PROJECT Inuusirvik Community Wellness Hub

ARCHITECTS Lateral Office Inc. (Design Architect); Verne Reimer Architecture Inc. (Prime Consultant)

TEXT Adele Weder

PHOTOS Andrew Latreille

As I entered the Inuusirvik Community Wellness Hub in Iqaluit last fall, it seemed like I was walking through a door into another universe. Aside from the hemispherical St. Jude’s Cathedral down the road, the building is mostly surrounded by starkly orthogonal edifices that relay no urban logic nor sense of place. Next door to the Wellness Hub is the windowless concrete hulk of NorthMart, one of the town’s main grocery stores. Beyond that are scores of former military housing units and recently built shoeboxes. But upon stepping into the Wellness Hub, a visitor is met with curves, birch plywood, and soft daylight seeping in from above. 

The building opened late last year in Iqaluit’s downtown core and was instantly beloved. In a community that struggles with social and geographic isolation, the Wellness Hub could turn out to be the town’s most important new building in years. Spearheaded by Qaujigiartiit Health Research Centre director Gwen Healey Akearok, and designed by Toronto-based Lateral Office with Winnipeg’s Verne Reimer Architects as prime consultant, the project offers a refreshing approach for designing in Arctic communities.

The Wellness Hub is a compact multi-purpose community centre that brings together many sorely needed services: counselling, daycare, wellness research centre, research library, food preparation, and gathering spaces. Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut, is a fast-growing town of 8,000 residents, and such programs have been underserved for years. Equally important, it offers something more: a visceral connection to the rich local culture. 

Over a decade ago, Healey Akearok and other community members had begun conceiving of a place that would provide more of the essential community services necessary to local residents. At a serendipitous moment, she met Lateral Office partners Lola Sheppard and Mason White in 2012 while all three were researching health architecture in the Arctic. They then enlisted her as a collaborator for Arctic Adaptations, Lateral Office’s exhibition at the 2014 Venice Biennale of Architecture. Healey Akearok saw Sheppard and White as the logical choice of designers to help realize her vision. 

The next part of the puzzle came into place when the Research Centre acquired the abandoned house next door to its office in downtown Iqaluit.  The two lots, joined together, became the site for the project. 

From the start, Healey Akearok and the architects worked in an intensely collaborative manner, discussing form, program, cultural expression, and seasonality. In the course of their research prior to and after receiving the commission, White and Sheppard have made numerous treks to the region to understand its culture and geography. (Their observations and analyses of the North are the basis of their 2016 book Many Norths: Spatial Practice in a Polar Territory.) 

“The Arctic has always been like building on another planet,” says White. Or on planet Earth, he clarifies, it’s like building in a climate as extreme as the tropics, or the desert. “In Canada, this is our extreme environment.” 

The extended winters of sub-zero temperatures, permafrost that precludes subgrade construction, high windspeeds with no trees to break the wind, and the sheer remoteness of the place require a completely different mindset and building approach, he explains. Take the usual challenges of construction—budget restraints, labour shortages, unexpected shipping delays—and multiply each one by five or six. There is no road route to Iqaluit: every object, person, and piece of material must be flown in or barged in—or sealifted in, in northern parlance. Both modes of transportation are enormously costly. Air transportation limits the size of construction components to be transported. Sealifts allow for larger components, but pose other difficulties: Frobisher Bay’s sometimes-unpredictable schedule of spring thaw and winter freeze delayed this particular project—among others—by half a year when one shipment of materials missed the delivery-schedule window. 

In recent years, the response to Iqaluit’s surging demand for housing has been the construction of subdivisions and sprawl. In contrast, the Wellness Hub has been constructed on two adjacent single-family house lots in the downtown core. Although it might seem like land is endless in the Arctic compared with the metropolises of the south, the imperative for density is arguably greater in such a community. Densification of the downtown core makes better use of the area’s limited infrastructure, it reduces the carbon emissions from inner-city travel, and it makes for mercifully shorter pedestrian journeys in the biting cold of winter. 

Both Healey Akearok and the Lateral Office principals caution against the stereotype of the region as buried in snow year-round. On one hand, Iqaluit is undeniably colder: average winter temperatures fall to minus 45 Celsius and rise to an average of just nine degrees in summer. On the other hand, the local Inuit who live and work on the land are intensely attuned to richly variegated annual cycles, and recognize six distinctive seasons over the course of the year, rather than the standard four.  

I spent most of last January in this town, when walking to a building a few hundred metres away required gearing up in head-to-toe Arc’teryx. On my second visit last fall, the earth was bare and raw, dusted with frost on colder mornings, but perfectly hospitable for walking around downtown or hiking the nearby Apex Trail. “Our seasons are different here, and they determine what people are doing throughout the year,” says Healey Akearok. “There are different hunting and harvesting seasons, and we wanted our building to support all those activities that happen throughout the year.” 

Part of that support is a recognition of the different ways that space is used by the local community. The hunters’ bounty must be brought into the building’s food-preparation room, where the carcasses are butchered right on the floor. The option of dragging freshly harvested seals, caribou, and beluga through the common spaces of the building is a non-starter, so in starkly practical design terms, a large, separate ingress point was required. The opening started out as a hatch and evolved into a full-size door at the unloading level of a vehicle, once the design team had figured out how to resolve the related code requirements. 

The relationship of the Inuit people to the land is central to their culture, notes Healey Akearok. She worked with the architects to find contemporary ways to express that relationship visually and address it pragmatically. The syncopated corrugated-metal cladding is evocative of the shimmering sea, she notes. It’s also light on the land, in keeping with the values of contemporary environmentalists and age-old Indigenous traditions, and it’s less expensive to bring in than heavier cladding materials. 

Many Indigenous cultures favour circular forms, reflecting the historic rationality of domed structures. The iglu is the most widely known of those forms, but as Healey Akearok points out, there are other curvilinear forms that remain contemporary and are familiar to Inuit residents: the qammaq (a temporal structure, like a tent) or the qaggig (a very large iglu, built on four smaller ones to form a large gathering space). Even the iconic iglu, which I took to be anachronistic as a housing type, is still in use, albeit more as a secondary dwelling. 

