a non-starter, research shows that every $1 spent through such a partnership scheme would generate over $4.60 in community benefits, increased rail ticket sales, and reduced crime and vandalism. Moreover, local stewardship could allow the rail stations to become community living rooms, says Workshop, “with cats, plants, rugs and mugs.”

The proposal also saves money in its thrifty approach to the station buildings, which advocates for renovating existing structures. Such retrofits would aim to enhance their energy performance, and to convert single-purpose waiting rooms into maker spaces, galleries, and community halls.

For sites where new buildings must be created, the team envisaged bridge-like structures, with an elevated indoor community space that doubles as a pedestrian crossing over the rails. These projects would piggy-back onto an already-planned rollout of accessible footbridges. “Constructing a station building and footbridge together will minimize disruption, save costs, and be a more efficient use of resources,” writes Workshop.

Site planning was not part of the original design brief. Workshop nonetheless suggested that it would be key to readjust site plans to focus on pedestrians rather than parking and improve accessible access to the rail platforms. In their vision, the platforms are widened to add allotment gardens, pollinator planting beds, and shaded rest areas.

While the project did not win—in part, Grdadolnik thinks, because they did not develop a showpiece building the way that Network Rail expected—she still values the experience of developing the proposal. She believes it’s important to put architectural thinking to work not only in designing buildings, but in unpacking multi-faceted problems linked to the built environment. “For me, it’s a dream project to look at a system,” she says, “and to try to make a meaningful improvement that isn’t about our ego or a visual, but about improving people’s lives.”

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Architecture, fundamentally, deals in complexity. What makes Canadian architecture “Canadian” is, perhaps, its particular eagerness to engage in the dialogue that allows for seemingly competing interests to be resolved in built form.

In Canadian architecture, monumental gestures are rare, and often treated with some skepticism by Canadians. In the national capital region, even a place like Raymond Moriyama and Griffith Rankin Cook’s Canadian War Museum is sunk into its site, and is rendered as a series of subtly affecting spaces difficult to capture in a single heroic image. Moshe Safdie and Parkin Architects’ National Gallery is a bolder presence, but connected to its context by its reference to the parliamentary tower, and by its vast, wild landscape by Cornelia Oberlander.

The three top proposals in the Block 2 competition all exhibit great skill: the third place proposal, by Behnisch Architekten and Watson MacEwen Teramura Architects, takes the challenge of creating a highly sustainable building, interspersed with winter garden atria that cleanse the air and add amenity for the parliamentarians and senators working in the building. The second place proposal, by Renzo Piano Building Workshop and NEUF Architects, is a strong yet nuanced gesture: a modernist glass box detailed with care to both the quality of office spaces within, and facades crafted to pick up on neighbouring heritage buildings and motifs drawn from the parliamentary area.

But of all the proposals, the first place winner, by David Chipperfield and Zeidler Architecture, perhaps most explicitly embraces the complex and sometimes contradictory challenges presented in the 200-plus-page competition brief.  It addresses the complex heritage fabric of the site, retaining every building on the site and even stepping up to the challenge of unifying their diverse floor plates. It makes room around the indigenous Peoples Space, creating a shared plaza to the east that would allow for a ceremonial access to the building and an outdoor meeting place on axis with the Peace Tower. The configuration of the east wing keeps an open corridor for a possible link to the Indigenous Peoples’ Space – a subtle but important gesture that maintains the IPS’s autonomy, while welcoming future connection.

Unifying this is a material palette dominated by copper—a material that references the rooftops of parliament hill, as well as linking to Indigenous cultures, in which copper was highly valued. But the overall elevations, on both the Wellington and Sparks Street sides, are most strongly characterized by the varied heritage buildings retained in the scheme. These retained and restored buildings become a symbol for the notion of diversity, and a commitment to the accommodation of difference.

