Platform.Middle—Architecture for Housing the 99%

By 5468796 Architecture (Arquine, 2024)

Winnipeg architecture firm 5468796 is known for working outside of the norm—the puzzle-box Bloc 10, the flying-saucer-like 62M—and their first publication is no exception. Rather than a traditional monograph, platform.MIDDLE is a box set of four volumes. Together, the publication’s components distill lessons learned from 5468796’s portfolio of missing middle housing projects, offering context and practical tools for architects to address housing affordability.

The first of the four books, titled platform.MIDDLE, reports from a symposium of the same name held at IIT’s College of Architecture in 2019. The symposium explored the current state of multi-family housing in North America, and architects’ role in shaping its future. The paper version is structured around illustrated summaries of the presentations by architects, developers, and educators who participated in the symposium. Especially engaging are the interludes between these summaries, where the transcripts from panel discussions are excerpted. These discussions point to the complexities of the housing challenge, and the imperatives to shift policy, harness data, and reform regulations, among other drivers for change.

Personal stories are interwoven through the conversations. Montreal architect Rami Bebawi, for instance, recalls meeting 5468796 principals Johanna Hurme and Sasa Radulovic soon after founding KANVA with Tudor Radulescu. “We met them the first time we had ever won a medal. Out of the blue, they shared everything they knew. That stuck with us.”

That spirit of sharing is at the core of the next two volumes. The slender platform.MACRO is a primer to the many policy and financial tools that affect the affordability of housing: from zoning strategies and government investment, to alternative ownership models and hybrid housing policies. While beyond the scope of the architect, these systemic issues profoundly shape the profession’s work.

Aspiring and practicing architects, as well as others engaged in producing housing, will find the third and fourth volumes, platform.MICRO and projects.MODELLING to be the most directly relevant. In the former, 5468796 offers a toolkit of design strategies for architects producing housing: from introducing interstitial courtyards and plazas that make the most of communal outdoor space, to creating adjoining suites to skirt zoning by-laws that mandate maximum unit counts. These strategies are illustrated with their own work, which is presented in greater detail in the last volume.

Driven by a sense of purpose, this publication is not so much a manifesto or pure celebration of 5468796’s work, as it is a guidebook that aims to open-source knowledge gleaned from that work for a greater cause. “It is our hope that the following micro strategies and solutions will allow others to leapfrog the lessons we have spent uncovering since 2007,” writes Hurme in the introduction to platform.MICRO. “This head start will hopefully allow more of us to take on the housing and environmental crises on a larger scale through the mid-scale multi-family building typology, and give architects some practical, straightforward options to increase livability and quality of the spaces they design, while still meeting the financial goals of their clients.” 

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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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PROJECT Pumphouse, Winnipeg, Manitoba

ARCHITECT 5468796 Architecture

TEXT Trevor Boddy

PHOTOS James Brittain

Medium density housing remains one of the most conservative realms of architectural design. Looking beyond surface effects, its fundamental forms are generated by an almost biological mode of evolution: changes in housing types and layouts come slowly, by minor increments, with new species of layouts dying off if they do not fulfill the needs of changing markets and varying profitability markers. As in nature, true innovation in housing is usually the response to a stressor, with artistic creativity being its means, not its end. 

Historically, key housing forms in Canada were produced from such navigation of constraints and seizing of entrepreneurial opportunities. Hard rock foundations and the free availability of sawdust for furnaces led to Vancouver’s characteristic wood frame houses, in which the main level is raised up twelve steps—the most on the continent—to make room for bulky sawdust burners in the basement. (Those burners were removed between the wars and the lower levels turned into suites, meaning my home city’s houses were almost never single-family.) Toronto’s and Ottawa’s landscape-defining high-rise slab towers were the product of cheap concrete construction in cities without mid-block lanes, combined with the availability of new large-scale bank financing to developers. 

Then there is Winnipeg. Not discounting innovations from the late David Penner, Stephen Cohlmeyer, and others, the current leading edge of Winnipeg housing is the output of a single firm, 5468796. The book just released by partners Johanna Hurme, Sasa Radulovic, and Colin Neufeld entitled platform.MIDDLE—a weighty collection of their housing ideas alongside built demonstrations—firmly secures 5468796 as one of the most important housing design firms on the continent. The trademark axonometric analytic diagrams collected there show how it is done, and any architect wanting to innovate in housing form and detail should study them.

This background is useful for understanding 5468796’s many accomplishments at Pumphouse (CA Award of Merit, December 2018), the most complex synthesis of their housing ideas to date. Pumphouse can be understood as a palimpsest of the entire run of housing innovations by 5468796 in their eighteen years of practice, a careful layering and modulation of their own previous design ideas. 

As with other truly innovative designs shaped by housing’s evolutionary forces, Pumphouse emerged from a complex set of constraints: it sits on a site dominated by a large, low-slung heritage building occupied by bulky equipment that could not be removed because of a 1982 designation. There is little room for development along the edges of the site to offset the cost of restoring and opening access to the heritage building. While the property was listed for $1 by the city for several decades, and many have hoped to see the heritage structure reopened as a museum, dozens of previous proposals for redevelopment couldn’t pencil out. 

The 1906 James Street Pumping Station itself was produced in response to one of the greatest urban stresses of those times—fire control in the face of conflagrations in Chicago, Vancouver and elsewhere that destroyed huge swaths of cities. Water was taken from the Red River and pressurized within the building’s Brontosaurus-scaled pumps, manufactured by the same Manchester company that built engines for the Titanic, to be distributed to fire mains throughout the adjacent Exchange and Warehouse districts. The Pumping Station’s equipment was built to last, and it served its original purpose until changes in firefighting precipitated its closure in 1986.

The desire to redevelop the property emerged in the following decades. A riverside rail spur line had long defined the eastern edge of downtown Winnipeg, blocking public access to the waterfront. In 1987, the city acquired the line and, at the turn of the millennium, replaced it with a road. New waterfront possibilities emerged, with a civic non-profit—CentreVenture—formed at the same time to encourage the area’s redevelopment.
In 2008, some of the earliest new housing in the area included 5468796’s youCUBE (2012) fairly conventional housing development at the north end of Waterfront Drive, and the Mere Hotel (2013) by David Penner and others, which transformed the Pumping Station’s waterside intake pavilion into a restaurant, and added a colourful block of boutique hotel rooms. 

Johanna Hurme says the eventual development of the Pumping Station itself is the perfect illustration of 5468796’s long-standing and practice-defining dedication to what she calls “creative opportunism.” Starting in 2015, the firm started producing a string of increasingly sophisticated schemes for the pumphouse parcel, but with no commission and no payment for them. Co-founder Sasa Radulovic notes the hugely increased value of this site—courtesy of their imagination and hard work. Once thought useless, this heritage-listed building on a marginal site went from a nominal price of one dollar back then to a final value of one million dollars upon completion in 2023. “A one-million-times land lift is rare anywhere!” he jokes. 

There is a lesson here to all young Canadian firms waiting by the phone for that call from Developer Mr. Right, or endlessly polishing their tiny portfolio on Photoshop for hoped-for webzines. A national reality and realty check, please: practicing architecture means far more of entrepreneurial improvisation than willful art or science. Winnipeg is one of the coldest architectural laboratories in the world and a comparatively underfunded one, and the difficult discipline of working there has honed 5468796’s brilliance. Please follow their lead, dear archi-brethren, and hustle with creativity and disciplined imagination around site and budget challenges, as they do. 

A breakthrough was achieved when 5468796’s team (at that time including designer Kenneth Borton) realized that an office floor could be hung from an intact gantry crane, locating a new level above and to one side of the machine room. This created a visually stunning working perch that could be leased to a commercial tenant, tipping the building’s pro forma into viability. This early thinking impressed the young and formerly Victoria-based heritage developer Bryce Alston, who then received CentreVenture’s approval to take on the unusual project. 

A new future for the heritage space being set, the architects went on to identify two zones for housing at either end of the pumphouse. The one at the west accommodates 70 units in a pair of wood and steel frame buildings set on concrete plinths, and a smaller single block at the river-facing eastern edge holds 28 more—this address now generates the highest rental rates in all of Winnipeg. Construction details are similar for all three blocks, and were kept simple: the only way Pumphouse would meet its financial targets was by using standard materials and workmanship. (The developer’s instructions, Radulovic recalls, were to make a design “that could be built by guys hired off Kijiji.”) Fire codes and access routes necessitated bridges to tie together the bifurcated project.

5468796’s existing portfolio equipped them well for dealing with the many additional challenges that arose from the dumbbell plan loading housing at either end, plus the complex layering of civic requirements for the space in-between. The east and west housing pavilions at the Pumphouse need to be understood as meta-projects, folding together ideas from 5468796’s eighteen years of practice, so a brief survey of those now. For instance, the city required views to be retained between the riverfront park walkway and a portion of the yellow-brick heritage structure. This led to a cutting back of ground-plane occupied space at the property’s southeast corner. Most of the rest of this main floor is now occupied by the Miesian temple of an entirely glass-wrapped hair salon overlooking the Red River—surely the nicest locale I have ever seen to get one’s curls chopped. On the west side of the Pumping Station, an access lane was required to be retained, resulting in a flanking cube of leftover space too far from windows for use as part of the west block housing. The solution? Adding tiered seats to this zone allows it to host resident gatherings, and serve as a covered amphitheatre during Winnipeg’s Fringe Theatre Festival. The playful inter-penetration of public and private space is a signature 5468796 theme, found in many of their designs. 

The details and disposition of the rental housing units even more clearly show how 5468796 draws, with sagacity, from its own prior design ideas. The smallest of Pumphouse’s rental units feature Murphy beds and walk-through, glass-walled and double-doored bathrooms, to save space and borrow light, a trick refined in prior projects. On a larger scale, 5469796’s 2010 Bloc 10 project on Grant Avenue demonstrated how corridors can be eliminated for three-storey, stick-built walk-up apartment buildings. As both an ex-Edmontonian and ex-Winnipegger, I can attest that apartment corridors in these two cities smell permanently of boiled cabbage. There are no boiled cabbage smells at Pumphouse, as corridors are almost entirely outdoor and ventilated by soft Prairie breezes off the Red River. In the west wing, a parliament of eight doors (half of which access stairs to units above—a skip-stop arrangement seen in several previous 5468796 projects) form a raised open-air small piazza with compelling views south to the brickish pleasures of Exchange District architecture. 

Noting that residents are not yet personalizing their entrances during our site tour, Radulovic pledged to buy each renter a pot for succulents and other hardy plants this spring. (Acts like this—to assist residents in realizing their fully inhabited potential of designs—ought to be the last phase of any housing commission, but sadly remain rare and “out of scope.”) It’s an idea that can be scaled up: open-air apartment lobbies with plantings—marketed as “sky gardens”—are similarly a feature on all 57 residential floors between the towers of Vancouver’s Butterfly, a project initiated by Bing Thom, and soon to be completed by Revery’s Venelin Kokalov. In the conservative realm of housing design, interrogating a feature as seemingly banal as corridors can be a breakthrough to innovation.

Hurme and Radulovic learned from the curving corridors of nearby 62M that vistas to neighbour’s doors help build both safety and community. Accordingly, one now cannot pass from the street, up Pumphouse’s dramatic exterior access stairs cantilevered out over public sidewalks, and then on to approach one’s own door without seeing many others, and at intriguingly different angles. Drawing again from Bloc 10, Pumphouse’s sections pack a surprising variety of unit types within the black box of its corrugated galvanized metal elevations. The Roman historian Suetonius quoted Emperor Augustus as saying, “I found Rome a city of bricks, and left it a city of marble,” and Arthur Erickson declared concrete “the marble of the twentieth century”; furthering the same line, corrugated metal has become cost-conscious Winnipeg’s signature cladding for the 21st century.

But this corrugated metal is black, entirely black, set in black frames, punctuated by black mullions, and so on; the building is a raven set amongst the sparrows and starlings of Waterfront Drive housing designed by other firms. The only time there is coloured relief from black metal, silver metal and grey concrete comes solely at night, and only when viewing the west elevation, where the gang-nailed soffits of panelized wood mill flooring can be seen through the large windows—a riot of colour by 5468796’s recent standards. Relax, my friends: a bit more generosity with smart hits of colour would humanize designs that are not nearly as aggressive in occupation as their blackness first indicates.

Where the designers have certainly got things right is in avoiding over-restoration of the yellow brick and steel trusses of the old Pumping Station. “We did not have budget to clean and repoint all the brick or repaint the metal, and they did not really need it,” says Radulovic. A patina of history remains on the Pumping Station, with its stains and cracks clear evidence of authenticity. Canada’s zealous over-restorers in the Federal Government and National Capital Commission need to go back and read William Morris’s 19th-century screeds against “scraping” the age and character off their restored buildings. 

With their new book and breakthroughs into more ambitious large works such as the Pumphouse and Calgary’s Platform 9th Avenue Garage, 5468796 has evolved to the point where their repertoire of housing forms and details have emerged as the true genetic structure of the firm’s brand—so now, the camouflage of black can drop away. The gifts to all Winnipeggers from these architectural leaders in their renewed Pumphouse complex are many, but are crowned by gracious good humour, and an aggressive comfort with local realities. Oh, that all cities could be so lucky!

Trevor Boddy, FRAIC wrote the introduction to 5468796’s platform.MIDDLE book and participated in the original 2019 IIT housing symposium of that name that started the publication rolling. Boddy will co-lead tours of downtown housing and Erickson’s Smith House II at the RAIC national convention in Vancouver, May 12-15, 2024, where there will also be a platform.MIDDLE book launch and talks with Hurme and Radulovic.

CLIENT Alston Properties | STRUCTURAL Lavergne Draward & Associates | MECHANICAL/ELECTRICAL/CIVIL MCW Consultants Ltd. | LANDSCAPE Scatliff + Miller + Murray | Interiors 5468796 Architecture | CONTRACTOR Brenton Construction | SURVEYOR Barnes & Duncan | CODE GHL Consultants | ENERGY Crosier Kilgour | AREA Heritage rehabilitation (office & hospitality): 1,670 m2; Multi-family residential: 7,110 m2 (incl. underground parking) | BUDGET $22 M | COMPLETION January 2024

ENERGY USE INTENSITY 138 KW/m2/year (PROJECTED) | THERMAL ENERGY USE INTENSITY 80 KW/m2/year (PROJECTED)

The post Pumphouse Palimpsest: Pumphouse, Winnipeg, Manitoba appeared first on Canadian Architect.

PROJECT Laurent & Clark

ARCHITECT MSDL Architectes

TEXT Claire Lubell

PHOTOS Adrien Williams

The recently completed Laurent & Clark condominium building in Montreal’s Quartier des spectacles is perhaps the most ambitious—and certainly the most high-profile—of a string of collaborations led by Jean-Pierre LeTourneux, principal of MSDL Architectes, and Denis Robitaille, founder of developers Rachel Julien. According to LeTourneux, who has worked on projects with Robitaille since the 1990s, it takes an “audacious” developer to make good architecture—one who cares about details like, as LeTourneux points out to me, air exhaust vents seamlessly incorporated into a façade. The project as a whole has impressive presence: its first phase tower includes an array of colourfully partitioned balconies facing an urban park, while its second phase centres on a slim black tower.

