McGill University is presenting the exhibition Minimum Cost Housing Group: Design for the Global Majority in the lobby of the McLennan Library Building. This exhibition, running from April 12 to June 9, 2023, traces how student thesis work, research papers, technical papers, reports and other types of formal and informational publications were essential outlets for the transmission of the group’s innovative research. It is curated by Vikram Bhatt, Ipek Türeli, and Arièle Dionne-Krosnick, with research by Arièle Dionne-Krosnick and Beatriz da Silva Takahashi.
Fifty years of housing research
The Minimum Cost Housing Group (MCHG) was founded in 1971 as a postgraduate program at McGill University’s School of Architecture by Columbian architect and alumnus Alvaro Ortega, and with the financial support of the CMHC, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. Ortega developed his expertise in housing via his design practice. He also worked on United Nations missions, advancing economical housing solutions for under-resourced people around the globe. Architects and students who joined the program were concerned with global access to adequate housing and ecology issues.
Looking backward to look forward
This exhibition traces how student thesis work, research papers, technical papers, reports and other types of formal and informational publications were essential outlets for the transmission of the group’s innovative research. This research was wide-ranging, from mitigating the environmental impacts of building materials, and reducing environmental costs of buildings in use, to exploring culturally appropriate, context- specific design norms. These displays also emphasize how, from the 1970s to the 2010s, the MCHG’s changing objectives and research priorities are reflected in the evolving aesthetics of the publications: inspired alternatively by countercultural environmentalism, DIY, photocollages, aerial perspectives, and computational imagery. Photographs, architectural drawings, step-by-step instructions, visual aids, cartoons, and collages are interspersed throughout, offering a visually approachable lens through which to learn about the innovative technological and architectural research of the MCHG.
These collected materials represent archival holdings from the McGill Library’s John Bland Canadian Architecture Collection, including the Alvaro Ortega Fonds, Witold Rybczynski Fonds, and the personal collection of Vikram Bhatt. A more extensive and detailed exhibition will follow in Fall 2023 at the Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture.
For more information, visit https://www.mcgill.ca/architecture/channels/event/minimum-cost-housing-group-design-global-majority-347863