“Those round forms are out on the land; they are what’s familiar to people here,” says Healey Akearok. “You just don’t see them in the towns.” For Lateral Office, the design directive to visually reinterpret the cultural norm required a creative approach. “We told them: ‘You’re not going to get a dome; we just don’t have the budget for that,” recalls White. “And, by the way, we do love rectangles!” 

Although Iqaluit is filled with rectangular buildings, that standard is strongly associated with its years as a colonial military outpost, as well as with expeditiously built government housing. “We all agreed that a rectangle wasn’t an acceptable form,” says Healey Akearok. “So they came back with five different concepts, and everyone let them know which one was their favourite.” 

The final design resolution involved rethinking the conventional mode of architectural curvilinearity, seeing the challenge more in conceptual terms. “We didn’t take the iglu as a form,” says White. “The iglu as a form would be a cartoon building. Instead, we took elements of an iglu, the spirit and aspects of an iglu, and used them selectively.” Instead of configuring the massing as a dome or tacking on rounded shapes, the design team embedded curves as subtractions rather than additions. 

The footprint is orthogonal, and the basic massing is close to cubic, but the subtractions—which read as five “scoops”—break the orthogonality of the volume and transform it into a different form altogether. These curved, indented spaces on the corners and front entrance help deflect wind in the harsher months, offer outdoor space in the milder seasons, and provide access to the green roof decks of tundra and moss. Snow will collect in the scooped-out spaces in the winter, but that’s all right, says White: “The snow will insulate the building: this the Inuit have taught us.” 

The design also embodies the concept of an iglu in its treatment of light. Iqaluit receives as little as four hours of daylight in the winter, but up to a full 22 hours of daylight in high summer. That cyclical shift required the architects to favour indirect glazing, in order to shield the occupants from being flooded by light in June, while still allowing light in during the dark months of winter. 

The rotunda at the centre of the building embeds curvilinearity into the entire sequence of interior spaces that surround it. The tundra roof and clerestory glazing atop the rotunda bring landscape, light, and views into the building in an indirect manner, acting in a similar manner to the fenestration pattern of an iglu. The rotunda itself—a wood-sheathed cylinder embedded with Inuit art—serves as a performance hall and social hub of the building. “At the top of this cylinder of space at the heart of the building is a full ring of windows, which is one of the ways you’d bring light into an iglu,” says White.  

Iqaluit is now one of the fastest-growing cities in Canada and will need a profusion of new buildings in the years to come. For Sheppard and White, this burgeoning demand is both an architectural opportunity and an imperative to design responsibly in a locale with a starkly different climate and way of living within it. 

For all their years of research, the Wellness Hub is the first completed building for Lateral Office, whose principals hold academic positions at the architecture schools at the universities of Toronto and Waterloo. Their practice has long been more focused on raising questions than chasing commissions. “There is a wider conversation about circumpolar architectural typology: What is an arctic vernacular today?” says White. “This building is a response to that question, but it is not the response. We’re just happy that this building can contribute to the wider conversation.”

Adele Weder is a contributing editor to Canadian Architect.

CLIENT Qaujigiartiit Health Research Centre | ARCHITECT TEAM Lateral Office Inc.—Mason White (FRAIC), Lola Sheppard, Kearon Roy Taylor. Verne Reimer Architecture Inc.—Verne Reimer (FRAIC), Jeff Penner (MRAIC), Daryl Holloway, Stephen Meijer, Youchen Wang. | STRUCTURAL/MECHANICAL/ELECTRICAL WSP Canada Inc. | LANDSCAPE Lateral Office Inc. with Roxanne Miller, Sopranature (green roof); and WSP Canada Inc. (civil) | INTERIORS Lateral Office Inc. | CONTRACTOR NCC Development Ltd. | PROJECT MANAGEMENT Colliers Project Leaders and MLPM Inc. |  AREA 883 m2 | BUDGET $10.2 M | COMPLETION November 2023

ENERGY USE INTENSITY (PROJECTED) 553 kWh/m2/year

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A year late and amid pandemic restrictions, the 17th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia opened this summer. The opening brought a muted version of the regular fanfare, and the exhibition’s theme—“How Will We Live Together?”—tackles a correspondingly serious set of questions.

Canadian architects and designers have taken up the enormous task of responding to this prompt, in several different ways. Canada’s official entry to the Biennale, Imposter Cities, was commissioned by the Canada Council for the Arts and co-curated by McGill professor David Theodore and Montreal-based firm T B A / Thomas Balaban Architect. In addition, Canada also has a presence in the Central Pavilion, with the project Contested Circumpolar: Domestic Territories, developed by Toronto-based Lateral Office with Arctic Design Group. The Arsenale is graced with Grove, a large-scale installation by Toronto’s Philip Beesley with Living Architecture Systems Group.

This year’s selections did not go unscathed by the effects of the pandemic, and many exhibitors found ways to rethink and reformulate their exhibitions. Impostor Cities developed a hybrid exhibition that offers an outdoors-only experience in Venice, paired with a content-rich online site. Both versions describe Canadian cities that stand in for well-known international destinations in film and television. It exposes a quirky aspect of the country’s architectural identity—Canadian structures are remarkably good at “faking it,” representing places other than themselves.

While travel restriction have made it difficult for visitors to attend the Biennale, those that make it here will immediately spot the iconic Canadian pavilion. It’s usually hidden between trees and dwarfed by its neoclassical neighbours at the Giardini grounds, but this year, the building has been partially wrapped in a lively shade of green, emphasizing its unique form.

The green fabric allows for the use of chroma technology to create an augmented reality experience. A smartphone aimed at the building activates an Instagram filter, which transforms the building into a range of Canadian landmarks from the curatorial team’s film library. With Venice as its backdrop, the visitor can catch a glimpse of Arthur Erickson’s Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, BC, or Louise Bourgeois’ Maman, a looming sculpture of a giant spider that sits outside Moshe Safdie’s National Art Gallery in Ottawa. The building itself becomes an impostor—an experience that is singular to each visitor in Venice, but also global once it is shared on social media platforms.