But more than its striking façades, what distinguishes Laurent & Clark is how its massing intricately responds to the constraints of a complex site. The project occupies two-thirds of a very particular block, transformed several times since the 1960s through major projects that changed the urban structure of the city. If we look back to the early 2000s, the site was vacant and bisected by an arc of Boulevard de Maisonneuve, one of the main car-dominated arteries that traverses Montreal’s downtown, effectively making the area unbuildable. This was not the original urban grid, but rather an alteration born from the construction of the metro in the 1960s: below ground, a tunnel follows the same arc as the street. 

But after 2008, the grid was returned to its pre-1960s Cartesian organization, when the City of Montreal began to remake the area into the Quartier des spectacles. Boulevard de Maisonneuve was severed, liberating an open area opposite the site to become the Parterre—one of the main public parks that host concerts and performances during Montreal’s summer festivals—but also leaving two awkwardly shaped residual parcels at the corner of the re-directed Boulevard de Maisonneuve, which were too small to be developed. 

This remained the case until 2016, when Rachel Julien purchased both parcels from the city, and the larger adjacent parcel from the developer of Loft des Arts, the 1914 brick building (converted into condos in 2010) that occupies the other end of the narrow block. Together, the three parcels have now become one of the most visible developments in the city. 

The project’s fragmented massing is both pragmatic and contextual. On one hand, as LeTourneux explains, the project’s 356-unit count made it too large for the developer to easily build in a single phase. But more importantly, MSDL wanted to avoid an imposing and massive structure that would create deep, dark units. Moreover, they felt that it was important to acknowledge the mix of building scales and eras around the site. 

In fact, the surrounding city blocks epitomize the patchwork of much of Montreal’s present-day urban realm. While Boulevard Saint Laurent remains one of the city’s key commercial arteries and is historically important to many communities, the blocks on either side of Laurent & Clark are suffering from a noticeable decline. Just across the street are a series of small-scale shopfronts in historic brick and greystone buildings, some apparently vacant, and many in evident need of restoration. The telltale signs of gentrification are also visible along the block: a trendy bar, café, and restaurant have moved in beside a vacated tire and mechanic’s shop, whose prime corner lot now awaits redevelopment. The opposite corner was home to the legendary punk-rock venue Katacombes until 2019, and will soon be occupied by high-rise student accommodations, a project by social economy organization UTILE.

It is relevant to note that Laurent & Clark was initiated before city regulations mandating affordable units were in place, so the project primarily offers relatively small studios and one- or two-bedroom units, rapidly snatched up at market rates that were no doubt unattainable for many. So yes, the project inevitably marks a sharp divide between an existing context in transition and the sparkling newness of the Quartier des spectacles. But, to their credit, MSDL’s solution quite deftly mediates between the nine-times density allowed by the city and the competing priorities on either side of the block. Along the relatively narrow Boulevard Saint Laurent, a three-storey base avoids creating an overpowering and claustrophobic tunnel, and maintains the views from windows on the south face of the Lofts des Arts. In contrast, along the more open Boulevard de Maisonneuve and Rue Clark, the project presents two towers, one light and playful, the other dark and minimalist. Both towers have surprisingly slim profiles and are connected by footbridges made with discrete metal grate decks and glass railings.  

Aesthetics aside, achieving the effect of a reduced scale by breaking the project up into two smaller, thinner volumes was not a straightforward design solution. For LeTourneux, the first and most challenging condition to negotiate was the metro, because it forced a setback of the building’s vertical structure from Boulevard de Maisonneuve to avoid the tunnel below. To make up for the lost floor area, the dark-tinted glass tower has extended slabs that cantilever above, which in turn results in a somewhat awkward density of columns within the units on the southern end. On the positive side, the setback benefits the public realm by opening up a welcoming passage from Saint Laurent metro to the Parterre, and creates space for a corner café patio that is sure to become a popular spot. 

To complicate things further, the only pre-existing structure on the site—a small building housing electric equipment for the metro—had to be maintained. While it is discretely integrated into the facade, its presence interrupts what could have otherwise been a continuous ground-level of inviting commercial and social spaces spilling onto the Parterre. 

Another challenge was how to create passthrough units in the lighter building facing the Parterre, so that residents could enjoy concerts from their front balconies, but have a quiet area to retreat to. First, MSDL designed units with a floorplate that is only fourteen metres deep—much less than the standard eighteen metres. This allows for natural light to penetrate most of the space, notes LeTourneux. But the more important innovation is how MSDL did away with a central corridor, in favour of four single elevators for access, and an exterior passageway and stair for egress. Each elevator rises directly from the underground parking and, once past the fifth floor, gives direct access to either one or two units. While passthrough units and exterior egress stairs are quintessential to Montreal’s urban fabric—visible walking down hundreds of streets of duplexes and multiplexes on the island—the way this principle is applied to a 65-metre-high, 21-storey tower is uncommon and very well-resolved. In the two-sided units at Laurent & Clark, bedrooms give access to narrow exterior passageways, which lead to either the sculptural-but-utilitarian exterior egress stair, or, via a vertigo-inducing footbridge, to the core of the phase two tower. The ingenious solution allows the two separate towers to share egress stairs. (A temporary stair was in place while phase two was under construction.) 

The exterior passageways overlook the building’s central courtyard. LeTourneux says that this space, although accessible, serves primarily as a light well, akin to that of historic apartment buildings in Paris. This is not his only French reference. Le Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation is mentioned as an inspiration for the passthrough unit design. Yet, in a sense, it is the dual-access elevators that serve the role of Corb’s alternating corridors. Laurent & Clark’s exterior passageways, connecting footbridges, and visible egress stair could perhaps be more closely connected to the brutalist housing classics of 1960s and 1970s England—consider Ernö Goldfinger’s Balfron Tower, or Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith’s Park Hill estate. But while those projects had front doors opening onto public pedestrian decks intended to function as “streets in the sky,” Laurent & Clark’s residents are not in the habit of using the passageways for circulation, out of respect for the privacy of their neighbours. Rather, they can make use of them in the summer, to enjoy the morning sunlight and the impressive views across eastern Montreal. 

Laurent & Clark responds to the demands of its complex site with an innovative and refined form. It draws on the past half-century
of change in its urban context to set a hopeful example for inventive, human-centered residential tower design for the half-century to come.

Claire Lubell is a designer and editor with an international background in architecture and urban design, and has guided print, digital, and open-access publications of several major research projects. She was a long-time editor at the Canadian Centre for Architecture and now works in heritage and territorial research at the Montreal cooperative L’Enclume.

CLIENT Rachel Julien | ARCHITECT TEAM Jean-Pierre LeTourneux (FRAIC), Anne Lafontaine, Gaetan Roy, Marie-Eve Ethier Chiasson, Vincent Lauzon, Yien Chao, Sami Jebali, Pierre Gervais, Guy Rousseau, Mahindar Youssef, Martin Radisson, Nicolas Maalouf, Gaétan Roy, Nils Rabota, Marie-Eve Ethier Chiasson, Mehand Aziz, Jean-François Jodoin, MacGregor Wilson | STRUCTURAL CIMA + | MECHANICAL/ELECTRICAL BPA | LANDSCAPE Projet Paysage | INTERIORS MSDL Architectes (Sabrina Lareau) & Gauvreau Design | ACOUSTIC SNC Lavalin | SURVEYOR Le Groupe Conseil T.T. Katz | CIRCULATION Aecom | CODE GLT+ | WIND RWDI | ELEVATORS JMCI | CONTRACTOR Rachel Julien | AREA 36,700 m?| BUDGET $110 M | COMPLETION Fall 2023

ENERGY USE INTENSITY (PROJECTED) 135.6 kWh/m2/year

As appeared in the April 2024 issue of Canadian Architect magazine

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PROJECT Îlot Rosemont, Centre de services de l’Office municipal d’habitation de Montréal + Résidence des Ateliers, Montreal, Quebec

ARCHITECT Lapointe Magne et associés

TEXT Odile Hénault

PHOTOS David Boyer

Emerging from Montreal’s Rosemont subway station, these days, one may be in for a bit of a shock. Where there used to be a small pavilion with direct access to the subway system—and a generous turning loop for buses—there is now the strong presence of an L-shaped complex, eight storeys high along Rosemont Boulevard and ten storeys along St. Denis Street. This recent addition to Montreal’s highly eclectic urban fabric epitomizes the city’s progress towards promoting mixed-use, urban densification, and public transit. Translated into reality, this means a subway station-topping complex that offers affordable housing for 200 seniors, as well as holding the headquarters of the Office municipal d’habitation de Montréal (OMHM)—a not-for-profit responsible for the management of some 880 buildings and close to 21,000 social housing units across the metropolis. 

A complex context

The building sits at the border between the Plateau Mont-Royal and Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie, central boroughs which span either side of a long, curving CPR freight line. For decades, the 40,000-square-metre site to the north of the rail line was occupied by municipal works yards and workshops, which were gradually demolished over time. In 2006, a new Master Plan was adopted to redevelop the city-owned area, with an emphasis on both market housing and social housing, as well as on public amenities essential to support a new neighbourhood. During the following years, the area saw developments including Bibliothèque Marc-Favreau (Dan Hanganu architects, 2013), Quartier 54, a thoughtfully designed eight-storey condominium complex (Cardinal Hardy Beinaker architects, 2012) and the Coopérative du Coteau vert, a three-storey social housing project built around a central garden (L’Oeuf, 2010).

The last site on this major lot was earmarked for affordable and social housing. In 2013, Lapointe Magne & associés was mandated to design the project, which by then had grown in size to include the OMHM headquarters. One of the architects’ main challenges, apart from the actual building design, was to secure and harmonize the labyrinthine movements of pedestrians, bikes, buses, cars, and emergency vehicles gravitating on and around the site. To top it off, bordering the parcel is an underpass heading south, and an overpass going east. A strong urban gesture was needed. 

Shaping Îlot Rosemont

The architects’ mandate to renovate the existing subway access and integrate a bus terminal and turning loop was to have a major impact on the structure and the overall shape of the complex, as well as on its visual identity. Approaching the site, one is struck by the unexpected presence of giant V-shaped supports, zigzagging along the building’s perimeter. They form part of the intricate structural solution found by the engineers and architects as they looked to accommodate the large spans required by the public transit program, without compromising on the number of affordable units above. 

The 193-unit Résidence des Ateliers occupies the upper five levels of the complex’s east wing and the upper seven levels of its west wing. The exterior volume of the overall complex is softened by the introduction of balconies and loggias, which reveal the presence of its occupants. Most of the units are one-bedroom apartments, which were designed with care despite the strict budgetary constraints attached to subsidized housing: the Résidence des Ateliers is the 11th initiative of a city-sponsored program called Enharmonie, which targets low-income seniors. As it happens, Lapointe Magne was the first architecture firm to be hired when the program was launched, designing the Résidence Jean-Placide-Desrosiers (inaugurated in 2006; see CA, Feb. 2007), and later commissioned with the Résidence Alfredo-Gagliardi (2008), located above the busy Jean-Talon subway station. 

Given Îlot Rosemont’s peculiarly shaped site, the architects were able to avoid conventional, identical apartments and come up with almost 34 different unit types, all universally accessible. The lack of lavish budgets was compensated for by great attention to the treatment of spaces within the units and in commodious corridors with whimsical, oversized wayfinding graphics. Particular emphasis was put on light-filled communal and dining spaces. These were placed at the wings’ junction point in order to take full advantage of the obtuse angles generated by this irregular site. 

These gathering spaces are also found on the office floors, where light abounds thanks to an open plan and high ceilings with exposed mechanical and structural elements, which are particularly impressive at the third level. The communal rooms, such as the south-facing cafeteria on the third floor, offer generous views of the immediate surroundings and of Mount Royal in the distance. The OMHM’s double-height reception area is directly accessible from St. Denis Street, in a spot some neighbours would have preferred to see given over to a more glamorous function. The choice made by the OMHM was to offer its equity-deserving clients a space with dignity, defying the possibility of NIMBY sentiments. 

A strong urban presence

Îlot Rosemont is a robust, unexpected object in the landscape. And it does take some getting used to, despite the looming presence across the road of a far bulkier structure built in 1972 for a then-rapidly expanding textile industry. Lapointe Magne’s response to this condition was to integrate the brutalist building by making it part of a symbolic gateway to an area of the city that is still undergoing major changes. In an effort to soften the transition towards the massive concrete volume, a dark brick—interspersed with subtle aubergine inserts and ochre finishes—was selected for the west wing of Îlot Rosemont. For the east wing, a contrasting white brick was adopted in homage to the much gentler Bibliothèque Marc-Favreau.  At ground level, the soffit and bus loop that run underneath the raised building are clad with ochre-colored perforated aluminum panels.

Key to understanding this latest urban intervention is the eclectic nature of Montreal’s streetscapes. A certain appearance of unity is given by the residential neighbourhoods with their regular, orthogonal grid and their two- and three-storey-high rowhouses, known locally as duplexes and triplexes. Attempts at building anything that breaks away from tradition are often met with scepticism. Nonetheless, the need to densify the city around subway stations—and on any of Montreal’s innumerable vacant lots—creates valuable opportunities for planners and architects to propose new formulas.

What has been built in Rosemont-La-Petite Patrie since 2006 can definitely be called a success. In less than twenty years, a new urban environment has sprung up here, anchored by some 800 housing units, more than half of which are affordable or cooperative housing.  It is an exemplary showcase for the urban densification so often called for as a response to urban sprawl. Municipal leadership should be applauded for leading the way, by demonstrating how its own properties can be developed in ways that embrace complex programs and sites, as well as promoting affordable housing. Furthermore, the Îlot Rosemont and its immediate neighbours constitute a unique illustration of what committed, talented architects can contribute to their city—if and when there is political will.

Odile Hénault is a contributing editor to Canadian Architect.

