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HOUSING SPECTRUM
18 THE BUTTERFLY AND FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH
Revery Architecture adds a striking landmark to Vancouver’s skyline—along with tangible benefits for both residents and the wider public. TEXT Adele Weder
26 BEAVERTON HEIGHTS
A transitional housing project by Montgomery Sisam Architects expands the aesthetic possibilities of modular construction. TEXT Elsa Lam
32 LE CHRISTIN AND STUDIOS DU PAS
Two new buildings in Montreal—by Atelier Big City and L. McComber in collaboration with Inform—offer dignity to people experiencing homelessness. TEXT Odile Hénault
4
VIEWPOINT
Building Toronto’s missing middle, one multi-unit rental mid-rise at a time.
8
NEWS
Remembering Dick Mah SaiChew, 1928-2025.
13 AIA CANADA JOURNAL
Four Canadian educators on addressing the affordable housing crisis through partnerships, research, and design studios.
38
PRACTICE
A new CMHC Housing Catalogue revives a model pioneered 75 years ago. John Lorinc asks: will it work in the 21st century?
42
INSITES
Yellowknife-based Kristel Derkowski on the driving factors behind the Northern housing crisis and ways to start addressing it.
48
BOOKS
New volumes on the history of the barrack, James Strutt’s round houses, and sustainable housing in a circular economy.
50
BACKPAGE
A shelter for Indigenous women, designed by LGA Architectural Partners, offers a place of nurture and grounding for its clients.
COVER Le Christin by Atelier Big City, in Montreal, Quebec. Photo by Scott Norsworthy
GENTLE DENSITY IN ACTION
Gerrard Healthy Housing, at Gerrard and Main in Toronto, delivers exactly the kind of “gentle density” that has been much discussed and desired in the city. The eight-unit walk-up rental building with two laneway houses replaces a single-family home, while carefully integrating with its walkable neighbourhood.
But achieving this outcome was no easy matter. To streamline approvals, TMU professor Cheryl Atkinson, of Atkinson Architect, aimed to design with no variances. “Everything’s to the minimum in terms of distance between the attached four-plexes and the laneway units,” says Rolf Paloheimo, of P&R Development, who also acted as project manager. “We built to the maximum height within 100 millimetres.”
Atkinson had designed a panellized, netzero missing middle housing unit exhibited at DX ’s EDIT festival as part of a TMU research project; Paloheimo was the client and developer behind the 1996 CMHC Riverdale Healthy House, a model sustainable development designed by Martin Liefhebber. For Gerrard Healthy Housing, they set out to create as close to Passive House as possible, specifying all-electric heat pumps and ERVs, using wood framing, and deploying blown-in-cellulose insulation to achieve a quiet and airtight R45-R65 envelope although stopping short of installing tripleglazed windows.
“We wanted to make it reproducible and affordable,” says Paloheimo. “Part of my argument for doing this scale of development is that if you stay in part 9 [of the building code], the construction is a lot lighter, the consultant load is lighter. You’re stuck with higher land costs, but costs are quite a bit lower to build,” he adds. The construction costs for the project tallied up to $300 per square foot, and the all-in cost for the project was $650 per square foot about half the square-foot cost of condo construction.
Atkinson’s sensitive design provides natural light on three sides of all but two units, ample cross-ventilation and closet space, and office nooks that overlook entry stairs as well as façades detailed to fit in with the scale of neighbourhood. Details like bespoke mailboxes add polish to the composition.
The financial success of the project depended largely on government incentives for housing: just before construction started, the province waived HST on rental developments, and the City exempted four-plexes from development charges.
Paloheimo’s project management of the endeavour ensured the project stayed on track. He kept a close eye on the prices tendered by the general contractor, and ended up finding some of the trades on his own developing such a good rapport that he bought them cakes from a nearby patisserie at the end of the project. Both Atkinson and Paloheimo also befriended the neighbours, one of whom provided temporary power from her home when the hydro connection was delayed.
Can this kind of success be replicated at scale? Paloheimo is cautiously hopeful, and plans to continue with small-scale development projects in Toronto. But he acknowledges that it’s not an endeavour for the faint of heart. “You have a house that used to be just four walls and a roof,” he says. “And then we’re gradually adding complexity. If you’re doing sustainable housing, it’s got to have a certain R-value, a certain airtightness. So it creates headwinds if you want to make affordable housing.”
The bigger problem, he says, is the financialization of housing unlike a car, which you expect to lose value and cost money each year, we expect our homes to continually increase in value. “If we could get away from that, we could focus on what’s really important about housing: which is comfort, space, light, services.”
EDITOR
ELSA LAM, FRAIC, HON. OAA
ART DIRECTOR ROY GAIOT
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
ANNMARIE ADAMS, FRAIC
ODILE HÉNAULT
LISA LANDRUM, MAA, AIA, FRAIC
DOUGLAS MACLEOD, NCARB FRAIC
ADELE WEDER, FRAIC
ONLINE EDITOR
LUCY MAZZUCCO
SUSTAINABILITY ADVISOR
ANNE LISSETT, ARCHITECT AIBC, LEED BD+C
VICE PRESIDENT & SENIOR PUBLISHER
STEVE WILSON 416-441-2085 x3
SWILSON@CANADIANARCHITECT.COM
ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER
FARIA AHMED 416 441-2085 x5
FAHMED@CANADIANARCHITECT.COM
CIRCULATION CIRCULATION@CANADIANARCHITECT.COM
PRESIDENT & EXECUTIVE PUBLISHER
A set of
PROJECTS
St. Lawrence Market North reopens in Toronto
Toronto’s beloved St. Lawrence Market celebrated the grand opening of its redeveloped North building in May. The design, by London, UK-based Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners (RSHP) and local architect Adamson Associates Architects, was the winning entry in a 2010 twostage design competition.
The new building houses the established Saturday Farmers’ Market and Sunday Antique Market, along with courtrooms for Toronto Court Services and administrative offices on the upper floors, and a 250-space underground parking garage. The complex replaces an existing onestorey building that was primarily used for weekend markets.
The St. Lawrence Market Complex has served as a City landmark for more than 200 years and remains one of the most valuable historical sites in Toronto. The new complex is designed around a covered street bookended by views to St. Lawrence Market’s south building, and to St. Lawrence Hall to the north.
toronto.ca
Gordon B. Shrum Building opens at UBC
The University of British Columbia has officially opened the Gordon B. Shrum Building, the new home for the university’s School of Biomedical Engineering, and Canada’s first purpose-built facility for biomedical engineering.
Designed by Patkau Architects with collaborating firm Architecture49, the building will provide a home for the School, replacing its previously scattered locations across UBC’s Vancouver campus. The building, named in honour of philanthropist Gordon B. Shrum, will bring together researchers, students and industry partners under one roof to advance biomedical research, education and innovation.
The five-storey, 158,000-square-foot facility includes specialized labs, collaborative research spaces, and teaching facilities to support biomedical engineering and life sciences innovation. Researchers will be able to use the space to develop new medical devices, artificial intelligence-driven diagnostics, and lifesaving treatments, while students will gain hands-on training experience. ubc.ca
WHAT’S NEW
Picoplanktonics premieres at Venice Biennale
As part of the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, Canada presents Picoplanktonics : a 3D -printed living artwork incorporating cyanobacteria a global first at the intersection of architecture, biotechnology, and art.