The Giardini’s main building, the Central Pavilion, houses installations directly chosen by the Biennale’s guest curator; this year, Lebanese architect Hashim Sarkis. By focusing on the global commons, Sarkis critically examines the political boundaries and economic interests that shape architecture.

As part of the Central Pavilion, Sarkis invited Lateral Office to build upon their research on Nunavut, originally presented at the 14th Architecture Biennale in 2014. Created with Arctic Design Group, the exhibition Contested Circumpolar: Domestic Territories expands Lateral Office’s earlier research to encompass the global Arctic. The installation presents maquettes of domestic life representing the eight nations that have land claims in the Arctic: Canada, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the United States. While the Arctic is home to many Indigenous groups, the region is shaped by territorial claims, resource extraction, climate change and political interests that have strongly influenced the way in which people live, including their domestic spaces.

Arranged in a circular manner, eight plinths are wrapped in maps that reveal geographical data and local flora and fauna, alongside particularities of northern life such as open dumps, refineries, and geo-political markers like DEW radar stations. The plinths are each topped with a detailed house model, exposing the intimacies of domestic life: from slippers on the floor to freshly slaughtered meat on the kitchen table. The housing samples vary in size and form, with mechanical systems on view in some, and others purposefully modelled to reflect the level of disrepair of local housing stock.

Alongside the models, the walls of the exhibition space are lined with further explanatory graphics. These describe specific aspects of Arctic life, such as communication limitations in the north, which is largely reliant on dial-up or weak satellite connections at extremely high costs. Residents of the Arctic must also contend with pollution from mineral extraction sites and refineries, challenges with waste management, an array of transportation systems adapted to seasonal change, and the tradeoffs between sometimes-hazardous local food practices and costly imported food.

The nations of the circumpolar Arctic share a common territory, but the exhibition makes it clear that each is also distinct, having been molded from specific political and economic influences.

Turning to the Arsenale space, Grove, an installation by Philip Beesley and Living Architecture Systems Group, offers a much larger narrative frame of reference—examining metaphysical questions of how we live, dwell, and die.

Nestled next to exhibitions on molecular and bee architecture, Grove hovers over visitors as an interlaced canopy of intricate, lightweight meshwork and droplet spires. It’s a multi-sensory island, with an entanglement of air, water and light coupled with sound totems that breathe life into the surroundings. At the centre of this delicate space, the film Grove Cradle, by Warren du Preez and Nick Thornton Jones, is projected onto the floor. Images of water, ice formations, snow, and a child-like being appear, moving through cycles of light and darkness. The sound—both from the film and the pillar speakers—draws visitors further into the space.

The installation suggests a new world where architecture collaborates with plants and animals, has no national boundaries, and is constantly shared and inclusive. The form of this new world takes inspiration from natural structures—cloudscapes and snowflakes, water and plants—to create buildings that are both rigid and sensitive to their environment, as evoked by Grove’s lace-like canopy.

At varying scales, responding to the question of how we will live together is a task that involves study and reflection on how we live now. It’s a daunting endeavour—not only for curators presenting work in Venice, but for all architects, designers and builders. How do we live, apart and together? How should we live? How can we remedy the errors of our architectural pasts, and envision something new together?

Natalia Woldarsky Meneses is a Canadian architect based in Bologna, Italy.

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Architects Marc Blouin and Catherine Orzes work in the bustling metropolis of Montreal. But, says Blouin, they are constantly “in a Northern state of mind.” The duo describes their practice, established in 2017, as “a tireless journey through the vast territories north of the 55th parallel.”

The firm’s commitment to the region builds on previous experience by its co-founders; Blouin, in particular, has been involved for decades in developing projects and building relationships with northern communities. Last year, Blouin received the Order des architectes du Québec’s Social Engagement prize and the firm was selected as one of the Architectural League of New York’s Emerging Voices.

Architecture faces many challenges in the North. Extreme weather significantly limits the construction season and requires highly specialized knowledge. Climate change means that project teams must collaborate with environmental experts to develop innovative, sustainable solutions. Remote locations result in high costs and complex logistics for securing materials, as well as a limited availability of skilled labour. The evolving social conditions of the once-nomadic Inuit impact planning for the future.

“The notion of North overlays all aspects of life, and our life as architects and builders there,” says Orzes. “Nordicity,” explains Blouin, “is the complete context and environment where we work: from the cultural differences with our clients and project users, to the way we build and the way we get there.”

Working collaboratively with community members—in relationships built on mutual trust—leads to projects that are both respectful and responsive. As such, Blouin Orzes describes their process as “accompanying clients,” rather than designing “for” them. Their scope of work often goes beyond traditional architectural services. In the case of Katittavik Hall, completed in 2018, this included everything from assisting with grant proposals to training stage technicians. Located in the Northern village of Kuujjuaraapik, the building was originally conceived by the community as a venue for the Inuit Games. With assistance from the architects, the program evolved into a fully functional performance space, capable of hosting festivals and events throughout the year.

Blouin Orzes’ architecture often features brightly coloured façades and folded geometries. Such projects may initially appear quite simple, but looks can be deceptive. In each of their buildings, apparent simplicity of form represents years of collaborative efforts to create spaces for celebration, tradition and connection.

This profile is part of our August 2021 feature story, Twenty + Change: Emerging Talent. 

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Along with celebrating over 6,000 graduating students this year, Carleton University has presented an honorary doctorate to Métis architect Harriet Burdett-Moulton. She is among seven recipients of honorary degrees from Carleton in recognition of contributions to their chosen fields and Canadian society.

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“Show me a wealthy architect,” architect Lloyd Hunt once quipped to his class at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture, “and I’ll show you a developer.”

The profits of developers can seemingly outstrip an architect’s fees on a project. But for architects, there’s a way to reap the financial rewards of development—by becoming the developer.