CLIENT Office municipal d’habitation de Montréal (OMHM) | ARCHITECT TEAM Lapointe Magne & Associés: Frédéric Dubé, Katarina Cernacek,  Pascale-Lise Collin , Alain Khoury,  Olivier Boucher,  Isabelle Messier-Moreau,  Esther Gélinas, Alizée Royer,  Frédérick Boily, Yves Proulx | STRUCTURAL  Tetratech | MECHANICAL/ELECTRICAL Norda Stelo | LANDSCAPE VLAN Paysages | INTERIORS Lapointe Magne et associés | CIVIL AECOM | CONTRACTOR Pomerleau | SIGNAGE/WAYFINDING Pastille Rose | AREA 24,560 m2  | BUDGET $91.2 M | COMPLETION November 2022

ENERGY USE INTENSITY (PROJECTED) 151.2 kWh/m2/year | WATER USE INTENSITY (PROJECTED) 0.55 m3/m2/year

 
As appeared in the April 2024 issue of Canadian Architect magazine

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PROJECT The Well, Toronto, Ontario

ARCHITECTS Hariri Pontarini Architects (Masterplan and Office), Adamson Associates Architects (Executive Architect), BDP (Retail, Canopy, Landscape Architect), CCxA Architectes Paysagistes (Landscape Architect—Masterplan and Public Realm), Giannone Petricone Associates (Wellington Market), Wallman Architects (Residential Midrises), architects—Alliance (Residential Highrises), Urban Strategies (Urban Design and Planning)

PHOTOS RioCan, unless otherwise noted

TEXT John Lorinc

The elevating history of Toronto’s upward trajectory is a story that can be told in chapters, beginning with suburban slab apartments and downtown bank towers (1960s-1980s), moving through the era of arterial point tower clusters (on Bay, the Kings, North York City Centre, downtown Yonge, Jarvis) and on to massive industrial conversions (Liberty Village, the railway lands). Half a century after David Crombie imposed his infamous 45-foot freeze, height passes muster almost anywhere, and, despite policy efforts to stoke low- and midrise residential, there’s little to indicate that Toronto’s verticality will subside anytime soon.

What is quite new in the narrative of the city’s intensification is the advent of the mega-site—not just large-ish former car dealerships and the like, but precinct-sized projects that come fitted out with all manner of planning riddles, such as relationships to transit, abutting neighbourhoods, and architectural vernaculars. These sites include large inner city and suburban supermarket and mall properties, with their acres of blacktop, as well as marquis projects, such as the redevelopment of the 9.2-acre Canada Square site, at Yonge and Eglinton, by Oxford Properties and CT REIT working with Hariri Pontarini and Urban Strategies, and the former Honest Ed’s/Mirvish Village lands, which are being converted to mixed-use rental by Westbank with Henriquez Partners Architects, Diamond Schmitt Architects, Urban Strategies, and Janet Rosenberg Landscape Architects.  

Most (though not all) of the developers pursuing these large-scale gigs recognize they require a more extensive tool kit—intentional architectural variety, unconventional massing, new public open spaces and, crucially, porousness to prevent such developments from becoming too monolithic. 

In the case of the Galleria Mall, Almadev, working with Urban Strategies and Hariri Pontarini Architects, cut a deal with the city to build a new grid-busting diagonal road through the site and swap land to create a central park. With Mirvish Village and a future Ontario Line project at the Corktown station at King and Parliament, the designers and city planners carved out mid-block pedestrian cut-throughs, which, with the exception of a few examples in the downtown office core, represent an entirely new type of car-free public space in the city. (The Corktown site plan, prepared by SvN, includes two intersecting mid-block connections.)   

The first of these mega-projects to cross the finish line is The Well, a much anticipated and heavily publicized collaboration between RioCan and Allied Properties REIT. The 7.7-acre site—which belonged to the Thomson family, owner of The Globe and Mail, whose flagship facility stood on the site for many years, and much else—includes 1.2 million square feet of office space, 320,000 square feet of retail, and some 1,700 condos and rental units. The developers estimate it will eventually house about 11,000 residents and employees, whose comings and goings are expected to sustain the retail space and provide a major boost to a somewhat ragged corner of the King West district. 

Several design firms were involved in the project, including Hariri Pontarini Architects, which was responsible for the office tower and led the masterplan in collaboration with Urban Strategies and CCxA. BDP led the retail components, architects—Alliance designed the residential towers on the southern half of the site, and Wallman Architects oversaw the residential midrises on the northern half. The late Claude Cormier’s practice, CCxA, developed the landscape plan, while Adamson Associates served as executive architect. 

The complex features a huge underground cistern—thus, “the well,” a name that also nods to the adjacency with Wellington Street. The reservoir is not just a fixture of the project’s internal heating/cooling infrastructure, but will also serve as a means of extending the city’s deep lake water cooling network (owned and operated by Enwave) into the western part of the core.  

The Well’s headlining feature, however, is the covered passageways physically linking the various buildings that open onto Front Street, Spadina and Wellington. These mid-block, multi-level connections—lined with shops and colonnades, and then topped by a undulating latticed glass canopy—are unlike anything else in Toronto, with the possible exception of Santiago Calatrava’s smaller enclosed galleria in Brookfield’s BCE Place.   

This space can be seen and experienced in two overlapping ways: as an inside-out mall, and as a means for pedestrians to move between the three streets that delineate the property.  These internal lanes have no doors, and as such the passageway will function as a “privately-owned public space” (POPS), a formal designation created about a decade ago by the City of Toronto’s planning department as a means of expanding the pedestrian realm in an increasingly vertical downtown. 

The most literal inspiration for The Well’s covered mall can be found in many parts of the U.K. “This idea of having a roof like an umbrella, rather than an enclosed space, is something we’ve done in the U.K. a lot,” says Adrian Price, a London-based principal at BDP, noting that British planning rules in the 1990s didn’t permit enclosed malls. He cites examples like Victoria Square in Belfast and Cabot Circus in Bristol. But, as David Pontarini notes of those U.K. projects, “They’re all mixed-use residential-retail-office sites, but they don’t work at the density [The Well] is working at. This is kind of a European-combined-with-Asian model.”

The canopy—designed collaboratively by Hariri Pontarini, BDP, and Adamson, working with RJC Engineers—extends between seven buildings. It is held aloft by V-shaped supports, relying on what Price calls a “continuous walk-in gutter” that extends around the edge of the structure to provide stiffness. The supports, in turn, are designed to have enough give to accommodate building movement, while the panels of engineered glass sit atop the lattice. “It’s the largest structure of its type in North America,” says Price.

The internal passageways of the mall provide the most intimately scaled evidence of the project’s strategy to pack the site with diverse architectural elements: the office and retail blocks facing the promenade are rendered in distinct styles and materials, including red brick, white terracotta, and metal fins. As a whole, the complex includes seven connected buildings, ranging from tall glass office towers to mid-rise brick residential blocks that step down towards Wellington, self-consciously referencing the scale and massing of the King West brick-and-beam warehouses immediately to the north. The north face of the office towers features a glass elevator, offering commanding views of the west end, while a rooftop restaurant provides sweeping vistas of downtown. 

Two of the residential towers on the Front Street side are aligned, sensibly, off the customary Toronto grid so as to avoid direct exposure to morning and afternoon sun. Thus situated, they bear a certain resemblance to the off-centre orientation of every sun-destination hotel or condo. But this decision reflects an important and all-too-often ignored reality about the thermal loading that is endemic in so many high-rise glazed residential towers in Toronto.

The site’s intentional mix of architectural forms and styles holds up a mirror to the extraordinary variety in built form in the chunk of King West that extends from Spadina over to Tecumseh. The precinct now includes everything from early-19th-century workers’ cottages to the Bjarke Ingels Group’s King Toronto—a Habitat-esque confection, created with developers Westbank and Allied Properties, and designer Diamond Schmitt Architects. Hariri Pontarini worked on another mixed-use Allied/RioCan project across the street from where King Toronto is under construction—the King Portland Centre. The King Portland Centre and The Well share a strategy of leveraging the network of mid-block passageways which have long been a feature of the area.

Indeed, The Well’s urban design is its most distinctive feature. The entrance portal from the corner of Spadina and Front—for years, a car dealership—is now all show business, while the north-facing edge, just around the corner, seems to want to blend into, but also define, a rather staid stretch of Wellington. The project planners are to be commended for providing a generous and well-landscaped sidewalk allowance on this side of The Well. However, it remains to be seen whether the former buzz of that stretch of Wellington, with its industrial businesses, bistros and oddball clubs, will ever come back—or if it is now destined to remain a kind of high-end residential interstitial space between Front and King. 

As for the south side, the passageway and adjoining condo entrances opening onto Front are likely to spend the next 10 to 15 years staring at what will become a vast construction site. The five-tower Rail Deck District project is to be cantilevered over the GO/VIA rail corridor, after prevailing in a tense air-rights battle with the City of Toronto over the latter’s plan to build a multi-billion-dollar park above the tracks. Metrolinx also has a block of land reserved across Front Street from The Well for a future shoulder-station.

For the time being, the question posed by The Well and its highly deliberate urban design choices is a variation on the one that Eb Zeidler’s Eaton Centre posed when it opened in the late 1970s. Will the mall’s gravitational pull suck King Westers, in all their guises, away from King and Lower Spadina? Or does its porousness—a feature that serves as a notable point of differentiation with the Eaton Centre—represent a meaningful addition to the urban connectivity of that neighbourhood? 

It feels trite to say here that time will tell. Yet the breathtaking dynamism of King West’s urban form can lead to no other conclusion for the moment. The enormous project has enormous ambitions, setting out to meaningfully address itself to the three streets around it, and to create a new downtown hub. But it begins life as a kind of island of high density within a mid-rise neighbourhood that’s very much in flux. How well The Well serves the future and evolving King West is an open question, yet one whose answer is revealing itself bit by bit—and now mega-block by mega-block—with each passing year.   

John Lorinc is a Toronto journalist who writes about planning, public space and development for Spacing and The Globe and Mail. Follow him on X at @johnlorinc. 

CLIENT RioCan REIT, Allied | RESIDENTIAL CLIENT TRIDEL, RioCan Living, Woodbourne Capital Canada | ARCHITECT TEAMS Hariri Pontarini Architects—David Pontarini, Michael Conway, Douglas Keith, Ali Soleymani, Shuan Liu, Elnaz Sabouri, Michele Hauner, Dorna Ghorashi, Alyssa Goraieb, Asem Alhadrab, Brad Moore. Hariri Pontarini Architects (Interior Design)—Cathy Knott, Danielle Tsisko, Victoria Kwon, Paloma Pontarini, Emma Craig. Adamson Associates Architects—Bill Bradley, Domenic Virdo, David Jansen, Alex Richter, Jack Cusimano, Steve Carroll, Deni Di Filippo, Navjit Singh Matharu, Rasha Mousa, Anna Satchkova, Gianni Meogrossi, Gordon Adair, Pam Bruneau, Chuck Comartin, Martin Dolan, Alfredo Falcone, Ana Gadin, Sarah Gilbert, Margarita Goyzueta, Dwayne Keith, Negar Khalili, Jimin Kim, Mike Koehler, Gilles Leger, Tonino Ottaviani, Theresa Prince, Dan Rubenzahl, Arlene So, Gintaras Valiulis, Gabriel Virag, Ashley Wewiora. BDP—Adrian Price, Steve Downey, Roberta Massabo, Maarten Mutters, Greg Froggatt, Lauren Copping, Marco Cosmi, Paul Foster, Malcolm De Cruz, Catherine Griffiths, Ivan Popov, Michelle Wong, Hoa Quan, Maria Martinez, Simon Perez, Trevor Pool, Luminita Musat, Emilie Kwapisz, Daniele De Paula, Millan Tarazona, Peter Coleman, Waimond Ip, Adriano Scarfo. BDP (Interior Design)—Justin Parsons, Sean Rainey, Cora Granier, Amy Simpson, Vivien Kerr, Anna Carnevale, Melodie Peters. Concept Lighting—Colin Ball, Sarah Alsayed, Mim Beaufort, Jono Redden. BDP (Landscape)—Mehron Kirk, Lucy White, Cedric Chausse, Bethany Gale, Martyna Dobosz, Dalia Todary-Michael. Wallman Architects—Rudy Wallman, Rod Pell, Khodayar Shafaei, Michael Panacci, Aleksandra Mazowiec, Tristan Armesto, Shaun Oldfield. CCxa Architectes Paysagistes—Claude Cormier, Guillaume Paradis, Logan Littlefield, Yannick Roberge, Marc Hallé, James Cole, Yi Zhou, Hélio Araujo, Georges-Étienne Parent, Nicole M. Meier. Architects—Alliance: Peter Clewes, Adam Feldmann, Oliver Laumeyer, Barb Zee, Helen Tran, Nicolas Peters, Sophia Radev, Dele Oladunmoye, Robert Connor, Lisa Maharaj, Anna Wan, Jason DeLine, Carl Caliva. Giannone Petricone Associates—Ralph Giannone, Andria Vacca, Cassandra Hryniw, Carlo Odorico, Katherine French, Amy Piccinni, Tracy Ho, Shane Alharbi, Yoland Senik, Hung Hoang. Urban Strategies—George Dark, Dennis Lago, Geoff Whittaker, Craig Cal, Pino Di Mascio | STRUCTURAL RJC Engineers (Daniel Sokolowski) | STRUCTURAL (RESIDENTIAL) Jablonsky Ast & Partners | ELECTRICAL/IT/COMMUNICATIONS/AV/SECURITY/LIGHTING Mulvey & Banani (Eric Cornish, Olumide Joseph, Nirojan Ketheeswaran | Mechanical The Mitchell Partnership (James McEwan, Camille Williams) | MECHANICAL/ELECTRICAL (RESIDENTIAL) Novatrend | CIVIL Odan/Detech Group, Inc. | ACOUSTICS & VIBRATION HGC Engineering | HARDWARE Trillium Architectural Products | TRANSPORTATION/PARKING BA Consulting Group | WIND RWDI | FIRE/CODE/LIFE SAFETY/ACCESSIBILITY LRI Engineering, Inc. | VERTICAL TRANSPORTATION Soberman Engineering | SURVEYOR J.D. Barnes | EXTERIOR BUILDING MAINTENANCE RDP Associates | ice/snow Microclimate Ice & Snow Inc. | WASTE MANAGEMENT Cini-Little International, Inc. | LANDSCAPE (RESIDENTIAL) Janet Rosenberg & Studio, MBTW | SUSTAINABILITY EQ Building Performance | SHORING AND EXCAVATION Isherwood Geostructural Engineers, GFL Environmental | CONSTRUCTION MANAGERS EllisDon, Deltera, Knightsbridge  | CODE LRI (Steven Grant) | STRUCTURE AVENUE-verdi jv | CLADDING & ROOFING Bothwell-Accurate | CANOPY Gartner GMBH | CONCEPT LIGHTING BDP | LIGHTING Mulvey & Banani (Stephen Kaye) | WAYFINDING kramer design associates | LANDSCAPE SUBCONSULTANTS Albert Mondor (planting); Joe Carter (irrigation); Peter Simon (urban forestry) | AREA 7.67 acres | BUDGET Withheld | COMPLETION November 2023

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Over the past decade, engineered mass timber has evolved from a new and innovative choice of structural material to becoming almost mainstream. Canadian architects have played a major role in the material’s acceptance in the North American building industry, with British Columbia architects at the vanguard of harnessing Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT) around 10 years ago. 

As the three in-construction projects featured on the following pages demonstrate, Canadian mass timber expertise continues to advance—and in Michael Green’s case, it is garnering international projects. Moreover, architects including MTA with Acton Ostry are looking beyond the material’s vaunted renewability and carbon-sink aspects to make their mass-timber buildings even more environmentally sound. And lastly, architects like Intelligent City are integrating and overhauling the very process of designing and building with mass timber. 