The installation transforms the Canada Pavilion into an aquatic micro-ecosystem, where architectural structures grow, evolve, and naturally degrade alongside their living components. Designed according to regenerative architecture principles, Picoplanktonics is designed as a breathing organism interacting with its environment, prompting reflection on potential futures of the built environment.
Picoplanktonics is led by the Living Room Collective, headed by biodesigner Andrea Shin Ling alongside core team members Nicholas Hoban, Vincent Hui and Clayton Lee. It is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts. The exhibition runs until November 23, 2025. canadacouncil.ca
Canada and the UK sign reciprocity agreement
A mutual recognition agreement (MRA) was signed between the UK’s Architects Registration Board (ARB) and Canada’s Regulatory Organizations of Architecture in Canada / Regroupement des Ordres d’Architectes du Canada (ROAC) in Toronto on April 23, 2025.
The agreement allows eligible architects who are registered in the UK or Canada to benefit from a streamlined process to practice their profession in the two countries.
“The agreement opens significant new opportunities for architects in the UK and Canada to collaborate, building on the strong professional partnerships that already exist between the two countries. It will at the same time maintain the high standards the public have a right to expect,” said Alan Kershaw, chair of the Architects Registration Board.
The agreement is applicable to:
T hose who have obtained Canadian Architectural Certification Board (CACB) -accredited qualifications, or who have achieved the same standard following certification, and who have additionally completed the Canadian experience requirement and licensing examination
T hose in the UK who have obtained ARB -accredited qualifications and registered with the ARB
T hose who have registered through passing the Prescribed Exam at Part 1 and Part 2 level and additionally completed a UK Part 3
The streamlined process will involve obtaining a letter of good standing from the regulatory body in the architect’s home country (ie. from ROAC in Canada, or the ARB in the UK), followed by further
ABOVE
3D-printed structures on display at the Canada Pavilion of the Venice Biennale are the largest living material structures produced using a first-of-its-kind biofabrication platform capable of printing living structures at an architectural scale.
light assessment to ensure architects understand what is necessary to practice safely and effectively where they wish to register.
There are different fees and application processes for registering in Canada and the UK via the MRA , although both are streamlined. For Canadian architects looking to apply for UK licensure, applicants must undertake and pass a UK Adaptation Assessment (UKAA)
The process includes submitting a career CV, providing written responses to a series of scenario-based questions to demonstrate the ability to practise safely and effectively in the UK , and undergoing a professional interview based on their written responses.
For those UK architects seeking to register in Canada, the process involves completing four modules that take approximately two hours each to complete, which focus on practice areas unique to Canada, such as code requirements. An ARB representative explained that applicants would be expected to know, for instance, that different cities in Canada have different planning regulations, but would not be not be tested on the content of those regulations, nor of the building code. The streamlined process applies to all areas of Canada, including Quebec, where there is no French language test as part of the process.
“This agreement further strengthens the longstanding and historic relationship between the UK and Canada, as Commonwealth partners,” said Ian R. Mc Donald, chair of the ROAC
ARB ’s role in developing the MRA was in part supported by funding through the UK D epartment for Business and Trade’s Recognition Agreements Grant Programme. The ROAC ’s role, through the Architectural Institute of British Columbia (secretariat for the MRA), was in part supported by the Province of British Columbia’s Credential Assessment Improvement Fund. arb.org.uk / roac.ca
IN MEMORIAM
Dick Mah Sai-Chew, 1928-2025
As every architect knows, architecture is a team sport, and few architects have been better team players than Dick Mah Sai-Chew. As a job captain at Thompson Berwick & Pratt and later The Thom Partnership, he helped oversee the creation of some of the country’s most complex architectural commissions, including the B.C. Electric Building, Trent University, and Shaw Festival Theatre.
Sai-Chew was born in Vancouver in 1928, and was raised by his father, a Chinese immigrant who worked as a chef. He never knew his mother. “He was a very loving father, but we never discussed my mother,” recalled Sai-Chew in a 2021 interview with this writer. “It was only years later when my wife, Susan, asked him point blank: ‘What nationality was Dick’s mother?’ And it was then that he said, for the first time, ‘Oh, she was Swedish.’”
He grew up in the city’s Chinatown district, at a time when the city around him was rife with racism. “The best thing my dad ever did for me, other than caring for me, of course, is take me to China when I was seven years old,” recalled Sai-Chew in the 2021 interview. “I had just started grade two and he took me to South China, to the Taishan District in Guangdong, where I met my relatives there and absorbed the culture.” He and his father stayed in China for three years. “To be of mixed race, you could always be torn: who are you? But I felt I was Chinese, and that’s because of my father taking me to China for those years, so I could speak Cantonese and the village dialect.”
Back in Vancouver, Sai-Chew finished his schooling, and found woodworking to be his favourite subject. “So I decided, without know-
25_004308_Canadian_Architect_JUN_CN Mod: April 15, 2025 3:56 PM Print: 04/30/25 9:05:54 AM page 1 v7
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ing what architecture was, that I would be an architect. Working with wood, with your hands and directly with the materials, that’s what appealed to me. I didn’t think about the design so much.”
He enrolled in the University of British Columbia’s fledgling School of Architecture, then headed by its founding director, Fred Lasserre. But Lasserre, a Swiss-born European modernist, did not make a strong impression on Sai-Chew. “You could tell he wanted everything to be clean, in a grid, all boring as hell! That was not a design-inspiring attitude to instill in a young architect,” he recalled many decades later.
After his 1952 graduation, his first job was with a local firm headed by an English architect. “After a while, I thought to myself: This is a dead end, working in this atmosphere. Then I got a job with a structural engineer, who was a consultant to Thompson Berwick and Pratt,” Vancouver’s pre-eminent architecture firm. At the time, that firm was completing a transition from neoclassical architecture to European modernism endorsed by the two younger partners, Bob Berwick and Ned Pratt. Sai-Chew arrived just in time for the firm’s landmark commission to design the first modernist high-rise in Western Canada: the 1957 B.C. Electric Building.
Pratt consigned his star architect, Ron Thom, to lead the design of B.C. Electric, and Sai-Chew served as the job captain, working literally at Thom’s side during the two years from project conception to completion. With its then-groundbreaking 21-storey, 889-metre height and curtainwall façade, it required a satellite office devoted exclusively to the project. The B.C. Electric garnered international acclaim for its design and engineering, its success made possible in part by Sai-Chew’s deft coordination of its numerous designers, administrators, and engineers.
Working together on the B.C. Electric project helped forge a strong bond between Thom and Sai-Chew, who served as a quiet, competent, stalwart friend and colleague, often keeping things together on a project during bouts of Thom’s notoriously erratic behaviour. Like Thom, Sai-Chew appreciated Frank Lloyd Wright and made a pilgrimage to Taliesin West to experience first-hand Wright’s approach to the gradation of space and light.
In 1960, Sai-Chew relocated with his wife to Montreal and became a staff architect for CBC, which was then in the process of building a series of local headquarters across the country. “CBC had tons of money, but no creative ambitions in terms of architecture,” he recalled. “But [the experience] wasn’t wasted for me. It was the opportunity to see Canada, of which I had no inkling.”
In 1965, when Ron Thom was grappling with the commission to design the Trent University masterplan and main campus, he pleaded with Sai-Chew to join his newly independent firm. Sai-Chew agreed, and he moved to Peterborough to oversee the huge multi-year project. He became a full-fledged partner in 1970.