The rewards go beyond potential financial gains, though. Architects who enter the development arena are often aiming to make modest, but important improvements to a neighbourhood or city that they know well. They’re gaining valuable knowledge about building from a client-and-owner perspective that feeds back into their architectural practice.

When architects own, finance, and sometimes even act as the builder for development projects of their own design, caution is needed to navigate potential conflicts of interest. As with some other professions, architects are ethically bound to maintain a high level of independence and impartiality in supporting the interests of clients and of the public.

A conflict of interest can arise when an architect has other roles in a project. For instance, when an architect has a financial interest or acts as the builder on a project, it can be difficult to be impartial in tasks such as certifying the value of work, explains the Ontario Association of Architects in its Practice Tip 26.

The Tip states that business activities outside of providing architectural services should not be connected to the architect’s Certificate of Practice. “The OAA does not discourage members from pursuing other avenues of business, such as the provision of construction services, under a separate entity,” it reads.

The Alberta Association of Architects expects that members choosing to be involved in activities such as development conduct their business through a separately registered legal entity. It also expects members to communicate and market their architecture design services independently from other industry-related activities. For the AAA, the onus lies with members to clearly identify and distinguish in which capacity they are operating if they provide a combination of regulated and unregulated services.

Some of the architects I spoke with for this story set up a separate corporation that owns the property under development, and that hires the architect to work on it. All of them emphasized the importance of fully disclosing their role to all parties involved, and ensuring that their professional responsibilities supersede their financial interests.

The Architectural Institute of British Columbia’s Bylaw 31.5 states that an architect may be a project’s owner, and may also be a project’s contractor. The bylaw adds that in these cases, written disclosures of the architect’s additional roles should be provided to contracting parties, as well as to authorities having jurisdiction over the project’s review and approval process. Written acknowledgments that those disclosures have been received and accepted are also required.

In Ontario and Quebec, if architects own greater than a 10 percent share of a project, they forfeit their professional liability insurance for that project.

Pro-Demnity, the provider of mandatory professional liability insurance for Ontario’s architects, notes that conflicts of interest can provide an enduring risk with regards to future claims, which may come from other parties involved in the project, the users of the building, and people who may be affected by the project, such as adjacent landowners and passers-by.

“Pro-Demnity’s experience arising from claims where an architect attempts to wear two hats at the same time through two separate incorporated entities, is that the architect potentially undermines the strength of their own legal defense as professionals,” comments the insurer. “The prudent way forward is for the architect to make informed decisions about the type of risks they choose to accept, keeping the professional liability insurance limitations in mind, and appreciating that playing only one role or the other is the best way to eliminate the conflict of interest risk altogether.”

In California, where architects can obtain insurance as an owner, architect and builder, architect Jonathan Segal has built a thriving practice around development work. Segal has developed and designed 30 projects over as many years, holding most of the properties as rental apartments which his small firm also manages.

The rentals create the income needed to fund new projects and pay for employees. Since the apartments depreciate over time, they also present a tax advantage that can be used to offset gains from annual rental income.

Segal, who offers an online course in his method, says that being the developer helps him to expedite work by eliminating the disputes and finger-pointing that typically arise between architects, owners and builders in conventional practice. “I’m making the drawings and writing the cheques,” he says. “I want to get financing, get the building done, collect rental income, and then move on to the next project.”

Since he continues to own the properties, this allows him to push the envelope of what he would do for clients. For instance, in one project he put in a glass floor that later leaked—it wasn’t a problem, in his view, as he simply repaired it. “These buildings are all one-offs, so they’re all going to have problems—we can fix that stuff,” says Segal.

He advises architects interested in development to start by building their own house and flipping it, gaining experience in dealing directly with trades, financing, and real estate transactions. This can be repeated to gain capital and momentum, with the goal of moving up to progressively larger projects.

Segal notes that the appreciation of projects over time is where he’s seen the greatest profit in his work. “Always do rentals, never condos,” he says, noting that he has only rarely sold buildings from his portfolio, when he was offered twice what he considered to be their worth.

It’s recommended for architects pursuing development work—along with any work outside the scope of architectural practice—to obtain appropriate legal and insurance advice in their province or territory to suit the contractual relationships involved.

Is it worthwhile to navigate the regulatory issues and financial risks to pursue this kind of practice? We spoke to a half dozen architects who’ve taken the leap, and haven’t looked back.

Shora Parvaresh, Noble Architecture

Vancouver, British Columbia

With their high real estate prices, cities like Vancouver and Toronto are tough places to get started with development projects. But while the financial risks are high, architect Shora Parvaresh felt a strong pull to pursue her own developments as a way of nudging up the city’s standards for housing quality.

“My theory is that quality really matters—and if you’re not in a position to get an architect to design your dream home, there’s not many options that have a lot of sparkle and joy in them,” says Parvaresh. “Is it possible to push the boundaries a little, and make something affordable, high-quality, well-designed, and with an element of delight?”

Three years ago, Parvaresh founded Noble Architecture amid pursuing a Masters degree in management, all while continuing her full-time job. (She says that her current employer, MA+HG, has been supportive of this work, and she sees principals Marianne Amodio and Harley Grusko as her mentors.) Parvaresh recently completed and resold her first project under Noble—a duplex replacing a single-family home.

While most Vancouver duplexes divide houses into square-shaped front and back units, Parvaresh instead wanted to explore a side-by-side typology that would give both homes a front entrance and allow equal use of the backyard. To offset the narrower plans, more akin to Vancouver townhouses, her units include a double-height void that creates a sense of openness throughout the floorplates.

In construction, she prioritized high quality materials, including raw natural wood shingles that will develop a silvery sheen over time, and a metal roof chosen for its longevity and ease of maintenance.

In Vancouver, most spec homes maximize the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, and add so-called luxury finishes like faux-marble tiles. “Those things are not on the top of my list, but high-quality spaces are,” says Parvaresh. “There’s things that sell in the city that become the norm, but they’re not necessarily making our lives better.”