The material choice still requires something of a helping hand in terms of subsidies and investment. Though few architects speak freely about it, choosing an engineered wood structure is usually a more expensive way to build—at least for the moment. But that could change quickly as the immense carbon costs of construction become reflected in pricing and in regulations. And as more innovative and impressive projects near completion and prove their mettle, Canadian architects will continue to show that they remain at the forefront of mass timber innovation.

Limberlost Place

An innovative structural system and pre-fabricated envelope set new standards for mass timber public buildings.

LOCATION George Brown College, Toronto, Ontario

ARCHITECTS Moriyama Teshima Architects + Acton Ostry Architects

Even while still under construction, Limberlost Place is hauling in acclaim. Part of George Brown College’s waterfront campus in Toronto, the building has pulled in over a dozen awards, including the RAIC’s 2023 Research & Innovation in Architecture Award, and a Canadian Architect Award of Excellence. Expect more accolades upon its projected completion in January of 2025. 

At 10 storeys high, Limberlost Place is one of the world’s tallest mass-timber institutional buildings. Buildings of this typology must meet onerous construction codes and design considerations; this one will serve 3,400 students and staff. Teaching and gathering spaces occupy the full structure, including a tall-wood research institute, childcare centre, classrooms, and areas for lounging and study. MTA’s Vancouver-based joint-venture partner, Acton Ostry Architects, has already established a benchmark in designing the 18-storey Brock Commons Tower at the University of British Columbia, at the time the tallest mass-timber project in the world. 

Like Brock Commons, Limberlost Place is a hybrid structure of CLT, concrete, and steel. But where Brock Commons’ CLT was mostly hidden under drywall, roughly 50 per cent of Limberlost’s is exposed to view, including its nine-metre-span beams and every column in the building. Its 10-storey height clocks in four storeys above the conventional pre-CLT code, “so we had to be meticulous about every element,” says MTA principal Phil Silverstein, who is the construction administration lead on the project. 

While many North American mass-timber structures are still sourced from overseas suppliers, Limberlost has taken a made-in-Canada approach. Its prefabricated envelope system arrived in two-storey panels assembled in Windsor, Ontario, and delivered just-in-time to eliminate on-site storage needs. The prefab wall panels have been manufactured up to 11.7 metres high and are quickly assembled on site and supported by jack posts.  The CLT for Limberlost Place—manufactured largely from fast-growing black spruce—comes from Quebec-based Nordic Structures. 

As we walked through Limberlost mid-construction, we could already sense the dramatical verticality of its interior, dominated by a three-storey-high glazed foyer connected to smaller common spaces—“breathing rooms,” as design partner Carol Phillips calls them—on the second and third levels. The open volume of the foyer is anchored by a 16-metre-high glulam column, the heaviest member of the entire project, weighing in at 22,000 pounds. “Timber doesn’t like to transfer loads very well,” notes Silverstein. “Timber likes to work vertically.” 

In horizontal terms, a major innovation is the ultra-generous 9.2-metre span of the teaching spaces. It’s essentially a “beamless” construction system: its main structural member is a timber-concrete slab band, composed mostly of CLT, topped by a layer of reinforced concrete. “It’s an extremely shallow system,” notes Phillips, allowing for greater floor-to-ceiling heights as well as column-free spaces ideal for large-group instruction. 

The building has environmental attributes well beyond its use of mass timber. Solar chimneys on the east and west façades will draw air up and through the building from operable windows, to harness the stack effect and establish a natural convection system for temperature regulation. The building informally meets Passive House standards and meets the energy targets for LEED Platinum status, according to the architects, although they will apply for LEED Gold. 

The most salient value of the project is that it will provide a paradigm for many more sustainable mass-timber public buildings in the future. “This isn’t a one-off,” says Silverstein. “It’s a starting point.”

Flora

Canadian mass timber expertise is being tapped for this project in Europe.

LOCATION Nanterre, France

ARCHITECTS MGA | Michael Green Architecture + CALQ Agence d’Architecture

The first thing you notice about Flora is the sensuality of its form. Even in mid-construction, its rounded corners, jogged massing, and prow-like base distinguish it from the other rectilinear buildings around it. Its principal designer, Michael Green, avers that the building’s voluptuous shape is entirely logic-based, following the irregularities of the site and the material economy of avoiding 90-degree corners that often end up as wasteful underused space. 

Flora is a nine-storey mixed-use complex, with offices and retail slated for the lower floors, and a mix of market and non-market housing above. Here in Nanterre, a fast-growing suburb of Paris, Green has teamed up with local architecture firm CALQ Agence d’Architecture to bring his knowledge, design, and powers of persuasion to France. CALQ’s website states that the firm’s main reason for using mass timber is to combat “le réchauffement climatique.” Green concurs. And Woodeum, the Paris-based real-estate developer and the project’s client, promotes itself as a specialist in low-carbon wood architecture—making Canada’s best-known mass-timber advocate a natural choice for a partnership. 

This summer, as Green surveyed the busy construction site in person for the first time, he noted some of the distinctions between building in France versus in his homeland. For instance, the interior of Flora is enlivened by a spiral staircase—a charming, fun, and space-saving element. In Canada, the building codes disallow spiral staircases, because they are allegedly dangerous—although, as with so much in life, risk calibration is partly a subjective matter.

Although the French remain détendu about risks that furrow the brows of Canadian code-writers, they are rigorous about certain other requirements that enhance sustainability and quality of life, notes Green. Their national building code includes the stipulation for cross-ventilation, for instance, while our national building code has nothing of the sort for residential construction.

In Green’s most recent TED Talk, he unpacked his bid for the next big transition in mass-timber engineering and design: a system based on biomimicry. He foresees a future of plant-based materials whose lignified tissues and cellulose are reinforced in a way that will allow the architecture to carry loads in the same way as tree branches, with an aesthetically pleasing curvilinearity that would have an inherent structural logic. And instead of the standard spruce-fir-pine now used for most Canadian mass timber, the choice of plant will be based on what’s local and ecologically appropriate. “It might be bamboo in one region, and then grass, or salal, or hemp in another,” he says. His concept “is going to be a big thing. It’s not happening yet, but it will in ten, twenty years,” he avows. “As humans, we’re very resistant to the idea of starting over. But we need to rethink all aspects of the built environment.”

Back to the here and now: French authorities, like their North American counterparts, are still nervous about transitioning the entire structural framework of buildings to mass timber. That’s not the way Green would have it. The ground floor of Flora is concrete, and so it’s essentially a hybrid structure.  All over the world, including here in Canada, notes Green, “concrete use is driven largely by code. So, you have different trades, you have two different structural materials, you have finger-pointing.” It’s not the cheapest or the most efficient way of building, but it will change, he expects, or at least hopes. “We’re still stuck in a version of the old system. It’s time to move on.”

Intelligent City

An integrated system of design and manufacturing is the project.

LOCATION Delta, British Columbia

In some ways, the Intelligent City factory in Delta, B.C., seems like some sort of sci-fi film set. A giant robot lumbers around in a caged space, looking oddly like a Meccano dinosaur. And yet this metallic creature may well be the future master builder of the region. Controlled by a petite woman holding what looks like a PlayStation remote-control device, the robot is building mass timber components for the firm’s first real-world project. 

“We saw that the delivery of infill urban housing—multi-housing in particular—was difficult to develop,” says Cindy Wilson, the company’s co-founder with architect Oliver Lang. “Every time you have a new person come to a team, they have their own way of thinking how things should be done. So how could we curate a system that is more integrated and could be repeated at scale?” 

By unifying and distilling the messy process of construction into software-controlled prefabrication, the firm essentially smooths over the schism between design and manufacturing, and streamlines the custom design work that is usually dedicated to discrete buildings. Since the Intelligent City team has more control of the overall process, they can also ensure more price stability. This was evidenced in one of their current projects. “During Covid, the price of construction almost doubled,” notes Wilson. “But importantly, about 60% to 80% of a building’s superstructure is our components, so those prices remained stable. We’ve also developed an ecosystem of a supply chain.”  

As previously reported in Canadian Architect, Intelligent City—the sister firm of Lang Wilson Practice in Architecture Culture (LWPAC)—opened its manufacturing facility in Delta, B.C., two years ago. Now the factory is thrumming as its staff and ultra-high-tech software produce the largely pre-assembled components for the “product proof,” a kind of miniature sample building that staff work on to determine where and how the components will later be assembled on-site. 

The firm’s first “real-world” building will be the Vancouver Native Housing Society’s Khupkhahpay’ay Building, a nine-storey housing project to be built in East Vancouver by GBL Architects and Ventura Construction Corporation. Intelligent City is producing the building’s Passive-House façade system. 

The two-year period from factory inception to the launch of actual construction reflects the typical process of testing, commissioning and certification of the building systems and the robotics, but this first real-world project will smooth the way for more projects, built faster, says Wilson. To create a system that would not only be repeatable and scalable but also customizable, the Intelligent City team has streamlined the entire process of building, from preliminary design to construction, so that design and manufacturing are integrated from the start. The fruits of this work are most impressive at the end stages: remote-controlled with proprietary software, the factory’s giant robot lifts, positions, and custom-cuts oversized panels of mass-timber walls, floors, and ceilings. The cuts are unique to each product and can vary in size and shape, allowing electrical channels and ventilation ducts to be embedded in the components before they even leave the factory. Crucially, the customization is instantly and economically adjusted for each component and each project by altering the instructions to the robot. 

The result is a convergence of two processes—architecture and construction—that are normally sequential, separate, and rarely align as well as we’d like them to. There is usually no downtime from delays in material delivery or labour shortages. Once on-site, the components will be assembled much more rapidly than in conventional on-site construction, with much of the electrical and ventilation elements already embedded in the structural framework.

Wilson and Lang believe that Intelligent City’s approach will have an impact not only on the take-up of climate-friendly mass timber, but also in addressing the housing affordability crisis. “The more control we have over the building, the more we can control costs,” says Wilson. “This is where we can really make a difference in affordable housing. It’s not just time, materials, or labour. It’s how we can roll out the creation of housing at scale, in a systematic, predictable way.”

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PROJECT Hollywood Theatre & Residences, Vancouver, British Columbia

ARCHITECT MA+HG Architects

TEXT Benny Kwok

PHOTOS Ema Peter and Janis Nicolay, as noted

Down the street from where I recently lived in Vancouver, there’s a building that has long been a treasured local oddity. Designed by Harold Cullerne, the streamlined Art Deco Hollywood Theatre was built in 1935, boasting roofline hieroglyphic decorations, a black-and-gold tiled ticket booth, and vibrant neon signage. It was a source of escapism for patrons during the Great Depression and remained a beloved family-run cinema for 76 years. After its closure in 2011, the theatre was leased to a church group and was then proposed to be turned into a fitness facility. But communities around the city came together in opposition, and plans for redevelopment were eventually scrapped. Recently, MA+HG Architects have stepped in to restore the theatre to its former glory, while adding rental housing to ensure the long-term viability of the site. 

The process of saving this beloved icon of the Kitsilano community was a collaborative effort between the city, the local heritage community, the arts and culture community, and the public at large. Through a series of workshops and ‘curiosity sessions’, everyone found common ground in their goal to preserve the building, including its original use and unique identity. 

To achieve this, the theatre underwent significant upgrades, including the addition of adequate restroom facilities to maintain its status as a 650-seat venue. The Hollywood’s versatility was also emphasized,  opening the possibility of hosting not just films and live acts, but also community gatherings. The renovations were executed with care to respect character-defining elements, such as through maintaining the original light troughs and restoring the building’s wooden wainscotting. In the spirit of the Art Deco period, the new bars have a stylish yet understated design; red highlights appear throughout, a colour prominent in the original theatre. Behind the bar, film reels and curtains pay homage to the rich history of the building.

MA+HG also designed a six-storey mixed-use residential development on the neighbouring lot. Under a heritage revitalization agreement, the Hollywood property’s development potential was transferred to the adjacent property, together with additional bonus density that rewarded the restoration of the theatre. To showcase—and use—this relationship to full advantage, the condo block extends over the theatre, effectively gaining a third façade. This is an unusual opportunity on a commercial strip, where buildings normally only open to the front and back, and the added exposure allows for the inclusion of east-facing units. The city emphasized the importance of lightness in the building’s corners, and this was achieved by staggering the condo’s balconies to visually open up its edges. The building has been constructed above the street in such a way that the shadow it casts falls primarily on Broadway, rather than the single-family residences behind it, minimizing its impact on the low-slung neighbourhood.

The two buildings were further stitched together by setting the residential block back 2.7 metres from the street, creating a prominent canopy that echoes the theatre’s marquee and draws attention to the six-metre-tall Hollywood sign. In contrast to the vertical banding of the theatre, the residential portion of the project adopts a horizontal orientation, playfully accentuating the length of the site. The envelope of the new building was kept simple and box-like, with emphasis placed on height through tall front entry doors and a high-quality material palette. The balconies were allowed to have a slight dance-like effect, adding interest to the otherwise straightforward form. Its long horizontal bands are reminiscent of the fluidity “found in yachts,” according to design principal Marianne Amodio, or “a scarf blowing on a motorcycle,” with “a touch of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater” as an inspiration.

The building is designed to be slightly deeper than usual because of its greater width, allowing for slightly atypical apartment layouts, including studios that interlock with one-bedroom units, as well as over a dozen two-bedroom units and five three-bedroom units.  

The Hollywood Theatre is a symbol of the community’s memories and heritage, and its restoration became a win-win: preserving the institution for future generations to enjoy, as well as enabling a more flexible approach to the adjoining residential development. The outcome is a unique and visually appealing pair of buildings that showcases the potential of imagination and innovation in design. While the theatre will always stand out as the “weirdo on the block,” it is also a testament to what can be achieved with community, creativity and conversation.

Benny Kwok is a project manager with Herzog & de Meuron, and is co-founder of Vancouver- and London-based Smll Studio.

CLIENT Bonnis Properties | ARCHITECT TEAM Harley Grusko, Marianne Amodio (RAIC), Lindsey Nette | STRUCTURAL Kor Structural | MECHANICAL Integral Group | ELECTRICAL Integral Group & Advanco Electric | LANDSCAPE Prospect & Refuge | HERITAGE Donald Luxton & Associates | CODE Jensen Hughes | CONTRACTOR Bonnis Properties | AREA 5,852 m2 | BUDGET Withheld | COMPLETION August 2022

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PROJECT Telus Sky, Calgary, Alberta

ARCHITECTS Bjarke Ingels Group (Design Architect) with DIALOG (Architect of Record)

TEXT Trevor Boddy

PHOTOS Laurian Ghinitoiu unless otherwise noted

Books write books, and just as surely, buildings design buildings. This has seldom been as apparent as for the relationship between Bjarke Ingels Group’s Vancouver House and the Telus Sky tower that has now followed it in Calgary. There is more at play here than the two buildings having the same design team (BIG’s Bjarke Ingels and Thomas Christofferson), the same associate architect (DIALOG), the same developer (Westbank), and even the same structural engineers (Glotman Simpson of Vancouver). What is remarkable is the steep learning curve between the two designs, with refinements, clarifications, simplifications and rising confidence that coalesced into this hybrid office/rental housing tower in the very heart of Calgary’s oil patch. Vancouver House was a fine idea, but Telus Sky is a much better building.