At The Thom Partnership, Sai-Chew played a key role in many of the firm’s most important projects, including the Prince Hotel and Metropolitan Toronto Zoo. He briefly moved back in Vancouver, from 1980-1982, during the firm’s temporary expansion into Vancouver. After Ron Thom’s death in 1986, he remained with the firm and its four surviving partners, who changed the name of The Thom Partnership to the Colborne Architectural Group.
Although his tenure at The Thom Partnership was challenged by economic gyrations and Thom’s well-known struggle with alcohol, Sai-Chew never regretted his long tenure with the firm and its erratic leader. “There was a tendency to be completely dominated designwise by Ron,” recalled Sai-Chew in a 2011 interview with this writer. “Having said that, I still feel that Ron had that ability to draw out the best in a person.”
Dick Sai-Chew was predeceased by his wife Susan Sai-Chew (née Woo), and leaves his companion Sinikka Price, and his daughters Lydia and Trish.
-Adele Weder
ABOVE LEFT Sai-Chew circa mid-1950s, around the time he joined Thompson Berwick Pratt. ABOVE RIGHT Sai-Chew with The Thom Partnership associate Bob McIntyre in the late 1970s.
ADDENDUM
On Shirley Blumberg
Our coverage of 2025 RAIC Gold Medal winners Marianne McKenna and Shirley Blumberg (Gold Medal Supplement, May CA) mistakenly omitted a short essay by Ron McCoy, University Architect for Princeton University. We’re pleased to present his contribution here, reflecting on Shirley Blumberg’s role in the architectural evolution of the Princeton campus.
Shirley Blumberg’s architecture brings life to the values of communities. Through the beauty of her designs and her leadership within the profession, Shirley has made remarkable contributions to contemporary architecture throughout North America. I can speak intimately about her work at Princeton University and I see clearly the deep traces of her curiosity and spirit in every one of her projects.
Over the past fifteen years Princeton has grown faster than at any time in its 279-year history, and no architect has touched this era of campus-making as much as Shirley. Her remarkable range of projects includes the complete transformation of a Collegiate Gothic laboratory into a home for our Economics faculty, an equally complete yet subtle transformation of a mid-century modern masterpiece by Minoru Yamasaki, and a new home for our Facilities department.
We ask our architects to provide stewardship for the remarkable experience of the Princeton campus and to guide the campus fabric into the future, creating an architecture that is authentic, specific to Princeton, and expressive of our community and our values. To accomplish this at the level of excellence to which we aspire requires an architect who can read the fabric of the historic campus;
one who can listen, with empathy, to the aspirations of our community; lead a process of discovery; and employ a contemporary sense of craft that resonates with the unique identity and sense of place of Princeton. Shirley’s gifts of insight, humility and creativity have been a perfect match to our aspirations.
Each of our projects seek to create a welcoming sense of belonging for our increasingly diverse community and we make every effort to identify and support diversity within the architectural profession. Through her advocacy for women in the profession and her collaboration with Indigenous architects, Shirley has been an exemplary collaborator in these efforts.
When future Princetonians look back on the current generation of campus history, they will recognize the beginning of a new era of architecture shaped by a heightened sense of responsibility to the environment. This distinctive new generation of campus-making reflects Shirley’s influence. As the architectural leader of our 2026 Campus Plan, she successfully advocated for the creation of a Sustainability Advocacy Committee, a policy committee created to ensure each one of our projects is empowered to push the boundaries of sustainable design.
In Shirley’s body of work architecture has a pervasive effect: it speaks to the best values of society and provides moments of delight, inspiration and wonder. Her work gives meaning to our lives.
–Ron McCoy, University Architect, Princeton University
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President’s Letter
Dora Ng President, AIA Canada Society
Architectural education is an important part of becoming an architect. It provides a foundation in art and architectural history, basic concepts of design, and foundational technical knowledge. It promotes critical thinking, examines social and economic complexities, and encourages creativity and teamwork. I may be biased, but I believe the camaraderie and pride that are part of architectural students’ design studio experience are unmatched by any other educational program.
In this issue of the AIA Canada Journal, Pauline Thimm, Hannah Allawi and I reached out to schools of architecture from across the country. Our conversations centred on research themes in today’s design studios, with a focus on housing affordability. Students and faculties are actively engaging in challenging the status quo on the shortage of housing. It takes a village to derive plausible solutions—and schools of architecture across the country are united in bringing their voices and minds to this pressing issue. In a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)-supported partnership, AIA Canada Society is also actively participating in research on designing inclusive, sustainable and healthy cities. We want to thank all the educators who took time to speak with us and provide their invaluable insights.
NEWS
Canada Journal
Interviews
Rick Haldenby, FRAIC, served as Director of the School of Architecture at the University of Waterloo from 1988 to 2013, and founded the Waterloo Rome Program in 1979. Among many accomplishments, Haldenby was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2021, and has received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Canadian Council of University Schools of Architecture, the Special Jury Prize at the Kitchener Waterloo Arts Awards, and the Dr. Jean Steckle Award for Heritage Education from the Waterloo Regional Heritage Foundation.
Shauna Mallory-Hill , PhD, is currently Associate Professor and Associate Dean of Research at the University of Manitoba’s Faculty of Architecture. Her 25-yearlong career spans teaching, research and advocacy, with a focus on building systems, universal and sustainable design, as well as building performance evaluation. Her sponsored research includes accessible design, along with post-occupancy work on how sustainably designed environments impact human health and productivity.
AIA Canada Student Design Award Program 2025
AIA Canada Society is committed to supporting and promoting future generations of architects and design professionals. In our first year of a dedicated design award program for design and architectural students across Canada, we have received great support from the students’ and educators’ community. To learn more about the winning entries, visit www.aiacanadasociety. org.
AIA Canada at RAIC & AIA Conferences
AIA Canada Society is proud to be a Friend Sponsor at this year’s RAIC Conference in Montreal. Members from AIA Canada Society’s board will be at the conference to host the AIA Canada Reception on June 1, 2025.
AIA Canada is also speaking at the Global Architecture Workshop entitled Shaping the Future of Design Across Borders, presented by AIA International as part of the AIA National Conference in Boston on June 4, 2025.
Sasha Tsenkova, PhD, is a professor at the School of Architecture, Planning & Landscape at the University of Calgary. With a background in architecture, urbanism, and planning, her work spans over 30 years of research, teaching, and professional practice, focusing on creating more inclusive and sustainable urban environments. She is a Fellow of the Canadian Institute of Planners and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada/ Academy of Social Sciences.
Sara Stevens is an architectural historian and Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Her book Developing Expertise (Yale University Press, 2016) studies real estate development in 20thcentury American cities. She is a member of the collective Architects Against Housing Alienation, curators of the Canada Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale.
Vice President: Pauline Thimm, AIA Director of Continuing Education: Hannah Allawi, Assoc. AIA
AIA Canada new Board Member
We are delighted to welcome our newest board member, W. Neil Robertson AIA, Principal Architect at Stuart Howard Architects. Robertson is a skilled leader with over 18 years of design and technical experience. He excels in overseeing large-scale tower projects and smaller multi-family developments, with a focus on collaborative and effective design. He has additionally acted as design consultant for the City of Vancouver in the development by-law.
Interviews
RICK HALDENBY Professor, School of Architecture, University of Waterloo
Q: Kitchener-Waterloo is known as a univer sity town that is home to top Ontario postsecondary institutions. Tell us a bit about the twin cities.