As with any scheme at a comparable stage of design, there are many things that will still need to evolve and change. Notable among these is the provision of universal access, which is not convincingly integrated in the current planning. As the condition of the heritage building interiors is assessed, it may become viable to suggest a selective removal of existing floors, allowing for a realignment of floor levels that would do much towards making the new complex accessible to all, as it unequivocally must be. The public realm and street level facades on the Wellington side—currently blank walls—will need to be further developed. As the client enters into direct conversations with the proponent, they, too, will no doubt bring new requirements to the table that will need to be worked the design.

But, here is a scheme that has shown a willingness to work with such complexity, and find a clear and compelling architectural expression through it all. In those regards, it is quintessentially Canadian at its core.

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This winter, the community at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture, where I studied in the 1990s, is mourning influential Professor Emeritus Andrew Levitt, who passed away on November 7.

Levitt was a beloved design studio leader, but also worked as a Jungian-oriented psychotherapist. The meeting of these seemingly disparate realms is highlighted in his two books, The Inner Studio (2008) and Listening to Design (2018). The former asks what the modern understanding of the psyche can teach designers, while the latter considers design as a kind of therapeutic process in itself. Both books encourage designers to explore, validate, and investigate their inner worlds as an essential aspect to their work in shaping the outer world.

“It may seem odd to suggest that self-knowledge needs to become an integral part of a designer’s education,“ Levitt writes. “Schools make every investment in the outer world […] but they do not begin to address the deeper strata of conscious and unconscious longings, needs, emotions, and desires that influence decision-makers and affect decision making. I have come to believe that the idea of declaring the role played by the psyche in the creation of the built world is the best way to guide architectural know-how and heal the environment.”

For Levitt, learning how to face design problems—rather than how to solve them—was essential. He urged students to cultivate awareness of both the inner and outer forces that shape their designs, encouraging them to be open to their physical observations of a new project site, but also to their thoughts, feelings, and intuitions. He believed this would allow them to make a personal connection to their work, and to be moved in a way that drew on their deep creative instincts and made their designs alive.

Connecting with kinaesthetic intuition—our energy levels, our physical ailments, our ‘gut’ feelings, even our need for rest—is also a skill that Levitt encouraged students to cultivate. “As designers we typically associate creativity, intuition, and imagination exclusively with the mind, yet architecture has traditionally been built largely by hand,” writes Levitt. “It seems natural to bring our bodies’ innate capacity to create and express to the design process because it is the body, with its extraordinary sense and range of touch, that we are actually seeking to contact and satisfy.” Listening to the body’s reactions, rather than suppressing them, is important to the physical acts of drawing and crafting models and prototypes. But it can also help designers to understand their personal responses to designing, and open the door to choosing a path through the design process that comes from a place of wisdom.

In Jungian psychology, we all have positive and negative traits and experiences, strengths and weaknesses, talents and difficulties, light and shadow. Observing these dynamics in our inner world, wrote Levitt, helps us to understand how to act with greater empathy in designing the outer world for real people and complex problems—not just for an imagined ideal.

“Design can no longer mean ‘my design’, it must now mean ‘our design’,” he wrote. “Our design includes awareness of and respect for climate change, the extinction of species and habitats, the management of energy and resource use, and the legitimate needs of every user. Our design includes children and the elderly, as well as people with specialized accessibility needs. Looking into the future, perhaps our designs will also include the alienated, homeless and displaced populations, with room for those who protest and those who prefer to live online.”

Levitt’s ideas were hard-won through years of teaching grounded in deep empathy and compassion. He was known for crafting design exercises that helped students access their inner resources, and mounting charrettes where they contributed to each other’s success. Early in the pandemic, Levitt held an online talk on the loss of studio, focusing on the mental health and well-being of the students forced to study remotely. The talk was one of the many ways Levitt brought meaning to the emotional experiences of individuals in an institutional setting. It was followed by nearly an hour of conversation—a microcosm of the active listening and encouragement that Levitt offered as a teacher over more than two decades. He was a therapist to some, a mentor to many, and an inspiration to students and fellow faculty members alike.

This fall, the School launched a four-semester-long lecture series devoted to dialogues on the theme of care, dedicated to Andrew Levitt. Levitt’s own empathy and care for architecture students—and the work of architects—was deeply rooted. One hopes that its influence will continue to grow and flourish.

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