To explain why I arrive at this critical judgment, I need to say something first about Vancouver House. I may know more about this tower than any other contemporary Canadian building. The developer commissioned me to curate an exhibition installed on the building site when Vancouver House was still in design development, even assigning to me the name for this elaborate show: “Gesamtkunstwerk,” a Germanic neologism of the mid-nineteenth century meaning “Total Design,” popularized by Richard Wagner and thereafter becoming a bedrock principle of the Bauhaus and most of the other modernisms that followed.

The tower’s pro-forma, or economic equation, is brilliant. Rising up from a low-priced, orphaned triangle of land adjacent an on-ramp to the Granville Bridge, Vancouver House steps out, floor-by-floor, to transform from a triangular plan to a rectangular one. This creates up to double the area of suites on higher floors, which in view-obsessive Vancouver net up to five times the purchase price per square metre of condo than those closer the ground. Achieving this required substantial structural gymnastics: a rare combo of horizontal and vertical post-tensioning. 

But this massing and structure exacted a price. The distance varies from a fixed core to each perimeter glass line as it incrementally cantilevers out, yielding some very tough resulting dimensions. In a small minority of unit plans, this led to dull strings of small rooms, doglegs, and other awkward layouts. DIALOG was assigned the difficult task of unit planning, made even more complex by changing marketing decisions, timed to tap a huge demand from the Mainland China market, driven by both investors and recent arrivals here. Things were so in flux that our Gesamtkunstwerk exhibition included no floor plans whatsoever—a rare absence in an architectural exhibition. But thanks to clever improvisations by both teams of architects, the developer, and their marketers, Vancouver House opened as the most valuable residential tower in Canadian history—a stunning real estate success story.

Linking Vancouver House with Telus Sky is an approach to accreting residential units in façades that Bjarke Ingels has labelled “pixelation,” which treats individual apartments, not entire floors, as the key datum of massing. Both towers are often mistakenly described as “torquing,” when an examination of their plans reveals no such twisting. The illusion comes from seeing the receding lines of the variegated surfaces of each unit—pixelation in action. For Telus Sky, each floor is slightly rotated in plan and cantilevered from the one below, giving individual apartments their own volumetric expression on the exterior. The pixelation of units requires lots of corners (and their added expense), so one might say that these two towers have quite literally “cornered” the market. Both BIG towers use curtain walls (from German supplier SHUCO, manufactured in Korea), welcome relief from the window walls that make most Canadian residential towers look sheepishly the same, whether fat slabs backing onto the Gardiner Expressway or point towers in Yaletown.

Telus Sky does not require double post-tensioning, but the designers were forced to accommodate the reality of office floors being 1,670 square metres each, while the residential floors stacked on top of them are optimized to maximize light and views, with a floorplate just as long but much narrower, and crucially, each having just half the floor area of the office floors. The regional offices of telecom giant Telus occupy a minority of the floors in the rectangular office block. A grand urban plinth, they ground a 29-storey base that supports the small but efficient high-end rental units on the 28 upper floors, whose long faces rotate a bit towards the west with each step.  

Explaining the visual effects of Telus Sky, observers turn to metaphors, such as the pixelated seeded head of a sunflower turning to gain the light. A Telus executive describes the tower as “a cowgirl in a cowboy town,” and many locals note the “hips” where offices shift to residential. According to DIALOG’s senior architect on the project, Douglas Cinnamon, “Ours is the only tower in this part of downtown with balconies. It’s welcome relief, a more sensuous and sinuous form.” Certainly, this rotation and balconied pixelation dramatically punctuate a downtown dominated by hunky boxes adhering to the plains gridiron. Bjarke Ingels sums up the effect this way: “The texture of the façade evolves from smooth glass at the base to a three-dimensional composition of protrusions and recesses. The resultant form expresses the unification of the two programs in a single gesture—rational straight lines composed to form a feminine silhouette.”

This is especially true because Fosters Architects’ The Bow, just a half block away, is also rotated to the west instead of adhering to the prevailing north-south orientation. Last fall, I walked with a group of my University of Calgary architecture students to see the visual dance between the two towers. None of the students figured out the actual reason why both buildings turn to the southwest: it is because of valuable-to-tenant direct vistas to the Rocky Mountains in this direction, Calgary’s equivalent to the North Shore and Georgia Strait views that drive Vancouver designs. Whether by feminizing downtown or just providing relief from the tyranny of dumb boxes on a grid, the pairing of these towers is spectacular. For high tech buffs (this is an engineers’ town), the views to the Bow from the north face of Telus Sky may even be more breathtaking than those to the foothills and snow-caps on the other side.

The very public lobby of Telus Sky sets a new design standard for entrances to Calgary’s downtown-wide Plus Fifteen pedestrian system. Other office tower lobbies and bridges tend to a safe corporate palette of blanched stone or panels, chrome and endless glass, having the now-eclipsed magazine aesthetic of two stops of over-exposure popular ten and twenty years ago. By contrast, Telus Sky boasts the darkest but friendliest lobby in town, with continuous benches along its entire length, both inside and outside, the latter lining a 7th Avenue C-Train platform. With its refined but simple Nordic detailing and dark colours, the Telus Sky lobby makes the people walking through it more prominent, via visual contrast. It reminds me of Arne Jacobsen’s 1961 SAS Hotel in Copenhagen—a pioneering tower-and-podium construction that Ingels shows off to all his architectural guests.  

After one passes through this darkened space, the six-storey atrium beckons at its end, exploding with a torrent of Prairie light from above. Plantings set into curving fibreglass panels climb all the way up one wall. This is considered architectural choreography, with changing light and directions of view enriching the passage of every visitor. Looking up through the atrium, projecting angled stairs encourage Telus employees to avoid elevators when trekking to other departments. The stairs add further visual dynamism to this vertical white room, which the architects have dubbed “The Canyon.” The designers wanted the cantilevered stairs to be rounded, rather than angular, but the spatial concept is so strong it does not matter. Below them, a public stair leads to the all-hours Plus Fifteen system, and a set of amenity floors are shared by employees and rental residents alike.

Jeremy Sturgess and I founded the Calgary architectural advocacy and lectures organization CAUSA in 1979, and many of our invited speakers were appalled by what they saw downtown then (Robert Stern, upon being driven down Centre Street past the river exclaimed, “Take me back to the airport!”) Not so Rem Koolhaas, who would become Bjarke Ingels’ early employer at OMA and had been my teacher in a term spent at London’s Architectural Association: when he accepted my invitation, he was totally exhilarated by the frenzy of construction, astonished by viewing the ballet méchanique of 28 construction cranes all moving at once. As his host and driver, he had me do a complete grid survey for him—west on 4th Avenue, east on 5th, and so on—while he took photos. In the 1970s, Koolhaas glimpsed Calgary’s boisterous, ambitious character, and his protégé Bjarke Ingels has now done the same—a near half century later—with Telus Sky.

Alberta-born and -educated, Vancouver-based Trevor Boddy curated the 2014 Gesamtkunstwerk exhibition on BIG’s Vancouver House, the 2017 Rethink Downtown San Diego for Bosa Developments, and Telling Details: The Architecture of Clifford Wiens for public galleries across Canada.

CLIENT 7th Avenue Sky Partnership (Westbank Corp., Telus Corporation, Allied Properties REIT) | ARCHITECT TEAM BIG—Bjarke Ingels, Thomas Christoffersen, Christopher White, Carl MacDonald, Stephanie Choi, Michael Zhang, Iannis Kandyliaris, Francesca Portesine, Alex Wu, Barbora Srpkova, Beat Schenk, Benjamin Caldwell, Benjamin Johnson, Brian Rome, Bryan Hardin, Carolien Schippers, Choonghyo Lee, Chris Gotfredsen, Daisy Zhong, David Spittler, Davide Maggio, Deborah Campbell, Dennis Harvey, Douglas Alligood, Elena Bresciani, Florencia Kratsman, Gaurav Janey, Haoyue Wang, Ho Kyung Lee, Iris van der Heide, Isshin Morimoto, Ivy Hume, Jakob Lange, Jan Leenknegt, Jennifer Phan, Julie Kaufman, Justyna Mydlak, Ku Hun Chung, Manon Gicquel, Mateusz Rek, Maya Shopova, Megan van Artsdalen, Michael Zhang, Mike Evola, Peter Lee, Quentin Stanton, Sun Yifu, Tara Hagan, Terry Lallak, Tianqi Zhang, Yaziel Juarbe, Yoanna Shivarova, Agne Rapkeviciute, Christopher White, Cristian Lera, Jack Lipson, John Kim, Lina Bondarenko, Nicholas Coffee. DIALOG—Doug Cinnamon, Robert Jim, Bruce Haden, Jacqueline Che, Nathan Erickson, Ken Johnson, Chris Lavallee, Sara Remocker, Stephanie Yeung, Wellington Hau, Rey Tadifa, Ivy Usi, Lisa Der, Alen Niznik, Kenton Wickersham, Brenda Skappak, Doug Carlyle, Stephen Hews | STRUCTURAL Glotman Simpson Consulting Engineers (Anthony El-Araj) | MECHANICAL Reinbold Engineering (Doug Reinbold, Jason Edey, Bert Timmer) | ELECTRICAL Integral Engineering (Jubin Jalili, Ali Nazari, Gary Rhode, Colin Van Besouw) | SUSTAINABILITY Integral Engineering (Kevin Welsh) | ARCHITECTURE/INTERIORS COLLABORATOR BIG IDEAS| CODE LDMG Building Code Consultants, Gunn Consultants | TRANSPORTATION PLANNING Bunt & Associates Consulting Engineers | FAÇADES BVDA Façade Engineering LTD | ENVELOPE Morrison Hershfield | AREA 70,725 m2 | BUDGET Withheld | COMPLETION August 2021

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PROJECT Maison de Lauberivière, Quebec City, Quebec

ARCHITECT Lafond Côté Architectes

TEXT Olivier Vallerand

PHOTOS Charles O’Hara, unless otherwise noted

When talking about Lafond Côté’s design for Lauberivière, a large shelter for unhoused people in downtown Quebec City, founder Anne Côté notes that visible homelessness seems like a recent fact in the provincial capital. Her observation points to changing patterns of homelessness, but also to evolving understandings of how to support unhoused people—including rethinking how architects can be involved. 

As the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s 2019 documentary What It Takes to Make a Home discusses, in recent years architects such as Michael Maltzan have explored designs that move away from trying to blend shelters into their surroundings. Instead, they are looking to formally express the importance of providing well-designed spaces for people transitioning back into traditional housing. In that spirit, the new Lauberivière towers over an elevated highway accessing Quebec City’s historic and legislative cores, unapologetically claiming space in the city for marginalized people.

Lafond Côté was involved in an earlier project to renovate Lauberivière’s original space. The new building, which followed from that work, was designed over a decade. During that time, Côté and her team volunteered in all of the organization’s different services to fully understand the needs of both the people it served, and the volunteers and employees who help them. To rationalize internal operations, the site’s topography was used to create independent access to each service, from a new 24-hour sobering centre opening to the lower street, to transitional housing apartments at the top, with a day centre, food services, legal and financial services, and night shelter rooms in between. This allows clients to directly reach the area most relevant to their current needs—while avoiding interaction with people they may feel they share little with at the present point in their lives. Stacked vertically, the services also shape the elevations, with window sizes expanding towards the top of the building.

The building envelope also reflects financial, technical, and environmental innovations developed by the client, the not-for-profit housing resource group that advised it, and the architects. To limit long-time maintenance costs, the team decided to aim for a high-performance, energy-efficient building. As part of this effort, they developed a new type of aluminum-cladding system, with research funded by an Alu-Québec/Société d’habitation du Québec grant that also helped subsidize construction costs. The new panels are inspired by the traditional tôle à la canadienne construction technique, in which small metal roofing shingles are interlocked to resist heat expansion and contraction. Compared to the traditional material, the new panels, intended for walls, are larger and thinner, reducing structural loads and installation time. 

The material innovations continued with the choice of an economical alloy, rarely used for anodized aluminum because of its unreliable colour. However, for Lafond Côté, that diversity of shades was appropriate to this project, as it offers subtle visual texture and conceptually reflects the diversity of users. Metal screens adorned with silhouettes of human figures further add to the composition of the façades, while lending shade and privacy to the common rooms.

Inside the building, the team focused on providing dignity and safety for the clients, volunteers, and employees. Instead of large dorms, quieter individual single-night rooms ring the middle floors, surrounding a core of community rooms and services. In collaboration with the client, the architects designed a door handle that safely keeps doors open at night to facilitate interventions, and shuts them during the day, indicating when rooms are ready to be cleaned. The rooms have angled windowsills to prevent guests from climbing outside, and are designed using temperature-resistant materials to facilitate heat treatment when bed bugs are detected. 

Another major improvement from the previous location is the light-filled dining room served by a full commercial kitchen. The latter is equipped with biomethanization systems that recover energy from food waste. Volunteers who help prepare the 350 meals served each day—including some who previously used Lauberivière’s services—now enjoy a daylit space with views to the outside.

Last November, Côté and Élodie Simard, who coordinated the energy performance aspects of the project, presented Lauberivière at Architecture sans frontières Québec (ASFQ)’s first symposium on homelessness and architecture. Building on initiatives like Jill Pable’s Design Resources for Homelessness website, the symposium was organized to launch a new catalogue of promising design strategies compiled by ASFQ, in which Lauberivière features as an example of a building where intimacy gradients are used to help clients feel at home. 

In its publication, the ASFQ is careful to underline that talking about “good practices” around homelessness can be misleading, as it implies that tested solutions can be applied everywhere. Instead, as Lauberivière—and Lafond Côté’s larger portfolio of community projects—highlights, to be successful, such spaces must aim for co-design processes that recognize the diversity of unhoused people and the necessity of unique solutions adapted to their needs.

Olivier Vallerand is an Assistant Professor at l’École de design, Université de Montréal.