A: The Waterloo Region’s industrial develop ment began with the arrival of Germanspeaking immigrants in the 19th century. Its cities were literally “founded on factories.” Its prosperity was influenced by a rail-based transport system. In the late 19th century, the extension of the Grand Trunk Railway contributed to the industrialization of the area. In the 1950s, visionary community leaders made concerted efforts to build educational infrastructure, and in just a few years created the University of Waterloo, Wilfrid Laurier University and Conestoga College. The region experienced significant growth in manufacturing industries, insurance companies, and high-tech businesses over time. Home to two universities and a college, it is an education hub that attracts talents and businesses, which increases the demand for housing for students and families. The once-suburban neighbourhood of Northdale, surrounded by these post-secondary institutions, saw a surge in student population in the early 2000s, including a large percentage of international students. We saw a building boom to increase medium-density housing like stacked townhomes and row houses, as well as taller buildings up to 30+ stories in what was once a primarily low-density town.
In partnership with the City of Cambridge, Waterloo architecture students designed and built tiny homes as prototypes for emergency shelter.
paigns, including the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale. We also try to keep a balance to cover diverse topics in architecture, including housing. Second- and third-year design studios focus on urban intensification amid the building boom, enabling students to discuss ideas for keeping cities habitable and attractive for future growth. Design studios have also worked with the local chapter of Habitat for Humanity to support the ambitious program to build affordable housing for families in need.
Q: Any examples of collaboration between studio projects and practicing professionals in tackling the housing crisis?
Q: Like the building boom in Waterloo, we saw many residential high-rises going up in the GTA, but this growth still does not adequately address housing demand. In many cities across Canada, there are unprecedented housing issues including affordability and homelessness. What do you see emerging as key areas of interest and inquiry among students at your school? Is housing one of them?
A: Connection between affordability and homelessness is not a one-to-one problem. The housing crisis can have many dimensions. In our undergraduate design studios, we are laying the groundwork for approaches to affordability, environmental responsibility and social justice. Many of my colleagues and graduate students at the University of Waterloo are involved in various research studies, exhibitions and cam-
A: Through collaboration and communication with the community, the School of Architecture has engaged with social housing agencies, municipality planning authorities, Indigenous groups and aging-in-place consultants to develop housing solutions for a diverse population including seniors. Moving the School of Architecture from Waterloo to Cambridge in 2004 was a communal project with great support from the City of Cambridge. Occupying the repurposed silk mill in Cambridge, the school aims to be the design campus for the city to allow exchange of creative ideas and intellectual stimulation. Since the move, we have had many opportunities to collaborate and work closely with the municipality. The Tiny Homes project is an initiative in partnership with the City of Cambridge, whereby Waterloo architecture students were engaged to design and build prototype tiny homes that offer practical, cost-effective and dignified emergency housing solutions. It is an example of collaboration that makes a meaningful difference.
SHAUNA MALLORY-HILL
Associate Professor and Associate Dean of Research, Faculty of Architecture, University of Manitoba
Q: How is The University of Manitoba Faculty of Architecture (FAUM) specifically engaging in design explorations addressing housing?
A: In addition to hosting public events and delivering focused design studios, we are actively engaged and support research collaborations including funded research with the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC). We are also committed to partnering and working with communities.
One House Many Nations (OHMN) originally started as a grassroots movement to shed light on the housing crisis faced by Indigenous communities. For the past four years, OHMN, led by Dr. Alex Wilson and Sylvia McAdam, has been working with faculty and students from FAUM, houseless First Nations youth, and students at Saskatoon’s Nutana Collegiate to design and construct small, affordable homes that are trucked to remote Indigenous communities in Northern Saskatchewan. After a house is delivered, it is occupied by one of the youth participants. Each year, another house is built, informed by post-occupancy data that was collected on the previous year’s house(s). First Nations youth participants have learned to advocate for community needs while gaining skills and knowledge about home-building and maintenance. Lancelot Coar’s 2022 undergraduate architecture studio engaged with OHMN to create a mobile design lab that can be brought onsite to design-build in First Nations communities. OHMN’s work was exhibited at the Canadian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2023.
Q: What are key areas of interest and inquiry among students at your school? Is housing one of them?
A: We are seeing that this generation is increasingly concerned about what is happening to the world—concerns about sustainability, housing, and food deserts are paramount. Students want to work on things that are meaningful. Students also really embrace hands-on learning. Any time students are encouraged and supported to engage with community, they feel like they are making a difference. Here in Winnipeg, we can all see the encampments of the unhoused. It is apparent that there is work to do to solve this dilemma. This past year, one of our housing-themed studios worked with a local grassroots organization, St. Boniface Street Links, in the design and construction of a prototype transitional
house as a safer interim housing solution. This housing project ultimately was built and included as part of the annual Warming Huts design competition at the Forks.
Q: Are there any barriers to collaborating in this way, involving practitioners and real community groups?
A: We often get groups who approach us to collaborate. We need to be clear that we are not providing a design service, but we are committed to the exploration of ideas and working together on important problems. It is important to me that doing housing research work in collaboration with Indigenous communities is respectful, responsible and reciprocal. Ensuring that some benefit of the research stays with the community is crucial, given the long history of research involving Indigenous populations where this did not happen. A willingness to listen and understand community priorities and context—and adapt—is key. It can be difficult for some to have enough capacity to deal with added administration (meetings, paperwork, report writing, etc.); a local liaison is helpful.
Q: Some of your current research and design work is supported by the CMHC Housing Supply Challenge. Can you tell us a bit about that project?
A: The CMHC funding in part supports the Wîkiwin Training Enterprise of York Factory First Nation project, geared to building healthy homes by leveraging local resources and tradespeople in collaboration with the Kawéchiwasik Development Corporation. The purpose is to provide design education and construction skills in the northern communities where they are needed. A key goal is that kids won’t need to leave their communities to get skills, and communities can develop capacity to increase their self-sufficiency. In collaboration with FAUM, the project will include a comprehensive education model
based on a co-created curriculum, training programs, housing designs and research on building materials. Students earn micro-credentials through distance education to get basic training in design and construction, or have the opportunity to work as research assistants to assist with collection of data, such as indoor air quality.
Focusing on sustainable construction techniques, using local materials like stone and wood, the initiative promises to employ residents, cut production costs, and enhance housing quality. Additionally, the creation of a year-round skilled trades school facility and housing for students and teachers will boost the local labour force.
Stage 2 of the project involves the building of the Wîkiwin skilled trades training and research facility and dormitory. This phase will also see the expansion of the educational curriculum in partnership with the University of Manitoba, ultimately increasing the labour force capacity of York Factory First Nation and creating more opportunities for its youth.
SASHA TSENKOVA
Professor of Planning and Director of the Cities, Policy & Planning Lab at the School of Architecture, Planning & Landscape (SAPL), University of Calgary
Q: Major cities across Canada are seeing unprecedented housing issues. As an educator, what have you seen in research or studio projects that tackle these issues?
A: We are a nation of suburban homeowners, where much of the wealth creation in the urban system is driven by investment in housing. Today, income and wealth inequality in Canadian cities is higher than ever before, which is exacerbated by the suburban homeownership model. In cities, newcomers to the housing market—young and old—face incredible affordability constraints. Homelessness has grown exponentially and homeownership is not within the reach of the middle class. In the design world, we must begin to address, through systemic intervention, these challenges. Many of our research and studio projects focus on sustainable urbanism through designs that explore strategies to provide affordable homes across the income spectrum and embrace different types of housing.