An unexpected challenge that Parvaresh encountered in the development process was securing a commercial mortgage for the project, even though on paper, she met all the requirements. From her Masters’ research, she learned that women typically had more difficulty accessing financing than men—and this resonated with her experience. “It could be that it was my first project, or that I was trying a newish idea,” she says, reflecting that it’s impossible to know why her applications were rejected by several banks. Eventually, she was able to get approved for financing, but it wasn’t easy.

Parvaresh is hoping to ramp up to larger-scale development projects, although she is being careful to find the right investment partner to work with. Her ideal: a partner that shares her philosophy of contributing positively to the city, and producing a bottom line that doesn’t stop at profit alone.

“The reason to do this is not because I am dying to take financial risks or that I am that entrepreneurial by nature,” says Parvaresh. “But because it is the right and necessary thing to encourage market change and better housing outcomes across the city and the country. My dream is to lift up the public expectation of developments.”

“We all know that a duplex in East Vancouver is not going to solve affordability and density issues in this city,” she says. “But it is a very small step towards the right direction. Two families on one lot is a tiny bit closer to a healthier, more appropriate density.”

Gene Dub, Dub Architects

Edmonton, Alberta

When Gene Dub was establishing himself as an architect in the 1970s, he got in the habit of renovating the houses he lived in and reselling them. “My father was handy and my mother was industrious,” he recalls. “The first six houses, they did all the legwork with me.”

He also started fixing up spaces occupied by his office, Dub Architects—it moved four times in its first few years, each time leaving behind a newly renovated building, and accruing a bit more money to fund the next project. The firm continued to take on development projects, owned by sister company Five Oaks. Dub had a development project going at all times, to act as a levelling device for the firm’s workflow.

That’s still the case—Five Oaks projects make up between 10 to 30 percent of Dub Architects’ work in any given year. But over time, those projects have gotten progressively larger in scale. Five Oaks has completed 20 major projects, and its current work is its most ambitious, including a $70-million residential project with 400 terraced units in the historic Rossdale brewery and on an adjacent four-acre parcel, and the redevelopment of the 1968 Charles Camsell Hospital into a mixed-use project with 600 residential units.

Dub’s passion for self-initiated development work stems from both an entrepreneurial drive and a love of history. Fourteen of the projects he’s completed under Five Oaks, representing some $120-million of work, are historic renovations—the kind of project that conventional developers wouldn’t take on because they were too risky. This includes restoring Edmonton’s historic registry A-listed McLeod Building—a Chicago-style neoclassical office building replete with terracotta ornament.

In 1984, the turn-of-the-century Alberta Hotel was demolished to make room for a new federal office building. Thirty years later, Dub recovered its carved sandstone-and-brick façades, cupola, cornice and bar mirrors—and rebuilt the front part of the building, with a contemporary rear, 50 feet away from its original site. “The façade and hotel bar now exist as they did when Prime Minister Laurier came to declare Alberta a province, and apparently stayed at the hotel,” says Dub.

In holding with an ethos that repurposing older structures is much more sustainable than demolishing then, Dub has also renovated several modern-era buildings, including converting Saskatoon’s 1960 Hudson’s Bay department store into condos.

The success of Five Oaks has come from seeing long-term value in heritage buildings—and, more generally, in Edmonton’s real estate. This has put Dub in a position where he can give back to his community in significant ways. In 2018, he donated a $3-million, newly renovated apartment building to a group providing housing to homeless, pregnant women in Edmonton. The City Market Lofts reuses a market building from the 1960s, creating affordable housing for artists, and providing high-quality spaces that elevate the transitional neighbourhood, rather than contributing to its stigma. A new 10-storey office building, where Dub Architects currently resides atop a fashion-and-beauty college, sports one of the country’s largest vertical solar arrays.

Dub is philosophical about rolling with the gains and losses that come with this type of work. Early on, he converted a fire station from the 1950s as a new office for Dub Architects. Just as they finished it, someone offered him much more money to use the site for a new-build. “So we sold it, and they tore it down.” He expects his current conversion of the 23,225-square-metre Charles Camsell Hospital to lose money—it has been a complicated project, with a significant amount of asbestos abatement. But many interesting stories have emerged in the decade since the project began: it’s come to light that an earlier hospital on the same site was where Indigenous people were treated for tuberculosis in the 1950s, and often separated from their families in the process. “It’s been a financial disaster,” says Dub, “but it’s a significant Canadian history story, for good or bad. Movies have been made about this place—it’s a really interesting building.”

Tom Knezic, Solares Architecture

Toronto, Ontario

Sustainability is at the top of the agenda for Solares Architecture, a Toronto firm co-founded by architects Tom Knezic and Christine Lolley. It’s also the driving force behind a series of development projects they’ve undertaken in the west end of Toronto.

A soft start to this aspect of their practice was setting up their office on the ground floor of a Dufferin Street fixer-upper, with their own apartment above it and a rental unit below. Later, they gut-renovated a house in Roncesvalles for their growing family, making it a showpiece for the space-efficient, environmentally conscious design that they bring to their clients, and including a rental unit in the basement.

Eco Flats #1—their first project developed fully as an investment property—was an effort to bring the same principles of considerate design and energy efficiency to the Toronto rental housing market. After leveraging their existing properties to purchase a local single-family row house, they gut-renovated the dwelling, converting it into three passive-house inspired apartments. The work included underpinning the basement, giving it a separate entrance and full-sized windows to make it more airy and light than typical basement units.

A three-unit renovation dubbed Eco Flats #2, completed last year, built on the lessons learned from the first. “The impulse of architects is to always take things to the next level of difficulty, but here, we had the discipline to do almost exactly the same project as before—but to do it better,” says Knezic.

A big part of both projects was cutting the gas line—since natural gas is a potent contributor to carbon emissions—and going all-electric. Because the dwellings achieve a passive-house level of airtightness, they use very little energy. In Eco Flats #1, the first electricity bills came in at $30 per person. Eco Flats #2 takes 88% less energy to heat and cool than pre-renovation, and achieves a 96% reduction in carbon emissions.

