PHOTOS Ziechen Zhou
In recent years, housing has returned to prominence as an acute issue for Canadians, rising in salience in our municipal, provincial, and now federal politics. Across North America, the sense of a housing crisis and its proposed remedies have proved capable of both hardening and fissuring existing socio-cultural coalitions, with “gentrification,” zoning reform, “gentle density,” the “fifteen-minute city,” and greenbelt development provoking heated reactions. The sense of urgency around these issues was exemplified by Architects Against Housing Alienation (AAHA)’s “Not for Sale!” campaign, the latest iteration of the Canadian Pavilion at last summer’s Venice Architecture Biennale.
For many Canadians, these debates often revolve around access to housing as a government-sponsored savings vehicle or an aspirational consumption product—in other words, matters of abundance. But the rising numbers of unhoused persons living in our cities, together with increasing awareness of desperate housing conditions in many First Nations communities, have also focused attention upon housing needs requiring immediate rectification—matters of scarcity.
Whatever the cause of such anxieties and failures—speculative market overreach or sclerotic regulation, population growth or declining household sizes, increasing wealth or economic precarity—they are now central issues facing Canadian architects, linking debates from the Global North and South in our current world of uneven and unsteady globalization.
Curated by McGill professors Vikram Bhatt and Ipek Türeli, and doctoral candidate Ariele Dionne-Krosnick, a recent exhibition at the Peter Guo-Hua Fu School of Architecture charts their university’s Minimum Cost Housing Group (MCHG) and its five decades of sustained research into the scarcity side of this wicked problem. Presented last fall, Design for the Global Majority showcases a plethora of ground-up, low-tech, participatory approaches developed by the MCHG to address housing and related issues within their local contexts, all under conditions of extreme material and financial constraint. These efforts, with their underlying humanist imagination—an offshoot of 1970s critiques of modernist dogma and functionalist overreach—retain their salience today as approaches to dealing with constrained resources and growing ecological emergency.
While the figures involved in creating and sustaining the MCHG are fascinating—Álvaro Ortega, Witold Rybczynski, and Vikram Bhatt have directed the program in turn since its founding in 1971—the exhibition wisely focuses upon the group’s experiments and output, not its leaders’ biographies. In keeping with the MCHG ethos of sustainability and cost-minimization, the exhibition is built using donated, recycled, and second-hand materials where possible. Densely filled with remarkable objects and documents, Design for the Global Majority offers a humble manifesto for iterative, incremental change. It’s an affirmative response to Le Corbusier’s challenge of “Architecture or Revolution?” set out in Towards an Architecture (1923).
The exhibition is organized in five thematic groupings, each illustrated with multiple examples from the MCHG’s praxis. UPCYCLE presents the group’s early experiments with material recuperation and reuse, especially attempts to develop sulphur-based concrete as a usable building material. Widely available as a waste product of petroleum refining (as well as in areas of volcanic activity), sulphur was used by the MCHG to make interlocking concrete blocks, colourful tiles, and waterproofing agents. The concept was tested with the ECOL house built on McGill’s MacDonald campus in 1972 (a visiting Buckminster Fuller gave the two-room structure its moniker), in a community structure for the Cree National in Saddle Lake in the Amiskwacīwiyiniwak region of central Alberta, and with the Maison Lessard, a fully winterized building in St-François-du-Lac, Quebec. While the sulphur blocks’ poor insulative value and flammability prevented their widespread adoption, the MCHG’s experiments belong to a rich vein of 1970s experimentation with material reuse.
HARNESS addresses issues of hygiene, showing MCHG’s initiatives to conserve precious fresh water while offering DIY sanitation systems built with off-the-shelf hardware and locally available materials. Solar water purification equipment, garbage bag solar water heaters, and mist showers were all intended to provide bodily dignity without increased water use. One of the MCHG’s most successful publications, Save The Five Gallon Flush! (1973) provided instructions for building composting toilets.
With PLAN, the exhibition shifts scale from building and sanitization techniques to urban development proposals in India, China, and Mexico. Working with institutional partners, the group meticulously documented the architecture and spatial practice of informal settlements and their inhabitants. MCHG’s collaboration with Balkrishna Doshi exemplifies this way of working. The group’s study of Indore in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh was published in How the Other Half Builds (1984–90), and then applied in Doshi’s Aranya low-cost housing project, for which the MCHG designed a 200-house neighbourhood.
In China, the MCHG studied rural inhabitants’ housing needs, leading to demonstration projects in Sichuan province and Chongqing city; this research was published in Housing a Billion (1993). The MCHG’s approach took the form of “village upgrading”—an alternative developmental approach intended to house farmers and support rural development. A similar concern for collaboratively improving challenging conditions is evident in the MCHG’s project for La Esperanza in Zihuatanejo, Mexico. Entitled “Fingers of Hope,” this analysis of an informal settlement for migrant workers takes its title from the steel rebars extending skywards from dwellings, ready for upward expansion when resources permit.
LEVERAGE explores the MCHG’s research into urban agriculture through rooftop and container gardens in Montreal, Sri Lanka, Uganda, and Argentina. Locally, the group played a role in the growing popularity of urban food production as a means of greening the city and addressing food insecurity. Many visitors to the McGill campus in recent years will have seen the “Edible Campus” project, a 120-square-metre container garden on a disused concrete terrace, built in partnership with Montreal’s Santropol Roulant Meals-on-Wheels program. Decades earlier, the “Rooftop Wastelands” demonstration garden (1974) topped a Montreal community centre. In a strange repurposing of one of Le Corbusier’s five principles, here, the “wasted” space (and frequent heat island) of the urban roof became a socially meaningful and ecologically productive oasis.
HACK presents more recent MCHG research in collaboration with First Nations and Inuit communities in northern Ontario and Quebec. This research focuses on the improvisational building cultures developed by these nations in the face of systematic exclusion and atrocious housing conditions. One case study looks at the Cree village of Chisasibi in the Eeyou Istchee territory, which was created after the displacement of communities to make way for Hydro Québec’s James Bay project—the very energy wealth which makes possible the material and ecological excess of lives in Canada’s south. Other projects in this section include the Kuujjuarapik Planning Workshop, which developed a masterplan with culturally resonant housing layouts, and the Kuujjuaq Hackathon, at which an outdoor pavilion was built from materials salvaged from the village dump.
Across these five themes, research is presented as an iterative process of making. In each case, a chain of collaborative experiments is generated from—and tested in—specific contexts. Design for the Global Majority joins with exhibitions such as the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s 1973: Sorry, Out of Gas (2007), which featured the MCHG’s ECOL House, to argue that many answers to our present crises lie in the past, not the future. Or, to be more precise, that low-tech solutions derived from current practices often provide the best solutions to our many challenges.
How convincing is this argument? When contemplating the MCHG’s 50-year span, the exhibition visitor is faced with contradictory conclusions. On the one hand, the ethos and knowledge produced by the MCHG are more relevant than ever: if the planet’s available resources are diminishing, then surely they must be used judiciously and shared equitably. On the other, the biggest challenges to the MCHG’s proposed solutions come from the massive increase in living standards achieved by the “global majority” since the research group was founded. While very welcome, the rising affluence in countries of the Global South such as India and China—alongside accelerating wastefulness in the Global North—has exacerbated many ecological challenges, as greater numbers of global citizens enjoy more prosperous, energy-intensive, and resource-intensive lives. There are no easy answers, but the MCHG’s research approach, grounded in observation and iterative design, offers a mode of inquiry with which to articulate the right questions.
Architectural historian Peter Sealy is an Assistant Professor at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto.
As appeared in the April 2024 issue of Canadian Architect magazine