We cannot continue to replicate a model of postwar city building that no longer serves the needs of the people. We encourage students to learn from successful cities in Europe, Latin America, and the United States, where a more systematic approach to neighbourhood design and redevelopment allows various types of housing to be built along the same street within a community. This is a different approach to growth premised on urban regeneration and intensification, where people come before cars and community identity evolves over time.
Q: Any examples of collaboration between studio projects and practicing professionals in tackling the housing crisis?
A: We focus on community-engaged scholarship, research and teaching at SAPL. Integration with communities of practice is necessary, but so is a direct relationship with clients, so that we situate our studio projects in the realworld. The housing crisis is multi-faceted and future professionals need to be aware of the complexity of design intervention—solutions require a nexus of policy, planning and design approaches. In a graduate school, we must prepare aspiring designers, architects and planners to embrace these challenges.
The interface with critical practice is the ultimate test for us to remain relevant and committed to innovation and excellence within the realm of what we can control. Studio teaching needs to address housing affordabili-
In 2022, U of M professor Lancelot Coar’s undergraduate studio engaged with One House Many Nations to develop a mobile design and construction trailer for on-site design-build work.
The Wîkiwin student-built house is part of an ongoing collaboration with Kawéchiwasik Development Corporation at York Factory First Nation.
ty in a systematic way, as it will make a critical difference within Canadian society and will define the future of our cities. This requires a much stronger emphasis on sustainable urbanism and community-based projects.
Q: What policies do you feel cities in Canada should create or address to aid in addressing the housing crisis and homelessness?
A: The planning regulation, upzoning, and permitting processes can be improved to enhance infill housing, gentle density and inner-city intensification. Recognizing that cities and neighbourhoods need to be built for people and not for cars requires a focus on transit-oriented development in strategic locations where lowdensity retail, industrial and housing sites can be redeveloped to become mixed-use urban villages with a variety of housing types. Changes to minimum parking standards and lot coverage can energize the infusion of missing middle housing to create opportunities for multigenerational living, cohousing and home sharing with renters. But the real difference in addressing the homelessness and affordability crisis is the renewed investment into affordable housing through partnerships of federal, provincial and municipal governments with non-profit organizations. We need to grow this segment of the housing market and to make sure that it is an integral part of our urban neighbourhoods through the design process.
Q: What role do you think schools of architecture and design have in tackling the housing crisis in Canada?
A: We need to make a major commitment to building knowledge and capacity that focuses on solutions to the housing crisis in our curriculum. Design thinking is premised on innovation; it is part of the competency, creativity and collaboration that we try to instill in future professionals. Architects today are absent from the design of neighbourhoods on the periphery of our cities. We need to bring back that creativity and the knowledge of architects, planners, and designers, and develop the prototypes that will provide solutions to the housing crisis.
SAPL is moving downtown so that we can be a part of downtown rebuilding and innovation. Our adaptive reuse of existing office space in Calgary’s downtown will provide opportunities to connect to local businesses and residents and offer immersion in city life that is critical for our students. Our school will be a living urban design lab, where we embrace social justice, community-inspired design work and collaborate with different communities of practice to demonstrate viable solutions for changing cities and changing societies.
SARA STEVENS
Associate Professor & Chair – Urban Design at the School of Architecture & Landscape Architecture (SALA), University of British Columbia
Q: Major cities across Canada are seeing unprecedented housing issues (affordability issues and homelessness). As an educator, what have you seen in research or studio projects that tackle these issues?
A: There are so many great examples of design studios in Canada that are looking at housing challenges, such as the ‘Not for Sale’ study abroad course on contemporary housing that recently won the ACSA’s 2024 Architectural Education Award. McGill has a long history of housing research with the Minimum Cost Housing Group, which was the subject of a recent exhibition curated by Ipek Türeli. The work of Shawn Bailey and Lancelot Coar at the University of Manitoba is bringing really innovative pedagogy to the question of housing for Indigenous communities to design schools.
Q: Any examples of collaboration between studio projects and practicing professionals in tackling the housing crisis?
A: At UBC, questions around missing middle housing brought forth a collaboration between Haeccity Studio Architects and UBC students that resulted in a publication of the students’ work, co-sponsored by SALA and the Urbanarium, an organization in Vancouver that is a forum for sharing ideas about city building, particularly around climate change and housing affordabili-
ty. The Urbananium’s design competitions have focused on missing middle housing, mixed-use neighbourhoods, and the codes and regulations that are barriers to housing affordability. Their current competition, Decoding Timber Towers, is focused on prefab and mass timber housing.
Q: What policies do you feel cities in Canada should create or address to aid in the housing crisis and homelessness?
A: I think that Canada needs to take UNDRIP and the TRC Calls to Action seriously. We can’t separate the issue of housing for Indigenous people, and the history of colonization that it’s part of, from the housing challenges everyone else faces. The United Nations Housing as a Human Right work is a great resource on this, as their work also points to the problems of financialization and the effect this has had on renters, social housing, and un-housed folks.
Q: What role do you think schools of architecture and design have in tackling the housing crisis in Canada?
A: Schools of architecture and design can play an important role by educating students about the role of architects in the housing crisis in Canada. We need the next generation of architects to understand that they have a part to play. It’s not an issue that can be solved through policy and the market alone: their expertise in design, which of course touches policy and works with the private sector, is inherently part of this issue.
To develop deeper conversations around this, I am working with collaborators in the collective Architects Against Housing Alienation to organize a super-studio across Canada for the next school year (25-26) called “End Housing Alienation Now!” that is inviting all schools of architecture to run studios on a shared set of themes and principles. (This builds off of the exhibition and campaign we did for the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, which the teaching award I mentioned is also related to.) We have commitments from almost all the schools already, and have hosted a number of conversations with people from the schools to develop how this will work, balancing what is shared vs. independent, the different schedules and levels of students, etc.
For these studios, one ambition is that the studios work with local activists, advocates, and professional practices to show students how important these kinds of collaborations can be, and how important embedded local knowledge is. We hope to share resources and create opportunities for students to connect across geographies to ensure that many, many people with lots of passion and expertise are focused on this topic.
The Land Back Courtyard was part of the Not For Sale exhibition at the Canada Pavilion in the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale.
Roberto Clemente Community Academy Renovation
In response to a major heatwave, Roberto Clemente Community Academy faced challenges with its air conditioning system, prompting the installation of new portable cooling units. Blackhawk HVAC created an opening in the roof and installed a BILCO Type D roof hatch to facilitate the safe handling of the cooling units.
The project required a significant amount of planning and precise execution, including cutting through the roof and removing concrete to make room for the BILCO hatch. With this successful installation, the district now has a reliable and secure way to manage future mechanical upgrades, with the added benefit of a long-lasting investment that will pay off in future projects.
“BILCO met and exceeded my expectation with the roof hatch. I was impressed with the quality of the door. I can be very critical of products, but we set it, squared it, set the bolts and it was done. There was no messing around with the latch or any other part of the hatch.”
– Rich LaCien, Blackhawk
Project Snapshot
• Roberto Clemente Community Academy in Chicago needed to upgrade its air conditioning system during a record-breaking heatwave.
• To ensure full reliability, the school district undertook a major upgrade, including the removal and installation of two 750-ton chillers.
BILCO Products
• Type D roof hatch for mechanical equipment installation and removal.
• The double-leaf hatch measured 9-feet, 8 inches x 18-feet, 3 inches.
Keep up with the latest news from The BILCO Company by following us on Facebook and LinkedIn.