CLIENT La Maison Lauberivière | Technical Resource group Action-Habitation de Québec | ARCHITECT TEAM Preliminary Studies—Mario Lafond, Anne Côté; Conception—Élodie Simard, Francis Fortin; Execution—Élodie Simard, Francis Fortin | STRUCTURAL Cime | MECHANICAL/ELECTRICAL Génécor, Poly-Énergie | LANDSCAPE Duo Design | INTERIORS Lafond Côté architectes | CONTRACTOR Construction Richard Arsenault| Energy Efficiency Écohabitation | AREA 10,551 m2 | BUDGET $23.5 M | COMPLETION June 2021

Thermal ENERGY Demand INTENSITY (ACTUAL) 17 kWh/m2/year 

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In the west end of downtown Montreal, an area densely packed with residential highrises, the appearance of a new apartment tower is not usually a cause for fanfare. But Link, a building designed by ACDF Architecture for developer Brivia Group, sets itself apart with a playful design that is carefully calibrated to stand out, while fitting in.

“It’s an awkward context,” says ACDF principal Maxime-Alexis Frappier, noting how the street is relatively narrow for the height of its buildings, and buried in the middle of a densely packed downtown neighbourhood. Two Victorian townhouses, at the base of the building, were remnant from a century ago, when the neighbourhood was named the Quartier des Grand Jardins for its villas and many religious institutions with large, verdant, grounds. In the 1950s and 60s, swaths of the area’s fabric of Victorian homes were demolished to make way for brutalist office and apartment towers. Now, it’s one of the city’s most densely populated areas, including a substantial number of students who attend nearby colleges and universities. 

ACDF’s client had originally planned to demolish the debilitated rowhouses on their site, too—they had no heritage designation, and constructing from a tabula rasa is much easier—but Frappier and his team argued for saving them. “The street has nothing else, we needed to find a way to keep it,” says Frappier. He knew that retaining only the front elevations to form the building’s entrance, as his design proposed, would mean facing accusations of facadism—but, he reasoned, “for most citizens, they are really glad if you can keep a portion [of the historic fabric], and it contributes to the street life.”

Above the rehabilitated façades, ACDF’s design continues to pay homage to the area’s rich history. The tower is a quilt of openings, shaped as archways, gables, and rectangular dormers to reference the shapes that characterized the area’s historic homes. Some of these are windows, while others are enclosed balconies for the building’s 122 dwellings. The composition is presented as a work of art, framed by a dark granite surround.

A variety of grey tones are chosen for the precast concrete façade—a dark grey that matches the heritage slate roofs, a lighter grey to tie the building in with the neighbouring concrete towers, and a white that reflects light back into the narrow street. From the street, the patterned façade lends a whimsical touch to the neighbourhood. The shaped openings screen the clutter that often accumulates on balconies, while also affording additional privacy to residents.

The name of the development—Link—is a riff on Rue Lincoln, where the development is located. It also refers to the developer’s plan for the rental units, which includes the option to rent a single room in a three-bedroom apartment as an affordability measure for the area’s students. The architecture adds to the analogy, linking between the area’s past and present. 

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PROJECT Ace Hotel, Toronto, Ontario

ARCHITECT Shim-Sutcliffe Architects

TEXT Bill Curran

PHOTOS Scott Norsworthy, unless otherwise noted

Hotels matter because, as architect Robert Stern once put it, they “constitute a permanent, habitable dreamworld, which we can escape into and depart at will—a dreamworld we can share with others.” Toronto’s latest addition to the typology—the Ace Hotel, by Shim-Sutcliffe Architects—is the kind of dreamy place that architects love to create and spend time in.

Facing St. Andrew’s Park, an island of green in a growing sea of downtown offices and condos, it’s also a real-life manifesto that, in Brigitte Shim’s words, is “a statement of resistance against the thin and glassy.” It is a magnificent piece of architecture in its own right, but also a contextual fabric building that respects its neighbourhood’s scale and material history. It raises the bar for private development in its immediate context and throughout downtown Toronto. 

The duo of Brigitte Shim and Howard Sutcliffe and their team are about the best among us at creating architecture founded in a sincere reverence for craft and material research. Their deep, thoughtful design consideration often seems freed from the frets of normal time and budget constraints, and they relish it. They produce consistently remarkable works of architecture that make us hold our breath. This is not the giddy exhilaration of bold, sculptural form, but quiet, deliberate, restrained modernism.

The Ace is Shim-Sutcliffe’s first tall building, one of few in a non-landscaped urban setting, and one of an even smaller number that are easily accessible to the public. Set on a tiny 21-by-27-metre lot, it is a world apart from the bucolic rural and backcountry sites of their most recent Governor General’s Award-winning private residences. It’s also a departure for the Ace, whose worldwide hotels, to this point, have mostly been in renovated heritage buildings. 

But there is a remarkable coherence between Shim-Sutcliffe’s exquisite design sensibilities and the Ace’s goal of creating classic, refined places. Shim-Sutcliffe and Atelier Ace (the hotel’s in-house, full-service creative agency, and a collaborator on the interiors) began the design process by visiting all of the Ace’s properties, getting a sense of the overall brand. The Ace Toronto feels quiet, restrained, taut. It’s suave and debonair, not brash or hippy. It achieves the “timeless” feel that we all seek. It is produced with superb attention to design detail and craft, with a fantastic, utterly authentic layer of rich quality. As the day ends, when golden sunlight streams in horizontally down the canyon of Adelaide Street and across from the facing park, the Ace is an ethereal, otherworldly place.

A modest monumentality

The monumentality of the building is apparent from a glance at the 14-storey brick building, which takes on a dead simple rectangular form, made spectacular by an intense attention to detail. To the west, deep, robust brick piers frame wide vertical slots of window, whose recesses throw deep shadows and rise full height, with tall bays reminiscent of Louis Kahn’s First Unitarian Church. A subtle recess of the bays above the second floor gives away valuable floor area, but produces a powerful presence for the building’s main façade when seen from the long view down Adelaide. The piers have no syncopation or pattern: I wish they were raw buttress forms ragged against the sky, like a Sant’Elia fantasy, instead of comfortably pulled together with a horizontal cap. 

The Endicott brick boasts a lush purple-red colour, and a glossy texture that adds to the classic feel of the building. There were some budget constraints, though: the brick is panelled, rather than hand laid. In response, the architects provided a thoughtful celebration of the panel joints as a design feature, while embracing the panels’ liberation from gravity with unusual vertical coursing and interspersed panels of soldier courses.

The simplicity of the west wall and its regular, powerful patterning is paired with a much different north wall, facing the quieter Camden Street. Here, a rich, flatter surface results from a delightful, sophisticated and informal pattern of varied windows, with wood privacy screens to the condo across the narrow street. At ground level, the main entrance is the magical focus—a flourish of bold canopy with a wavy, layered wood-and-steel soffit over wood revolving doors, all composed with subtlety and restraint. 

The entrance canopy is supported by a structural concrete arch—the first in a series that carries through the sublime two-storey lobby at tight 4.5-metre intervals. The heroic, splayed concrete columns yield a highly unusual space, reminiscent of Alvar Aalto’s Sanomat Newspaper building and of dirigible hangars. 

Each of the asymmetrical columns is carefully sculpted to the room. On the east, oversized steel knuckle connectors attach to counter-height bases, framing the lobby bar. On the west, the columns descend down past the park-facing windows into the lower-level restaurant, where they jackknife and splay back into the room. The columns have a raw formboard finish on the outside faces, contrasting with polished inside faces, and are race-striped with a grey-painted steel angle corner relief detail. Light grey plaster ceilings miss setting off the concrete frames as wood, copper or Corten would have, but it is a space refreshingly not defined by drywall, ACT or orthogonality.

Suspended by rods and cantilevered from the columns, the lobby bar sits on a floorplate that floats a few steps up from the entrance. It’s a particularly fine civic room, modest yet exhilarating, with a compact size that leads it to be often busy and buzzy. 

A grand stair slices down the west side of the main floor, bringing guests to the restaurant—a generous, open, unencumbered space. The decision to raise the lobby bar a metre above the street allows for more light to pour in from large clerestory windows along the west wall. To the south, an atrium—where the restaurant and lobby bar floors interconnect—feels high and welcome, although one wishes the tiny site allowed it to be larger.

The floating lobby is not so apparent to view, except where seen from below to the south from the restaurant atrium. Otherwise, it can only be glimpsed from the entrance through a narrow slot below the lobby floor, and few would notice this. The suspension system is concealed in the solid guard, so the floating effect is lost. Perhaps a more open guard or greater expression of the suspension elements would have made the raised effect more appreciable. One craves more rich details like those that adorn the south feature stair, where an arrhythmic series of suspension rods, serving as braces, bisect round reveals in the steel guardrails. 

The backdrop to both the lobby bar and restaurant is a stunningly crafted plywood collage, made by A. Howard Sutcliffe at Shim and Sutcliffe’s cottage and gifted to the project. Inspired by light dancing on a northern lake, its visual richness comes from the varied patina of the sun- and wind-aged segments, and an intended repair detail for warping edges that now seems perfectly needed in its randomness.

Urban cabins

Travelling upstairs, the floorplans are super-efficient, with a pinwheeled array of rooms on each floor. The best rooms face the park to the west, with second-best rooms to the north and south, and exit stairs abutting the east party wall. Shim-Sutcliffe describes the rooms as “urban cabins.” In that spirit, their main design element to each room is a pair of staggered, varied window boxes of raw-edged double plywood—one a lovely window seat with leather pad and reading light, the other a desk/object stand. 

A pleasant touch is the room accent colour, repeated in the bathroom grout—Frank Lloyd Wright’s Cherokee Red paint, an almost steel primer tone that matches the exterior brick and steel lobby stairs, and a recurring Shim-Sutcliffe motif. It’s a warm, soft choice that fits well with the urban cabin idea. But I found much of the room design rather fey and boring. White solid surface counters, white tile, Fat Albert lights—yawn. Another disappointment was the prominent, yet unadorned TV screen—a surprising omission of design attention. Shim-Sutcliffe’s artistry is at its highest when they design a project as a gesamtkunstwerk, down to bespoke door handles and lights; these shortcomings are telling for where private development funds fall short of the budgets available on private projects.

Towards a better city

To build in Toronto, Ace partnered with Zinc Developments and Alterra, local entities whose previous work focused on luxe condos of more conventional design. Ace Toronto marks a whole new level: it sets a benchmark for hotels in Canada for the design quality possible even with the constraints of the real estate market. Other developers are certainly taking notice.

As with any project, important design elements get jettisoned along the way: on the exterior, I regret the loss of expressed metal belt courses every second floor, now only on the third floor line. On the top floor, there is a fabulous rooftop bar room, bookended with a pair of fireplaces framed by lovingly crafted steel mantles and highly textural, integrated concrete art panels by Montreal artist David Umemoto. (An absolutely fabulous aspect of the hotel is its extensive and diverse art and decor elements, mostly sourced or commissioned from thoughtful local artists and designers selected by Atelier Ace.) The washrooms on this top floor are also wonderful, with wall sconces made from sectioned clay chimney flues. But these dramatic washroom design elements did not make it into the washrooms serving the lobby (which are bland), and the outdoor bar terrace is much simplified from its original design, losing a long loggia along the west wall that would have provided a sense of shelter and scale. The architects, always diplomatic, demure to criticize such losses. But this is also a lesson for clients: stay the course, see the vision through.

The Ace Hotel offers the city not only a new exemplar of hotel design, but a valuable approach to quality infill. Its presence is gently enlivening a quiet, post-industrial area of the city. It is both a showpiece and, simultaneously, an excellent fabric building. It blessedly avoids fakery, nostalgia and vulgarity while projecting design depth and robustness. Ace Toronto demonstrates the transformative potential of quality architecture, and we need more of its like. But in the meanwhile, it’s a dreamworld I’m glad to enjoy.

Bill Curran is a principal of Hamilton-based CGS / Curran Gacesa Slote Architects.

OWNERS Alterra, B-right, Finer Space Corporation, Prowinko and Zinc Developments | MANAGEMENT COMPANY Ace Hotel Group | ARCHITECT TEAM Brigitte Shim, Howard Sutcliffe, Narsi Naghikhani, Blaine Lepp | PROJECT TEAM Zack Glennon and Design Workshop Architects | STRUCTURAL Reed Jones Christoffersen Ltd. | MECHANICAL/ELECTRICAL MCW Consultants Ltd. | CIVIL Cole Engineering | CODE David Hine Engineering | LANDSCAPE NAK Design Strategies | TRANSPORTATION BA Consulting Group | PLANNING Bousfields Inc. Planning and Stikeman Elliott LLP | KITCHEN Cini Little International | LIGHTING VBK Lighting | HOTEL PROCUREMENT Benjamin West | SPRINKLER SYSTEM HYDRAULICS ANC | INTERIORS Shim-Sutcliffe Architects and Atelier Ace | CONTRACTOR Alterra | AREA 7,089 m2 | BUDGET Withheld | COMPLETION July 2022

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In late June, we sat down with Canadian-born, L.A.-based architect Frank Gehry. Gehry was back in his hometown, Toronto, for the launch of Forma, a pair of 73- and 84-storey towers in the downtown Entertainment District, clad with stainless steel panels.

Despite the fanfare surrounding the launch, Gehry was ambiguous about the idea of super-tall buildings downtown. He’d prefer to see downtown Toronto developed less intensively—but since the floodgates have been opened, he offers Forma as a high-quality, artistically conceived alternative to the norm.

Here’s Canadian Architect editor Elsa Lam’s interview with Frank Gehry.

Canadian Architect: I was hoping to talk a little bit about architecture in general, to give context to this project….

Frank Gehry: When we’re doing it, and when we’re in the soup, you don’t realize how good or bad it is. You’re too focused on temporal issues that are right there, without thinking a lot about what you’re leaving. It’s different.

[The Forma towers are] only one piece, it’s not the whole city. The city has gone ahead and done a bunch of stuff that most of us never expected. Some of it’s not good.

CA: When the renderings first came out for this, nine years ago, the big talk was about how this was extremely tall for Toronto. Now, there’s several towers that are similar in height, and lots more on the boards.

FG: And so, if we could have gotten together and talked about it, we could have done a better job. Instead of everybody going their own way. But that’s democracy.

CA: A lot of the narrative around this project has been about your roots in Toronto. I’m curious if you think of yourself as a Canadian architect, or as an American architect, or as some hybrid?

FG: My DNA is Canadian, and I think my—whatever it is, my modesty or false modesty—comes from being Canadian. Americans go out and blow their horns. I think that’s Canadian, that you don’t blow your horn as much, right? Am I right? I don’t know if that’s how it is now, but that’s where I came from and that’s where I feel comfortable. I’m proud to be part of that feeling.

CA: When I think about your career, you’ve gone from a rebel architect, when you were designing your own house from scrapyard pieces, to…

FG: In my mind, it’s all logical. I went to a factory that made chainlink in L.A., and in one hour, they made enough chainlink to cover one lane of the Santa Monica freeway from downtown to the ocean. Why was I interested in chainlink? Because it was a material that was ubiquitous, everybody used it, it was everywhere. Everybody’s yard had one. I said, if you’re going to use it, let’s see, can we make it better? It’s like fabric, it takes the light in a beautiful way. If you hang it, it shimmers. There’s all kinds of things you can do with chainlink to make it better. But when I used it, people said, “why are you using that crappy material?” So I turned to them and said, “why are you using it?” And the same with corrugated metal. Those were available very inexpensively, so I used them, and got in a way to like them, I used them so much.