The projects also allowed Solares to test-drive advanced building technologies, such as grey-water reuse systems, air source heat pumps, and electric heat pump hot water tanks. In the second project, Knezic specified Quebec-made Minotair compact air treatment units for each apartment—ERVs that also heat and cool the air, and are small enough to fit inside tenant closets overtop the laundry machines. In all, “these mechanical units weren’t much more expensive than conventional systems,” says Knezic. Moreover, he adds, they freed up the space normally occupied by a basement mechanical room. “That gave us an extra bedroom—so the decision paid for itself almost immediately.”

To reduce the use of high-carbon plastics and foams, Knezic experimented with using parging and plaster on the interior walls of Eco Flats #2 as a partial substitute for standard air barriers. To achieve a tight envelope without an extra layer of spray foam, he specified Aerobarrier—a substance similar to Elmer’s glue, that’s pumped as an aerosol into a pressurized home to fill cracks in the envelope.

For Eco Flats #2, Knezic optimized the sequencing of the trades to complete the project in under a year—a feat for a gut-renovation—minimizing the amount of time that the building was unoccupied by renters. “It shows that it’s not a choice between environment, speed, and cost,” says Knezic. “This was done in 10 months, and it makes money month over month.”

“There’s a mission to all of this,” he adds. “It’s a way to show people that we’re not kidding about this work. When we design houses for clients, we’re always saying that we should go a little further—we should go all-electric, we should insulate more. I can really advocate for these things because I’ve done it for myself.”

Bill Curran, Thier + Curran Architects

Hamilton, Ontario

Purchasing and designing one’s own office space is one starting point for architects to act as developers. That was the case for Bill Curran, whose firm occupies the top floor of a converted 19th-century furniture store in downtown Hamilton. Curran purchased the brick-and-timber loft building with two non-architect friends a decade ago. In addition to Thier + Curran’s offices, it now includes a half-dozen commercial and office spaces, with tenants such as the CBC, a café, and a beauty salon and supply store.

Curran has since developed two additional Hamilton properties: a Prohibition-era liquor warehouse that he adaptively reused as three loft-style townhouses, and a pair of joined main-street buildings in Hamilton’s Barton Village, with commercial units at street level and residences above.

Curran developed the townhouses on his own, while the Barton Village project, like his office building, was completed with others. The decision to find investment partners depends on the project, says Curran. “A bigger project demands more money, especially if it’s an older building in a sketchy neighbourhood,” he says, noting that banks will not finance vacant land, and don’t like empty or derelict buildings as investment properties. A loan is only available for the value of what’s already built on the site. “I’m looking for a gem in the rough—where you can see that the bones are fantastic, but to the untrained eye, it looks very, very unappealing. And the untrained eye includes the appraiser from the bank. So you have to work with them, to convince and educate them.”

By working with buildings on the fringes, Curran’s work contributes to Hamilton’s revitalization. “Our office was one of the first buildings to be redeveloped as part of the renaissance on James Street North. Now our Barton Village building is also becoming a beacon in its community,” he says.

Curran has a vested interest in seeing his projects thrive, but as a proud Hamiltonian, he also carries a personal passion for each of them. The Barton building, for instance, once housed Gallery 435, known for its 35 years of Friday night art and music jam sessions—an event Curran loved. “We bought the Barton building selfishly,” he says, “to keep the Friday boozecan Openings going.”

“It’s gratifying to buy and improve real estate and for it to be catalytic,” says Curran. “As an architect, you have the ability to make that happen.”

Financially, several of Curran’s developments depend on the gap between commercial and residential real estate prices in Hamilton. “Derelict commercial buildings are cheaper than houses, and I like their inherent character and how they’re put together,” says Curran. With housing prices on the rise, his properties have gained substantially in worth when upgraded into residences.

Curran estimates that the buildings he’s been part of have more than doubled in value from what he and his partners put into them. “This is my retirement fund,” says Curran. “I’m far more comfortable investing in real estate than in stocks or derivatives.”

Jack Kobayashi, Kobayashi + Zedda

Whitehorse, Yukon

When Jack Kobayashi and Antonio Zedda set up their architecture firm in Whitehorse, most of their work was outside of the city. “Downtown Whitehorse was the domain of small-time developers doing mediocre buildings,” says Kobayashi. Many of these didn’t even involve an architect—a possibility since Yukon doesn’t have an Architects’ Act. “Anyone can do their own building—and they were.”

Like a musician who isn’t landing a record deal and decides to start an indie label, Kobayashi and Zedda decided to do downtown buildings on their own. Their first project, completed in 2001, was a multi-use condominium, with four residential units and a ground-floor dental office. They funded the project with help from family and resold it when completed. “It didn’t make us rich, but we liked doing it,” says Kobayashi.

Since then, they’ve completed a half-dozen more multi-use residential projects on their own, keeping a unit as their earnings each time. The most recent is an affordable rental apartment building that they will hold rather than sell off. “It’s a bit more challenging, as there’s no capital injection to pay down the whole building—we’ve got to carry the asset and live off the rental income,” says Kobayashi. “We’re at a certain level where we can do that—we could never have afforded to at the beginning.”

The projects are built by a sister company led by Kobayashi and Zedda, called 360 Design Build. “We run it off the side of our desk,” says Kobayashi, who says he spends 95 percent of his time on the main architecture practice, and the remainder running the design-build company. 360 has three full-time staff and also takes on some private projects—usually single-family houses designed by Kobayashi and Zedda. (To avoid stepping on the toes of local contractors, 360 doesn’t bid on any projects, either public or private.) “Building ourselves keeps us current,” says Kobayashi. “You’re seeing more of the spectrum of construction, and that informs your professional life.”

In addition to their new-build development projects, Kobayashi and Zedda also own Horwood’s Mall, where they’ve had their offices since 1995. The 4,100-square-metre building has sections that go back to the early 1900s, which is ancient by Yukon standards—“like Roman times,” says Kobayashi. Since purchasing the property eight years ago, they’ve been gradually restoring its heritage features and bringing up the design standard of its spaces, which house 40 tenants. Their vision is for Horwood’s Mall to become the town’s social and community hub, and they’re gratified to see it starting to attract local artists, start-ups, and other creative endeavours.