For over 90 years, The BILCO Company has been a building industry pioneer in the design and development of specialty access solutions for commercial and residential construction. For more information, visit www.BILCO.com.
The BILCO Company is now part of Quanex (NYSE: NX), a global, publicly trade manufacturing company serving OEMs in the fenestration, hardware, cabinetry, solar, refrigeration, security, construction, and outdoor products market.
THE BUTTERFLY TAKES FLIGHT
A STUNNING NEW RESIDENTIAL TOWER IN VANCOUVER DELIVERS BENEFITS FOR ITS RESIDENTS—AND ALSO FOR THE CITY AT LARGE.
PROJECT The Butterfly + First Baptist Church Complex
ARCHITECT Revery Architecture
TEXT Adele Weder
PHOTOS Ema Peter
When you fly into Vancouver, the most prominent structure in the city’s forest of glass skyscrapers is now a 57-storey edifice known as the Butterfly. Designed by Revery Architecture, the luxury residential tower is the latest in a string of high-rises that pop out of the city’s backdrop of generic window-wall façades.
The Butterfly’s striking form evolved over many years, beginning with studies dating back to 2012. Revery principal Venelin Kokalov imagined several options, most of them suggesting a distinct pair of architectural forms in dialogue. Renderings and models of the early concepts relay a wealth of imagination that is sorely missing from much of the city’s contemporary architecture, as land economics, zoning issues, and the profit motive often compel a default into generic glass-
RIGHT The project included the renovation and expansion of the adjacent First Baptist Church. The chamfered forms at the tower’s base were inspired by the church’s pipe organ. OPPOSITE The tower takes shape as two sets of overlapping cylinders, clad with prefabricated panels intended to evoke clouds.
STRUCTURAL SILICONE GASKET AND WEATHERSEAL JOINT
SPLIT ALUMINUM MULLION (BALCONY CONDITION)
BACKER ROD AND SEALANT JOINT TO MATCH
PANEL COLOUR
CAST IN PLACE CONCRETE SLAB EDGE
ANCHOR BOLT
EMBED PLATE
WELDING STAND
EMBED BRACKET
FASTENING BOLT
STEEL SUBSTRUCTURE BRACKET
PRECAST WHITE CONCRETE PANEL INTERIOR FINISH CURVED ALUMINUM SSG WINDOW
INSULATED SPANDREL PANEL
BACKER ROD, SEALANT, AND GASKET
SILL PAN FLASHING
MINERAL WOOL INSULATION INSTALLED IN-SITU
HSS HOT DIPPED GALVANIZED WELDED STEEL PANEL
SUBSTRUCTURE
EMBEDDED FLEX ANCHOR WITH GFRC BUILDUP WELDED TO STEEL SUBSTRUCTURE
PREFABRICATED GLASS FIBRE REINFORCED WHITE CONCRETE PANEL HONED FINISH
and-steel towers. The earliest concepts look starkly different some evoke the Ginger and Fred building in Prague (Frank Gehry with Vlado Milunić, 1996); others the Absolute Towers in Mississauga (MAD with Burka Varacalli Architects, 2009). But one consistent theme runs through the design evolution: a sense of two Rilkean solitudes, touching.
Client feedback, engineering studies, and simple pragmatics led to the final form: two sets of overlapping cylinders linked by a common breezeway and flanked by a rental apartment on one side and a restored church doubling as a community centre on the other. The contours of the floorplan are visually organic: evocative of human cells dividing. The roundness of the main massing is complemented by curvilinear balustrades that smoothly transform into the outer walls of each unit. It’s an eye-catching counterpoint to the orthogonality of the city’s built landscape. The two adjacent buildings built, restored, and expanded as part of a density bonus arrangement with the city help integrate this gargantuan structure with the lower-rise neighbourhood around it.
The Butterfly is a high-end, high-priced residential tower one of the few typologies in which clients and communities are now willing to invest big money and resources in creative, visually astonishing
OPPOSITE
architect.
architecture. That leads to a fundamental question: what is the public purpose of a luxury condo tower?
Whatever one feels about the widening divide between the haves and have-nots in our big cities, this building like its ilk does serve several important public purposes. The most direct and quantifiable benefits are the two flanking buildings, also designed by Revery and part of the larger project. The seven-storey rental apartment provides a modest contribution to the city’s dearth of mid-priced housing. The superbly restored and seismically upgraded First Baptist Church has expanded into the area between the new tower and original church, and now offers the public a wider array of programming including a gymnasium, childcare facility, and areas for emergency shelter and counselling services for individuals in need.
The Butterfly’s character is largely defined by undulating precast concrete panels that wrap around the building. The architects describe the swooping lines as being inspired by clouds, but for this writer, the Butterfly evokes a 57-layer frosted cake towering above the city’s boxy skyline. Kokalov winces when he hears that impression, but it’s meant as a sincere compliment. Clouds are not universally welcome, but who doesn’t like cake?
The tower’s layered, undulating volume is echoed in a soaring residential lobby, which includes developer Westbank’s signature—a bespoke Fazioli grand piano designed by the building’s
unusual attribute for high-rise towers—and contribute to natural
Kokalov argues that its experiential quality is the building’s greatest distinction most notably, the incorporation of an “outdoors” not a balcony or deck, but an actual outdoor pathway at all residential levels. For years the lead form-maker at Bing Thom Architects, Kokalov was responsible for much of the curvilinearity in the firm’s later works, including the 2019 Xiqu Centre opera house in Hong Kong. It’s easy to assume that his forte and focus would be pure aesthetic delight, but he avers that every sinuous curve has a practical rationale.
Defying the local tower-on-podium formula, the building’s façade falls almost straight to the ground. At street level, the building is indented with huge parabolic concavities. It’s an abrupt way to meet the street, but the fall is visually “broken” by a publicly accessible courtyard.
After passing through this courtyard, you enter the building via the usual indoor luxe foyer complete with developer Westbank’s signature, an over-the-top hand-built grand piano designed by the architect. In this case, the piano’s baroquely sculpted legs are right in keeping with the architecture. But after taking the elevator up to the designated floor, you step out into what is technically “outdoors” and walk to your front door in a brief but bracing open-air transition.
The main entrance of every unit is accessed via a breezeway that runs from one side of the building to another. Unglazed and open to the outside, each breezeway is marked at one end with what the architects call (a little ambitiously) a “sky garden,” in most cases consisting of a sapling that will grow into a leafy tree in due course, God and strata maintenance willing. This incorporation of nature and fresh air transforms the condominium units into something akin to townhouses, albeit stacked exceptionally high.
Inside each unit, the space can be expanded and contracted and reconfigured visually not literally by the fact that the interior wall of the secondary bedroom is completely transparent, floor to ceiling. It’s unusual, and slightly unnerving, but undeniably exciting for any occupants who wish to maximize their views to the mountains and sea. The curved glass wall transforms the room into a private enclave by means of a curtain, futuristically activated by remote control.
The visual delight of swooping curves is only tempered when it’s wholly impractical the offender here being a massive built-in counter that serves to both anchor and divide the living-kitchen areas. It reads as a long, pliable slab that is “folded” into the middle in such a way
OPPOSITE A structure made of high-performance modular precast concrete structural ribs arcs over a swimming pool that bridges between the building’s main amenity space and the podium roof. ABOVE LEFT On each floor, semi-private sky gardens offer an outdoor place for residents to socialize.