The guy next door to me came to my house one day and said, “how dare you do this to my neighbourhood!” So I pointed to his house, and said, “you got two trailers in the backyard, and you got a chainlink fence—I was just being inspired by you.” But he didn’t see it that way. So that’s the disconnect.

I think a lot of that’s the same here—you don’t see what’s going on, until all of a sudden, there it is.

EL: Given this context, I’m wondering if you can talk a little about what the future is from your vantage point now.

FG: There’s always a demand for places to live, places to work, all over the world. Then politics comes into it. It’s different in Finland and Sweden; Scandinavian countries, their political approach makes for different kinds of cities, makes different kinds of environments. Toronto is a little bit of that—for me, that’s the nice part, the modesty part, the “don’t look at me, we’re making things.” That sounds like a frail comment in the context of two of the biggest towers in Toronto. So there are these inconsistencies in how we feel and what we do.

If I had my druthers, I wouldn’t be doing buildings like this here, I would have thought of it much differently in scale. But if you look from the freeway coming in, you’ve already opened the door to stuff that you’re going to be living with for a long time. Over time, you rationalize why it’s there, and what it looks like, and it’ll become the historic neighbourhood in 50 years. Compared to what happens after, it’s going to look modest and tame.

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Certain works of architecture are so carefully woven into the times, places and cultures within which they are set, they seem to have always been there. Such buildings form the settings for events both ordinary and extraordinary, shaping not only the ways we engage and remember these events, but also quietly defining how we see ourselves, through shifting circumstances wrought by time. It can be a valuable lesson to look back at the moments these buildings appeared. What was the vision that brought them into being, that imagined them as something wholly new?

Happily, the RAIC 2022 Gold Medal Jury has done just this, in awarding Jerome Markson its highest honour. Markson has spent his career creating just such works of architecture:  inscribed within their contexts, imbued with a masterful level of craft and character, and conceived foremost as settings for human interaction. His practice of nearly 60 years can only be described as omnivorous, embracing a wide range of building types and programs, from single family homes, to multi-family housing, to housing for the aged, to cultural and religious buildings, to medical and office buildings—even post-office prototypes, and yes, a floating cottage. He created notable buildings of distinction in all these categories, earning over 50 design awards in the course of his career. The longevity of Markson’s practice is a testament to his extraordinary commitment, dedication, and achievements in architecture and urbanism during a period of great change, and speaks to the continuous relevance of his architecture to diverse audiences inside and outside of the profession.

Through his diverse work, Markson pursued a more open and inclusive expression of modernity, one that moved away from the doctrinaire, object-focussed Modernism widely accepted in the mid-twentieth century when he began his practice. Architecture critic Christopher Hume has observed that Markson is “the rare architect who creates cities while designing buildings.” Indeed, Markson’s buildings are as attentive to the way they reshape their sites and affect the city as they are to providing rich possibilities within newly created spaces.

Early in life, Markson experienced the resonant complexities the city could present. Born in 1929, he grew up in downtown Toronto between two vibrant immigrant neighbourhoods, Kensington Market and the Ward (now vanished). His parents, Etta and Charles, were children themselves when they came to Toronto around 1900 as immigrants, from Lithuania and Poland respectively. The Markson family’s home still sits on the north side of Dundas Street, now facing the lilting portico of the Art Gallery of Ontario. The family lived on two floors above the street-level medical practice of Dr. Charles Markson. More than once, Markson’s father was paid with a chicken from patients who had no money to spare for medical care.

Seeing the struggles of his neighbours in the Depression years made a profound impact on Markson, inculcating a deep sense of obligation to help others, and a desire for greater social inclusivity. A keen observer, Markson also saw the dignity and vitality in more ‘ordinary’ buildings that constituted the fabric of the city around him—Toronto’s neighbourhoods filled with modest housing types, its mercantile blocks, storefronts, and warehouses.

Enrolling at the University of Toronto in 1948, Markson joined a class that spent its first year at drafting boards set up in a former bomb factory in Ajax, Ontario. Eric Arthur was a forceful presence in the faculty, and his arguments for recognizing the irreplaceable cultural value of the city’s heritage buildings resonated with Markson. Markson also discovered the work of the British Townscape movement, led by Gordon Cullen, Nicholas Pevsner, and others who argued that the incorporation of new, Modern buildings should be based on spatial relationships and visual sequences calibrated in relation to the existing urban context—counter to the Modernist preference for more singular, object-oriented buildings.

Another profound influence on Markson was Eliel Saarinen, whose pedagogy he encountered during a summer program at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. Saarinen’s philosophy of “always design[ing] a thing by thinking of it in its next biggest context—a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in city plan” struck a chord with Markson. At Cranbrook, Markson also met a talented ceramic artist from Winnipeg, Mayta Silver. They were married following Markson’s graduation in 1953, and after saving money to travel, embarked to Europe to experience firsthand the buildings Markson had studied in school.

The Marksons returned to Toronto and Jerome opened his office in 1955. It was an exhilarating moment to embark on practicing architecture. Urban planner Macklin Hancock summed up the spirit at that time: “Canada suddenly flowered, it wanted to be modern.” Markson’s architectural and urban works from the 1950s and 1960s, particularly those in Toronto, were created at a time when many were discussing the ideals of a progressive society within the context of post-war prosperity. Although fewer in number, his buildings outside Toronto, too, gave architectural expression to important social developments and innovations of their time. The emergence of socialized medicine was registered in Markson’s groundbreaking design for the Sault St. Marie Group Health Centre, demonstrating that a systemic overhaul in the name of greater social equity could also spark a more humane model for spaces of treatment. His thoughtful designs for speculative model homes at Seneca Heights and the density of his Concept 3 stacked townhouses in Bramalea suggested distinct alternatives to the self-same houses of a rapidly expanding suburbia. Markson’s Elliott Lake Plaza showed that the increasingly ubiquitous strip malls proliferating throughout Canadian cities could have civic potential. And, in a period of intensive post-war urbanization and consumerism, Markson forcefully recalled the importance of wilderness in the Canadian imaginary in such buildings as the Sherman Staff Lodge, hovering at the edge of Lake Temagami; the exuberant collection of buildings at Camp Manitou-Wabing; and the improvisational rusticity of The Shack, Uxbridge.

Architectural Practice as City-building

The question of not only where social housing for the needy should be built, but how it could better value—and even learn from—the existing city was central to Markson’s design of Alexandra Park Social Housing (with Klein & Sears and Webb Zerafa Menkes). This was Markson’s first public housing work and represented a radical departure from the sterile paradigm of concrete towers-in-the park. Markson and his collaborators proposed brick, mostly low-rise walk-ups with ground-level access, laid out as a series of undulating units with wood bay windows and individual entries, interspersed with garden courts configured to preserve heritage trees. All was consistent with the scale, and using the materials of, the surrounding urban housing. It was a humanistic retort to the state of housing for the ‘needy’ that to-date had been erected through massive urban clearance. While the architects’ plans to preserve key buildings within Alexandra Park’s site area (another groundbreaking idea for that era) were rejected, Markson achieved this goal a few years later. His Pembroke Mews Co-operative integrated historic and vernacular structures with new housing—one of the first urban infill projects in Toronto.

Later, Markson designed the critically acclaimed David B. Archer Co-operative Housing as part of the massive redevelopment of an industrial area south of the St. Lawrence Market. The Co-operative took shape as a combination of townhouses and apartments, with a seven-storey apartment building across from the linear Crombie Park, transitioning in height at abutting side streets to two- and three-storey townhouses. An assortment of intermediate-scale architectural elements—window surrounds, bay windows, corner posts, and porches—brought a sense of animation and identity to the red brick street elevations, each developed according to the street typologies they fronted. Built in the still-early years of postmodern architecture, the Archer Co-operative demonstrates the syntactical richness possible in the composition of architectural elements integrated into a scalar logic, and their role in creating both urban variety and continuity.

Markson’s nearby Market Square has been recognized and awarded for both its architecture and the exemplary quality of its urban design. Its sensitive siting and shrewd use of the courtyard typology allow the building to be relatively low-rise yet high-density, and its split massing constructs a visual and pedestrian axis with St. James Cathedral one block to the north. Urban designer Roger du Toit referred to the complex as an “essay in modern design.” The modulation of Market Square’s bulky exterior—from the expression of its structural frame and recessed infill panels, to the building’s generous windows with their elegant, recessed brick jambs, to the distribution of tall glass bays—suggests the forthright efficiency found in nearby industrial loft buildings, yet, in its refinement, Markson’s design stands apart.

The museum designed by Markson for the works of Group of Seven painter Frederick Horsman Varley in Unionville, Ontario, deftly negotiates between a historic city fabric and modern development. Markson placed his Varley Art Gallery slightly off-centre at the juncture of the quaint town centre and a new, wider road, creating an open plaza at the terminus to historic Main Street, while also mirroring the openness of parking surrounding the town’s nearby hockey rink. Writes critic Christopher Hume: “Markson’s willingness to serve the city, to blend with the urban fabric, mark him as an architect of rare selflessness and sensitivity.”

A Deeper Signature: Design, Experimentation, and Expression

Markson’s choreography of architectural program and site is clearly seen in his single-family house designs, a staple of his practice. Markson’s study of the emerging suburbs resulted in a diverse array of houses, each considering how the car engaged the domestic program, and how a house could better engage its site. The Moses, Smith, and Minden Residences, Seneca Heights Model Homes, and the Chatelaine Design Home ’63, as well as later houses such as the Enkin Residence and the Ravine Residence, are but a few examples of how Markson deftly orchestrated the routine movements of daily life within his rich architectural frameworks. 

Markson considered each iteration of a particular program or typology as a new opportunity to test and extend design solutions to the problem at hand. Rather than being concerned with establishing a signature identity for his work, he consistently sought new orders of program, space, sequence, material expression, and form. Markson’s design philosophy gave priority to an open, experimental process of inquiry and saw construction as a critical extension of his process. This, along with his commitment to work for a diverse mix of clients, led to a body of unique and distinct works of architecture.

Inventing a Diverse and Representative Material Idiom

Near the mid-point of Markson’s career, architect and theorist George Baird observed:

Markson has … pursued a quite individual course within the territory of Canadian architecture… [T]here is … in the best of his works a characteristic almost unique in contemporary Canadian architecture: a subconscious tactile iconography of the materiality of building, a materiality that is, for me, reminiscent of some aspects of the work of Aalto and Le Corbusier. Albeit an elusive characteristic of any contemporary architecture, this is particularly important in the Canadian context on account of its extreme rarity here.

-George Baird

Rather than based in a purely craft tradition, Markson’s architecture uses materials and building elements that communicate viscerally through experience. Diverse influences—particularly Aalto, Britain’s Townscape movement, Arthur, and Saarinen—but also, crucially, encounters with vernacular architecture both in Canada and in Europe, were instrumental in Markson’s development of a pluralistic, materially oriented approach, one that innately recognizes the intrinsic qualities of the city’s historic fabric.

Markson’s cultural and community works, despite their institutional programs, reflect his commitment to such material exploration. His Cedarvale Community Centre delineates the building’s utilitarian spaces—offices, changing areas—as a dense package of cellular rooms. That same utilitarian logic might have been extended to the collective community assembly space. Instead, Markson fashioned that space as an amorphous figure, a space at once explicitly about form, but also, at times, formless. The compound curvature of its primary exterior wall and its diffuse light sources contribute to a sense of shifting perceptual boundaries. The specificity of the wood ceiling and beams within the gathering space counter this ambiguity with a distinctly warm, immediate material presence.

His Regional Headquarters for the International Woodworkers of America is an essay in wood and brick: a lightly scaled, even delicate post-and-beam structure spans between two sidewalls of brick. Its interior spaces are lined with a textured wood tapestry emphasizing a sense of containment and interiority, strategically juxtaposed with views to a ravine, incorporating the larger landscape into the architectural ensemble. Other buildings for sites in natural settings also have a loosely expressive, improvisational quality, attributable to Markson’s choice of wood as a primary structural material. The incrementality of wood framing facilitates the minute adjustments that allow a wall to splay out, such as at his early buildings for Camp Manitou-Wabing; a roof to sweep and flare at Cedarvale Community Centre; and a large structure such as the Humber Arboretum to appear as a fragile, tree-like form hovering over the landscape.

Markson’s understanding that light is not only a medium of architectural expression, but also has the potential to heal, led to his invention of a new typology for medical facilities at his Sault Ste. Marie Group Health Centre, built at a time when the prospect of socialized medical care was being hotly debated across Canada. The ubiquity of the hospital atrium today and its current association with retail spaces may obscure what a real innovation Markson’s design was at the time. Markson excised an open core of light from what ordinarily would have been densely packed, functional floor plates. Architecture critic Hans Elte saw Markson’s innovation quite clearly, and his comments are worth quoting in full:

Among the agencies of atmosphere is light … It has played a major part in stimulating this remarkable space, resulting in an atmosphere of sheer lucidity, which incidentally, no photograph or film could accurately portray. Its designer has been roused by a love affair with light.

Over many medical institutions both large and small, there still hangs, in a rather remote way, something of the cloud of gloom always present in the ancient ‘maison de Dieu,’ a place where there was little hope for life, a place where one could go to die rather than to get well.

There is no doubt that it has been the great merit of this architect that he has been able to make a most capable attempt to reverse the symptoms of this phenomenon. Whilst walking through the building, it is manifest that he had a bold flair for the unusual and, a marked perception for the poetical.

-Hans Elte, architecture critic

An Architecture of Empathy and Dignity

Markson’s multi-unit housing works were an essential part of his practice. These projects were the fullest expression of Markson’s belief that architecture is not reserved for an elite class of users, but should rather be fundamentally democratic in its ability to frame lived space and its occupants with dignity. He has said, “Why should [Alexandra Park] be different-looking than houses for the more well-off? We are all human beings, for God’s sake.” His close attention to the design of housing units in that project—varied unit types with individual access to the ground, featuring architectural elements such as V-shaped bay windows conceived as “punctuation along the street”—brought a human scale to the housing complex, enriching the texture of residents’ daily experiences moving through pedestrian pathways throughout the site.

In True Davidson Acres/Metro Home for the Aged, Markson considered how each resident might use and occupy their living space, and their needs for privacy and social connection over time. He created an innovative unit plan for the rooms, allowing discrete territories and views to be claimed by each resident. In so doing, he refashioned a space where the extent of engagement became a matter of individual choice, preserving personal dignity and privacy while offering the potential for sociability. Creating ambiguity in a space precisely shaped, yet open to divergent uses and interpretations by its occupants, reveals the generosity in Markson’s architecture.