Kobayashi’s advice to architects thinking of taking on their own development projects? “Start with something small and keep building on that.” He adds, “As architects, we’re the perfect people to do this. We have the skill set, and then we hire ourselves out to other people who then have full control of the project.” Fundamentally, the only thing that separates developers from architects, he says, is their ability to take on risk. “The only thing holding us back is the risk factor. Find the confidence somewhere to do it; the door’s wide open after that.”

Aurèle Cardinal, Stéphanie Cardinal, and Ludovic Cardinal, Humà Design +Architecture

Montreal, Quebec

“When I was much younger,” says architect and planner Aurèle Cardinal, co-founder of Cardinal Hardy, “the developers didn’t want to build what we were drawing, because they thought we were dreaming too much.” So, he reasoned, “we’ll build the dreams, and then we’ll have more clients who believe in us.”

That impulse led Aurèle to lead a string of development projects in the Montreal region, first on his own, and more recently with his children—architect Stéphanie Cardinal and former banker Ludovic Cardinal. In all, they’ve built and sold some 1,350 units of housing, working on all aspects of the projects from purchasing the land, to finding outside investors, to managing construction and sales.

Aurèle’s first development projects in the 1980s were small-scale condominium buildings—a type uncommon at the time in Montreal, when most developers were focused on building three-storey walk-up rental apartments. The family has continued to innovate in bringing new typologies to the city. They’re currently completing the fourth phase of Espace MV, a multi-block development in Dorval that includes single-family homes, townhouses, and condo-and-loft buildings up to seven stories in height—all of which share co-owned amenity spaces.

Stéphanie and Ludovic hadn’t originally set out to join their father in development. Stéphanie trained as an architect and specialized in interiors, starting her own firm, Humà, in 2006. For university, Ludovic was accepted into architecture and commerce programs, and was encouraged by Aurèle to choose finance. He worked as a commercial banker for 20 years.

In 2010, Cardinal Hardy was sold to IBI Group, which in turn sold its Quebec offices to Lemay in 2015. Aurèle then joined Humà to expand its architectural offerings and ability to support real estate development work. (A sister company owned by the Cardinal family, Gestion PCA, is also involved with the family’s development portfolio.) Five years ago, Ludovic also joined Humà, bringing financial expertise that allowed for more substantial involvement with larger development projects.

The trio estimates that their own development projects constitute about a fifth of Humà’s work. The majority of Humà’s work is for outside clients, primarily real estate developers, for whom it acts as a one-stop shop. Its diversified in-house expertise allows Humà to take on the marketing, branding, interior design, architecture, and construction supervision of developments, as well as financial reporting to investors. “All of these people are under the same roof,” says Ludovic, “it’s a super nice unity when everyone is rolling in the same direction—it’s very satisfying.”

Being involved in all aspects of a project—both in their own development work and for outside clients—allows the team to bring a greater depth of reflection to their designs, says Stéphanie. This was especially evident in Espace MV, where early on, the team decided to retain and adaptively reuse an existing brick-and-beam factory structure—a choice that informed later design choices throughout the site. “The fact that we could work for 13 years within the same spirit is added value for the project,” she says. Moreover, “it’s also added value for the profession to see a project within this holistic view.”

One measure of success, for Aurèle, is that many of the first residents of Espace MV are still living there. “You have to bring good solutions for people to stay on the land for that long; you have to have satisfied clients,” he says.

Ludovic says that architects’ interest in development is often a case of the grass being greener on the other side. In his analysis, when all is said and done, development is not necessarily more lucrative than architecture—each party contributes its own expertise, and collects a concomitant level of return.

But the opportunity to work together as a family? That’s priceless. “Cross-generational work is not done enough,” says Stéphanie. “To be able to integrate 35 years of our father’s experience into our work—it’s amazing.”

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An open-access syllabus focused on critically examining colonial practices in Canadian architecture has been released by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, along with a supplementary index of short writings. 

Entitled “Toward Unsettling,” the resource was prepared by Alexandra Pereira-Edwards, Misca Birklein-Lagassé, and Zaven Titizian. The three graduate students were part of the 2020 Master’s Students Program at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), the first in a three-year thematic series entitled “In the Postcolony.” The research was guided by Rafico Ruiz, Associate Director of Research at the CCA, and in virtual conversation with Indigenous and non-Indigenous experts and guests.

The open-access syllabus questions settler colonial perspectives and research practices across design disciplines.

The syllabus’s introduction, presented in Inuktitut as well as in English, reads in part: “Colonization is embedded deep within built and educational structures and is continually furthered through the attempted dispossession and erasure of Indigenous lands and Peoples. This syllabus, as an infrastructure of education, can be used as a tool to restructure current processes within the design disciplines to reflect the multiplicity of voices seeking to disrupt colonial action. It is an opportunity to construct new frameworks of collaborative, inclusive design and research with an emphasis on Indigenous Knowledge and resilience.”

The Master’s Students research initially focused on swimming pools in Nunavut.

“Beyond tectonics, there are innumerable cultural and logistical complexities that impact the integration, maintenance, and use of [swimming pool] infrastructures—complexities that must be deeply understood, felt, and honoured if one wishes to draw any sort of conclusion about the infrastructure’s validity or offer emancipatory proposals,” write the researchers. “The swimming pools inherently embody a southern ideal of recreation and leisure, as traditional ways of knowing that have sustained Inuit life since well before colonization are often cast aside in favour of pool-based swimming lessons.”

“By exploring a topic that demands forms of settler accountability, our focus with the project shifted from attempting to make any substantive claims about the social, environmental, or logistical consequences of the pools, to the methods and lenses used to analyze them. We acknowledge that our initial approach and timeline for this project did not allow for prolonged community engagement and we intentionally proposed a new framework to investigate swimming pools in Nunavut.”

The Toward Unsettling syllabus and supplementary index of short writings—both posted on the CCA’s website—are intended to be resources for students, designers, activists, and historians, and to expand through an open call for contributions.