ABOVE RIGHT The breezeways provide residents with outdoor entries to their units—an
cooling, ventilation, and daylight in the suites.
that the counter itself transforms into its own horseshoe-shaped base, creating a narrow crevice in the middle of the countertop. I marvel at its beauty and uniqueness; I weep for whoever is assigned to clean out the crumbs and other culinary flotsam that will fall into that crevice.
The building’s high-priced architecture may well bring more to the table than density-bonus amenities. On a broader scale, these luxe dwellings may be just what is needed to help lure the affluent from their mansions. As wealthy residents and investors continue to seek out land-hogging detached homes, the Butterfly offers an alternate concept that maintains the psychological benefit of a dedicated outside entrance and an outrageously flexible interior space. Further over-the-top amenities add to the appeal. Prominent among these is a supremely gorgeous residents-only swimming pool, housed within ribs of concrete columns that curve and dovetail into beams.
The ultimate public purpose for the architecturally spectacular condo tower: its role as public art in the city. The units in any of these buildings are the private side of architecture’s Janus face, but its presence in the skyline and on the street is highly public. By contributing a newly striking visual ballast, the Butterfly has served its purpose as one of the age-old Seven Arts: defining a location, a community, and an era.
CLIENT WESTBANK CORPORATION, FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH | ARCHITECT TEAM VENELIN KOKALOV (MRAIC), BING THOM (FRAIC, DECEASED 2016), AMIRALI JAVIDAN, NICOLE HU, SHINOBU HOMMA MRAIC, BIBI FEHR, CULUM OSBORNE, DUSTIN YEE, CODY LOEFFEN, KAILEY O’FARRELL, MARK MELNICHUK, ANDREA FLYNN, JENNIFER ZHANG, DANIEL GASSER, ZHUOLI YANG, LISA POTOPSINGH | STRUCTURAL GLOTMAN SIMPSON | MECHANICAL INTROBA ELECTRICAL NEMETZ & ASSOCIATES, INC. LANDSCAPE SWA GROUP (DESIGN) W/ CORNELIA OBERLANDER & G|ALA - GAUTHIER & ASSOCIATES LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE, INC. (LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT OF RECORD) | INTERIORS REVERY ARCHITECTURE CONTRACTOR ICON WEST CONSTRUCTION (NEW CONSTRUCTION); THE HAEBLER GROUP (HERITAGE) | LIGHTING ARUP (DESIGN) & NEMETZ (ENGINEER OF RECORD) | SUSTAINABILITY & ENERGY MODELLING INTROBA BUILDING ENVELOPE RDH BUILDING SCIENCE, INC. HERITAGE CONSERVATION DONALD LUXTON & ASSOCIATES, INC. ACOUSTICS BKL CONSULTANTS LTD. TRAFFIC BUNT & ASSOCIATES, INC. POOL ROCKINGHAM POOL CONSULTING, INC. | FOUNTAIN VINCENT HELTON & ASSOCIATES | WIND GRADIENT WIND ENGINEERING, INC. | WASTE CONSULTANT TARGET ZERO WASTE CONSULTING, INC. | AREA 56,206 M2 BUDGET WITHHELD | COMPLETION SPRING 2025
ENERGY USE INTENSITY (PROJECTED) 106 KWH/M2/YEAR WATER USE INTENSITY (PROJECTED) 0.72 M 3/M2/YEAR
Adele Weder is a contributing editor to Canadian Architect.
The suites feature a custom counter with a sculptural folded form.
A public galleria joins the renovated First Baptist Church to the new building. Serving as a welcoming atrium, it allows for community access to the expanded church, including its daycare, full gymnasium, multi-purpose rooms, overnight emergency shelter, and community dining hall equipped with a commercial kitchen. ABOVE The church’s Pinder Hall has been reimagined as a venue for church and community events including concerts, weddings, and cultural programming.
OPPOSITE LEFT
OPPOSITE RIGHT
INVISIBLE NEED, VISIBLE CARE
A NEW BUILDING IN SOUTHERN ONTARIO OFFERS A RURAL MODEL FOR MODULAR SUPPORTIVE HOUSING.
In cities, homelessness can be painfully visible, in the form of encampments or people sleeping rough. But in rural areas, people experiencing homelessness are often hidden away.
It’s this largely invisible but clearly present need that led to the construction of Beaverton Heights, a 47-unit transitional housing residence about 100 kilometres from Toronto that serves the northern part of the Regional Municipality of Durham. The region had run a pilot project for transitional housing in Durham during the Covid pandemic, out of a summer camp property so when provincial and federal funding became available for modular, rapidly delivered transitional housing, they were quick to apply.
Montgomery Sisam Architects is no stranger to modular supportive housing, or to the site, for that matter. 15 years ago, they designed Lakeview Manor, a 200-bed long-term care facility for the region, on an adjoining parcel of land. At the time that they took on Beaverton Heights, they had completed two modular supportive housing projects for the City of Toronto. (They have since completed four more.)
LEFT Standard modular construction was given a softened appearance with the addition of residential wood truss roofs and the introduction of shorter modules in select locations to create courtyards.
The initial Toronto projects were done on a massively compressed timeline a mere eight months from design to the move-in date for the first, and nine months for the second. “So we knew that’s as tight as you can crunch it and that’s with all the stars aligned,” says Montgomery Sisam principal Daniel Ling.
As transitional housing, the Beaverton facility is designed to help residents overcome their barriers to housing. To achieve this, the program not only includes residential units, but communal spaces, including a double-height dining room and lounge that occupy the western half of the project. This part of the complex can also be used independently, such as for community activities and health supports. To create the needed volume, Montgomery Sisam decided to prefabricate the community structure in steel: the entire west half of the project was constructed and assembled in a factory to ensure that it would fit together as intended, then disassembled and reassembled on site.
For both the steel community structure and its wood residential counterpart, the prefabrication process was extensive, and included the in-factory installation of plumbing, electrical and mechanical systems, interior and exterior finishes, and even furnishings in each module. “Basically, just remove the plastic from the mattress and take the microwave from the box that’s already in the unit,” says Jacek Sochacki, manager of facilities design, construction, and asset management at the works department of the Regional Municipality of Durham. Within the building, the most extensive on-site work was in the hall-
ways, where the modules met: building systems needed to connect up, and flooring and finishes needed to be completed over the joints after the modules were installed.
One of the most surprising aspects of the project is how un-modular it looks. Montgomery Sisam’s previous experience with modular construction allowed them to find leeway in the process small tweaks that would change the look of the project, without affecting the construction cost. The long site allowed the architects to use a single module as a glazed hallway, connecting the two buildings, and creating generous courtyards on its two sides. In two other areas, shorter modules are specified to transform the massing of the building. The resulting cut-outs serve as an entry forecourt and as a dining terrace. Instead of flat roofs, the team used residential trusses “the same wood trusses you would see in subdivisions,” says Ling to create sloped roof forms. From the outside, the windows of the residential units are slightly recessed behind a frame of wood cladding, adding further dimension to the façade.
Since it was a design-build process, all of these decisions were vetted through the builder for their cost effectiveness. “It wasn’t hard to convince them, we’re going to use some shorter modules you are going to build less there,” recalls Ling. “These are things that actually don’t cost a lot of money.”
The resulting massing is intentionally lower towards the front of the property, where the community space faces residential neighbours, and doubles to four storeys towards the back. As you approach the
OPPOSITE Located between the residences and the community building, a semi-private courtyard offers a quiet place for clients to rest or socialize with others. ABOVE The double-height community space includes a reading room, terrace, administrative areas, and communal dining room served by a full commercial kitchen. The building can also be used for community-wide functions, such as medical clinics. A cluster of columns marks the area where the dining area’s eight steel modular units join together.