Cultivating Architecture as an Inclusive Spatial Setting

Understanding space as an empathic medium, and architecture as a material and spatial setting for human interaction and the appearance of the individual, recasts the object-focussed propensity of Modernism into a more inclusive construction. This is reflected in Markson’s photo-documentation of a number of his architectural works. Instead of sterile formal compositions, we see adults, children, families, friends, and sometimes pets—present, and occupied with their comings and goings, their hobbies, their conversations, and their play. Markson’s images provide insight into how a key aspect of his work was conceptualized: the character of his architectural settings is inseparable from the human characters who would be an integral part of those spaces. “If not for the people who will inhabit it, then who is the architecture for?” Markson has asked. 

When recorded, these images must have been arresting, even poignant. Today, some years later, the same photographs are certainly so – the familiar objects and appearances of everyday life, from objects in a household to how people dress, is more distant. Markson’s architectural settings impart the specificity of an individual’s experience at a particular point in time; because of this specificity, we can empathize with the shared aspects of that experience today.

Markson’s compassionate, humanistic approach to design ultimately transcended formal preoccupations in favour of a more immediate material and spatial dialogue with its users. A similar concern has been taken up anew within contemporary architectural practices, witnessed in the work of architects such as 2021 Pritzker Prize winners Lacaton & Vassal, who position their architecture with respect to the occupants of their buildings ‘completing’ the architecture in an active way. Decades earlier, Jerome Markson’s compassionate, humanistic approach to design transcended formal preoccupations in favour of a more immediate material and spatial dialogue with its users. The continued relevance of his architectural approach and works is evident.

Markson’s recognition of the essential role that constellations of individuals play as they appear, and are brought together, in the inclusive, collaborative construction of architectural space is at the core of what our most ambitious work as a profession can achieve. Perched as we are at the far edge, hopefully, of a global pandemic, still suffering from loss and social isolation that we have endured, many of us long for a return to the architectural settings of everyday life that Markson envisioned and built—an architecture that situates diverse human experiences in exquisitely composed and spatially rich settings, enabling participation within a shared social and temporal space.

Laura J. Miller is Associate Professor of Architecture at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Toronto’s Inclusive Modernity | The Architecture of Jerome Markson (Figure 1, 2020), and is currently working on a book about the history and urbanism of Toronto’s PATH network.

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PROJECT Pearl Block, Victoria, British Columbia

ARCHITECT D’Arcy Jones Architects

TEXT Paul Koopman

PHOTOS Ema Peter Photography

A four-storey rowhouse sits quietly on a tree-lined collector street in Victoria, BC, enjoying the camouflage of the foliage and a comfortable proximity to similarly sized townhouses and single-family detached homes. The building’s mass—rendered in deeply textured dark taupe stucco—presents as a series of articulated boxes that gently recede from the sidewalk and the mature London planes of Shelbourne Avenue. Confident, yet subdued, the design of Pearl Block finds balance in a modulated and family-friendly approach that builds on the typology of the rowhouse, incorporating elements that are at once new and historical. 

Completed this year, Pearl Block resulted from a collaboration between D’Arcy Jones Architects and Aryze Developments. D’Arcy Jones is a Vancouver-based practice that has made a name for itself designing single-family homes in the BC mainland; Pearl Block is the studio’s first multi-family housing project. Aryze started out as a Victoria-based custom home-builder, and then branched into development out of a desire to provide affordable urban infill housing, helping to counteract the city’s housing crisis.

Because of its triangular lot shape, Pearl Block’s site was considered a poor building site and had sat vacant for 65 years. Those constraints made it exactly the kind of project Aryze wanted to take on: a place where they could see the potential overlooked by others. They sought to create an attainable alternative to detached single family homes on the site, creating a set of high-quality, well-constructed places for families who admired modern architecture but could not afford a custom home.

To address the site’s geometric particularities, they engaged D’Arcy Jones Architects, who proposed a cluster of six rowhouse units in a sawtooth pattern, positioned around a common forecourt. Stucco was the choice of exterior finishing from the start, and was chosen to emulate the stucco of traditional Victorian homes built at the end of the 19th century. Initially, the City of Victoria’s Planning department was not on-side with the development: they found the stucco heritage approach to be antiquated, and objected to the “form and character” of the design. But they were won over after a favorable review by the local Architectural Design Panel, and a surprising show of support from the project’s neighbours.

In describing the public approvals process, D’Arcy Jones says that  the general public has an understandable fear of change, yet “too often, both sides are not respectful enough of one another.” In the design of projects like Pearl Block, he aims to make his buildings appealing to modern-minded residents and neighbours alike—blending newness and craft in a way that aligns well with Aryze’s commitment to using traditional building methods paired with innovative construction techniques and intelligent design. Jones adds, “Architecture has a responsibility to be good on other people’s terms.”

The site planning of Pearl Block exhibits solid urban design principles. First, the size and massing of the building matches the neighbourhood scale, yet confidently positions itself within the language of modern architecture. The design carefully considers neighbours’ access to natural light and restricts overlook into their yards. Jones likens the projecting wing walls of the façade to horse blinders, designed to focus residents’ views toward the street, rather than peering into neighbours’ lots. Pearl Block’s front doors likewise face the street, with garage doors turned towards the side yard. Large windows from the second-floor living rooms further enhance a connection to the front, adopting the “eyes on the street” approach promoted by urbanist Jane Jacobs. 

The exterior of Pearl Block is modern, yet it avoids current design preoccupations with tight, shiny facades. Instead, this architecture evokes a strain of modernism more in line with the coarse walls of Marcel Breuer or the rougher period of Le Corbusier. The rhythm of the stucco panels and recessed windows expresses bulky proportions, producing a play of deep shadows across the façades. The exposed concrete base further adds to the sense of massiveness.

Approaching the units on foot, one is aware of the continuous cantilevered soffit above the main entrances and garage doors. According to Jones, this cantilever was necessary to accommodate vehicle turning clearances. The result is a common portico that protects the doors from rain and behaves as a threshold between the public and private realms. Near the entry, a stocky plywood guardrail guides residents up to the second floor.

At the main living area on the second floor, it becomes evident that the units are L-shaped in plan. The kitchen faces a large sliding glass door and enclosed balcony to the south, while the living area faces east, towards the street. Although compact, there is a subtle dynamism to this space, thanks to multiple natural light sources and the dual orientation of the room. Jones points to his interest in creating “nooks and crannies” in contrast to the linear spatial experience common in townhouse and multi-family designs. He describes space in terms of solid and void, adding that people respond to this on an emotional level. “So many apartments are a version of the glass tube,” says Jones, adding that having multiple spaces—rather than a single large one—allows more possibilities for family life.

Sleeping areas are grouped on the third floor. Here, the designer and developer have opted for three smaller bedrooms rather than two larger ones, citing the benefit of an extra room for a child’s bedroom or small study. Jones describes the project as “working with minimums.” People who are accustomed to a master bedroom with room for a couch, he says, would find these bedrooms too small.

Continuing up the stairs, a large operable skylight opens to the roof. Here, the sense of compression experienced on the bedroom floor gives way to open sky and a wood-enclosed roof garden the size of the entire floorplate. Jones describes this space as the “yard” of the house. Cedar-lined perimeter walls extend five feet tall, designed to match typical fence heights in the city.  There is a sense of spacious luxury here, paired with privacy thanks to the tall enclosing walls.

Jones describes his design process as working from the inside out. For him, the design of bedrooms begins from the position of the bed and moves out from there; dining areas begin from the table; and so on. The scale and proportion of rooms comes first, and it’s only after the interiors are resolved that exterior design is explored. He adds that his studio is constantly drawing, that drawing is like thinking out loud. “We are only going forward,” says Jones: he encourages his studio to avoid rebuilding work in reaction to unexpected site conditions, instead choosing to adapt the design to meet new conditions.

As in all of Jones’ projects, there is a sense of careful consideration to details and materiality in Pearl Block. “We are never too busy to let anything be,” says Jones. Indeed, there is persistence at work here: a continuity of line and simple elegance that does not rely on the use of expensive materials.

Jones speaks about his desire to introduce both newness and history into his designs as if they are two sides of a coin. Ancient forms of housing inspire his work. “How people live hasn’t changed much,” he says. “I think the average person could go into a house in Pompeii today and would appreciate the experience of rooms and the hierarchies. They could move into them with modern details and be super comfortable—it would feel as fresh as if it was made yesterday.”

“A lot of people, if they are really honest with themselves, would like a door on the street and a relationship to the street. They’d like to have some kind of garden, not have someone above and below them, and not ride an elevator,” says Jones. “The rowhouse is an ancient building block and if everybody did it, everywhere, we wouldn’t need all these towers, which I think are not that appealing. I think people are sometimes looking for an overly complicated, magical design solution: but the solution is already done, and it exists in the rowhouse.”

Paul Koopman, MRAIC, is a Senior Project Architect at Cascadia Architects in Victoria.

DEVELOPER & BUILDER Aryze Developments | ARCHITECT TEAM D’Arcy Jones, Jesse Ratcliffe, Jessica Gu, Rebecca Boese | STRUCTURAL RJC Engineers | CIVIL Westbrook Consulting Ltd. | MECHANICAL AME Group | ELECTRICAL AES Engineering | LANDSCAPE Biophilia Collective | INTERIORS D’Arcy Jones Architects | AREA Six 3-bedroom homes ranging from 111 to 164 m2 | BUDGET Withheld | COMPLETION November 2020

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PROJECT Grosvenor Ambleside, West Vancouver, BC

ARCHITECT James K.M. Cheng Architects

TEXT Sean Ruthen

Discussions of the “missing middle” often focus on densifying single-family lots, or sites made by consolidating a handful of lots. But occasionally, the opportunity arises to develop a larger infill parcel in an existing neighbourhood. If done right, this can result in much-needed housing while enlivening the public realm.

This was the case with a project our firm, James K.M. Cheng Architects, recently completed after a decade of work. Grosvenor Ambleside occupies a 180-metre-long waterfront site in West Vancouver. For many years, the site had been home to a gas station, several single-storey retail buildings from the 1950s and 60s, and surface parking. It also housed an aging Ron Thom-designed police station that’s since been replaced with a newer facility elsewhere. The site sloped down to the south, where built-up railway tracks created a 1.2-metre-high visual barrier to beach and ocean views.

For our team, the idea of a new development here was an opportunity to inject new life into the aging neighbourhood block, improve access and enjoyment of the waterfront, and create a much-needed heart for the neighbourhood. We were working on a number of other master plans at the same time as Ambleside, including the 14-acre former TransLink bus barns site in central Vancouver, now set to become a new community for over 2,000 people, and an eight-acre strip mall in Coquitlam, being transformed into a transit-oriented development. Our office thinks of these projects as acts of “urban mending”—where an outdated commercial or industrial area is reworked as part of a more sustainable community.

For Ambleside, it was no small feat to see the 98-unit mixed-use development project through to reality, starting with a complex land assembly process led by Grosvenor, and followed by a robust public engagement process—perhaps the most comprehensive of the many that our team has seen in the past 40 years. A development of this density on a prime waterfront site would simply not have been possible without the support of the community—from the residents of the District of West Vancouver to the long-time locals around Ambleside Beach.

From the beginning, it was clear that the project needed to do more than provide high-end condos for its residents: it needed to create a strong public realm that would serve the entire community. Raising the ground floor to the level of the railway tracks was a first strategic move in this direction: it allowed for the commercial units (and not just the residents above) to enjoy views of Stanley Park and the Georgia Strait, while also providing flood protection against the annual King Tide and rising sea levels.

Early on during the public consultations, the team also settled on a terraced building form and a mid-block breezeway. The terraces help preserve views for neighbours in a small cluster of apartment blocks across the street, while the breezeway opened views to the beach for passing pedestrians and cars on Marine Drive. The upper floor condos pivot slightly from the ground floor street grid to align with the area’s overall north-south orientation, further opening up views and minimizing the building’s bulk.

The mid-block passageway quickly evolved into an all-weather living room for the community, complete with a transparent glass-and-wood canopy spanning 60 feet between the buildings. Tree Snag, a 30-foot-tall sculpture by Douglas Coupland, occupies the central space, complementing other works around the site by the same artist. Original paintings by the late Gordon Smith, who passed away in early 2020, adorn the residential lobbies. The developer, Grosvenor, has also forged partnerships with the Kay Meek Art Centre and other local arts organizations for Christmas performances and other special events to take place in the sheltered outdoor space.

The development also aims to contribute towards housing availability and sustainability. The 98 high-end, home-like units are the kind of places intended to appeal to aging boomers interested in opting for a lower-maintenance condo with waterfront views, and a chance to live in the ‘five-minute city.’ Such occupants could produce the knock-on effect of freeing up nearby existing houses for use by families. Currently, West Vancouver is Canada’s wealthiest municipality, with an average household net worth of over $4.45 million dollars—but much of that is tied up in the value of under-occupied homes that were purchased at much lower prices, and that owners can’t afford to relocate from without an alternative such as Ambleside.

On each floor, deep overhangs contribute to solar shading and weather protection while protecting each unit’s views; extensive planters allow for the capture and slow release of rainwater before being discharged at ground level. Nodding to the area’s West Coast Modern legacy homes, Grosvenor Ambleside sports long horizontal lines, wood parallam beams in the breezeway, generous glazing, and stunning views of the water and mountains.

Herman Hertzberger once wrote about the warp and weft of urban design. He commented that architecture and its surrounding context—the roads and infrastructure that support each building—combine and complement each other in a successful design. We see our work at Ambleside and other large sites around Metro Vancouver as part of this greater whole. These projects participate in an ongoing revitalization of the city’s infrastructure, mending city streets while introducing new building fabric.

At Ambleside, we’re proud of what we’ve accomplished, both for residents and for the greater community. Through public engagement and a shared vision of how we wish to live together, we believe that beyond providing housing, we’ve forged a strong public realm in this key community site—a place from which we can stand back to look at the state of our world, and find our way back home.

Sean Ruthen, FRAIC, is the current RAIC Regional Director for BC and Yukon, and a senior architect at James K.M. Cheng Architects.

CLIENT Grosvenor | ARCHITECT TEAM James KM Cheng (FRAIC), Adeline Lai, Don Chan, Dennis Selby, Ingolf Blanken Barbosa, Luc Melanson, Stanton Hung, Sara Kasaei, Ashley Ortlieb, Fang Hsu, Bruce Yung, Candace Lange | STRUCTURAL Read Jones Christoffersen | MECHANICAL Integral Group | ELECTRICAL Smith + Andersen | LANDSCAPE DESIGN ARCHITECT SWA | LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT OF RECORD Durante Kreuk | CIVIL Binnie | SURVEYOR Butler Sundvick | INTERIORS Mitchell Freedland Design | CODE LMDG Building Code Consultants | ENVELOPE RDH Building Science | GEOTECHNICAL Thurber Engineering | ACOUSTICS BKL Consultants | SUSTAINABILITY Integral Group | WAYFINDING Bunt & Associates | CONTRACTOR Ledcor Group | AREA 24,619 m2 | BUDGET $347 M | COMPLETION Spring 2021

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