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Blueprint for a Hack

By Vikram Bhatt, David Harlander and Susane Havelka (Actar Publishers, 2020).

Blueprint for a Hack describes a five-day project that took place in 2017 in a village in the Nunavik region of northern Quebec. The Kuujjuaq Hackathon saw Inuit community members work alongside designers from southern Quebec, with the aim of examining and improving public spaces within Kuujjuaq, reducing landfill waste and participating in a cultural exchange. 

The Hackathon resulted in the construction of a community sports pavilion. Created with materials salvaged from the local landfill—a shipping container, scrap lumber, tractor tires and septic tanks—the pavilion, and the processes that shaped it, represent an unassuming yet critical precedent for challenging formalized practices of architecture and design. In recognition of this importance, it was awarded a National Urban Design Award in 2018.

As the book documenting the project explains, Canada’s arctic and sub-arctic communities are often shaped by forces that are ignorant of the cultural, environmental and logistical contexts particular to the north. This lack of awareness is evident in architectural and planning approaches that are typically informed by southern Canadian sensibilities and foisted upon remote communities with little meaningful consultation. This leads to underused projects that feel foreign and disconnected from their physical and social realities. A more effective approach would be informed by local engagement, Indig­enous culture and lived knowledge of the challenges of remoteness and northern climates.

Historically, Inuit have long required resourcefulness. As nomadic peoples, they needed ingenuity to survive in the challenging environments of what would become Canada’s northern regions. This spirit continues to prevail as Inuit grapple with social and economic conditions arising from colonization and increasingly, the challenges of climate change. The resourcefulness at the core of Inuit culture—and the outward expression of this in informal building practices—has generally been overlooked by design practitioners. At the Kuujjuaq Hackathon, in contrast, this ingenuity was both acknowledged and honoured as a valuable source of information and as strategic inspiration.

To “hack” is to modify and to work in new ways, and also to upend and challenge standard material applications and methods of production. The Hackathon aimed, in part, to learn from practices of “hacking” already present in modern Inuit life, and to apply a hacking mindset to improve public spaces in Kuujjuaq to better serve those who live there. This process included strategizing how to transform discarded waste into a useful construction.

Blueprint for a Hack argues that such informal invention and ingenuity may provide new routes forward for the disciplines of architecture and planning, and that these skills have potentially far-reaching implications.

The participatory design approach used in Kuujjuaq highlights a wider discussion that’s needed between architects, designers and planners about how knowledge is gathered and how spaces are designed. A more collaborative approach taps into deeper understandings of place and the history, people and interactions that shape it. The hacking mindset reduces waste and encourages active engagement of team members—both with and without formal design education—acknowledging the wisdom, creativity and resourcefulness of everyday locals.

Drawing inspiration from the ingenuity and resourcefulness of the Inuit serves as a valuable springboard for re-examining and re-imagining different ways of up-cycling materials—and for practicing architecture.

Review by Natalie Badenduck

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TEXT Alexandra Pereira-Edwards, Misca Birklein-Lagassé and Zaven Titizian

When a Google Street View team was invited to Nunavut, Canada, in 2012, their first stop was Iqaluktuuttiaq (ᐃᖃᓗᒃᑑᑦᑎᐊᖅ, Cambridge Bay). While those visiting the remote hamlet surveyed it using a Google Trike, members of the community were trained to use Google’s camera equipment and learned how to add roads to the online map. Capturing these images was an opportunity for Nunavummiut to present their community to the rest of the world.

One of the indoor spaces that got a 360-degree treatment was the Cambridge Bay pool, with its brightly painted plywood walls and laminated signage describing rules for pool use, admissions requirements, and notes on ice safety—reminders aimed at lowering the high drowning rates in the Territory.

While the pool remains virtually open for view, its recreational function in the community halted in July of 2019 when the hamlet closed the facility early in its already short season. The 30-year-old building was deemed structurally unsafe as a result of thawing permafrost, a reminder of the amplified effects of global warming in the community. Its deck was slumping, its metal was corroding, and the supports under its liner were weakening, threatening to suck swimmers under the building should the liner burst. The pool’s closure meant that the largely youthful users who would typically spend days playing and learning how to swim in the shallow, warm indoor waters no longer had the space to do so. And while the option to swim in Nunavut’s frigid natural waters does exist, many communities do not have designated spaces for submersion.

Similar structural problems expose a material fragility that impacts Nunavut’s built environment, leaving in their wake social and financial burdens for Northern communities. But the pools in Nunuvut also point to a deeper line of inquiry, one that questions Southern ideals of leisure and recreation enabled by these facilities. What biases are ascribed when Arctic water safety is taught within the confines of a pool? And where does Inuit knowledge locate itself inside aquatic facilities when it has been consistently resisted by a standardized swimming education? Cambridge Bay’s defunct pool, and others like it, serve as potent if contentious spaces to discuss layered histories, including ongoing settler colonial practices that continue to shape the Canadian Arctic.      

By looking below the surface of the pool as a typology, discussions come into focus that unsettle the deep-rooted complicity of built form within Canada’s settler colonial narrative—and ultimately ask for retrospection and revision in how architectural research, scholarship, and practices are pursued.

Alexandra Pereira-Edwards, Misca Birklein-Lagassé, and Zaven Titizian were part of the 2020 Master’s Students Program at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), the first in a three-year thematic series entitled “In the Postcolony.” The research was guided by Rafico Ruiz, Associate Director of Research at the CCA, and in virtual conversation with Indigenous and non-Indigenous experts and guests. Their research developed into an open-access syllabus that questions settler colonial perspectives and research practices across design disciplines. The syllabus will be launched on the CCA’s website on November 23. 

The research was pursued under the guidance of Rafico Ruiz, Associate Director of Research at the CCA, and in virtual conversation with invited guests. The authors would like to extend their thanks to Nicole Luke, Lola Sheppard, Mason White, Darin Barney, Audrey Giles, Ana María León, Paul Renzoni, Lisa Landrum, Geronimo Inutiq, Jocelyn Piirainen, Taqralik Partridge, and the CCA staff.

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