ABOVE A terrace adjoins the reading lounge and dining area, inviting outdoor barbecues and gatherings in warm weather. The cut-out was created by using a shorter module in this section of the building, minimizing the impact to construction costs and logistics.
project, the courtyards and cut-outs give it the appearance of smaller discrete masses, rather than a single volume.
Topping the project is the region’s largest solar panel array, which provides 35 to 40 percent of the all-electric building’s energy needs. Modular construction aided in airtightness and performance in its first months of operation, it delivered an EUI of 102 kWh/m2/year.
Balancing between independence and community was an important principle for the program, and for the design. To this end, each studio is designed to function as a self-sufficient dwelling, with its own kitchen, full washroom, and heat pump with independent temperature control. Small spatial nudges like daylight at both ends of corridors, seating nooks with built-in benches throughout the project, and generous common rooms aim to coax residents outside of their units. The property is bracketed by the dining area at the front, and an outdoor basketball court at the rear. A long storage shed holds some of the facility’s mechanical equipment along with bikes an easy way to get into town for residents who may not have cars.
The building looks so good that, had the finishes be chosen for luxury rather than durability, it could easily pass as a family resort. But is that too nice? Often, government-funded buildings especially for a stigmatized program such as transitional housing come under criticism if they appear to be too fancy.
I put this to Sochacki, who replies: “There’s this misnomer that if the building looks good or unique, it costs a lot of money. I think we proved that it doesn’t.” Apart from a wood surround for the fireplace, the com-
ponents of the building are utilitarian and basic, he says. “It’s just like: how do you make the most out of common materials? It costs us exactly the same, but we’re doing things that are actually nice.”
That niceness is not just a perk, but essential to the core purpose of helping people experiencing homelessness to make their way back into society. “Making it nice is important,” says Sochacki. “Nice lighting, nice windows, nice places to sit, nice spaces that people enjoy being at because that’s what’s going to make the difference.”
“If you build a place that people just want to spend all their time in their room and they don’t come out, that’s not going to help them with transitioning back to a sustainable, permanent housing lifestyle,” he adds. “You’ve got to create a place where they feel welcome and that they want to spend time in they want to meet other people and they want to get the support, because there’s a place and space for it, and it’s successful for them to get the support.”
CLIENT REGIONAL MUNICIPALITY OF DURHAM | ARCHITECT TEAM DANIEL LING (FRAIC), ENDA MCDONAGH, KEVIN HUTCHINSON, SONJA STOREY-FLEMING, MATEUSZ NOWACKI, ZHENG LI, GRACE CHANG, JAKE PAULS WOLF, MUSTAFA MUNAWAR, PAUL KURTI, WILLIAM TINK, VICTORIA NGAI, KAVITHA JAYAKRISHNAN, MAX VENERACION, MEGAN LOWES | STRUCTURAL/MECHANICAL/ ELECTRICAL DESIGN WORKS ENGINEERING | LANDSCAPE BAKER TURNER INTERIORS MONTGOMERY SISAM ARCHITECTS | CONTRACTOR NRB MODULAR SOLUTIONS | CIVIL DESIGN WORKS ENGINEERING | CODE VORTEX FIRE | FOOD SERVICES KAIZEN FOODSERVICE PLANNING & DESIGN | ENERGY MODELLING DESIGN WORK ENGINEERING | SPECIFICATIONS DGS CONSULTING SERVICES | AREA 3,550 M2 COMPLETION OCTOBER 2024
ENERGY USE INTENSITY (OPERATIONAL) 101.98 KWH/M2/YEAR
A PLACE TO CALL HOME
TWO MONTREAL PROJECTS OFFER PLACES OF DIGNITY AND STABILITY FOR PEOPLE EXPERIENCING HOMELESSNESS.
PROJECT Le Christin, Montreal, Quebec
ARCHITECT Atelier Big City
PHOTOS James Brittain
PROJECT Les Studios du PAS, Montreal, Quebec
ARCHITECT L. McComber in collaboration with Inform
PHOTOS Ulysse Lemerise
TEXT Odile Hénault
Nighttime, April 15, 2025. A thousand volunteers are gathering in Montreal, part of a province-wide effort to try and put numbers on a growing phenomenon in cities like Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, and many others. The volunteers are getting ready to walk around targeted areas in downtown Montreal and around certain subway stations. Temporary shelters are also visited.
First conducted in the spring of 2018, this survey showed that 3,149 people were in a vulnerable situation at the time. Four years later, a similar effort revealed that Montreal’s homeless population had risen to 4,690 people and that there were some 10,000 people experiencing
homelessness in the whole of the province. The 2025 numbers are expected to be significantly higher. For the organizers, this one-night snapshot of the situation is “neither perfect nor complete.” However, for nonprofit organizations and governmental bodies eager to prevent a vulnerable population from ending up on the streets, the informal census does provide highly valuable information.
Two recent initiatives very different from one another offer inspiring answers. The most recent one, Le Christin, was designed by Atelier Big City (led by architects Anne Cormier, Randy Cohen, and Howard Davies) and inaugurated in 2024. Studios du PAS, on the other hand, was designed by Montreal firm L. McComber, and welcomed its first tenants in 2022. Both projects involved long-standing charities: the 148-year-old Accueil Bonneau, in the case of Le Christin, and the 136-year-old Mission Old Brewery for Studios du PAS . Le Christin was spearheaded, and mostly financed, by the Société d’habitation et de développement de Montréal (SHDM), a non-profit, para-municipal corporation created in 1988. Studios du PAS was first selected by the City of Montreal to be built thanks to the Rapid Housing Initiative (RHI) program run by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC). Le Christin also received a financial contribution from the CMHC towards the end of the process.
OPPOSITE View of Le Christin’s modulated front façade. Galvanized steel panels at ground level add a soft touch while protecting the building from potential damage caused by snow plows. ABOVE, CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT Boldly coloured blind walls signal the presence of Le Christin in the center of a densely occupied city block, with entrance to the left along Sanguinet Street; view of the south façade before construction of a new residential project that now conceals Le Christin from Boulevard René Lévesque; a tenants-only courtyard is inserted in the south façade.
ABOVE LEFT The fire stairs, which open onto the exterior yard at ground level, feature glazing that allows for ample natural light. ABOVE RIGHT On the unit levels, corridors include large openings along the south façade. Each floor is colour-coded to enliven the space; overhead, perforated metal plates conceal the mechanical systems. An extra floor was gained thanks to the decision to expose the various plumbing, electrical, and ventilation systems. OPPOSITE The low-slung Studios du PAS aligns with neighbourhood two-storey buildings.
Le Christin
Although sited in a very central location, near the buzzing St. Catherine and St. Denis streets, Le Christin is hard to find. And even when one suddenly spots two seven-storey-high walls, coloured lemon-zest yellow and mango orange, it’s difficult to figure out what they are about. A stroll along the tiny Christin Street finally reveals the front façade of this new facility, now home to some of Montreal’s most vulnerable citizens.
Le Christin is unique for a number of reasons. First among them is its highly unusual location at the centre of a dense city block otherwise occupied by university buildings, office towers, and condo blocks. Until a few years ago, the site was home to the four-storey Appartements Le Riga. The Art Deco-style building had been built in 1914 by developerarchitect Joseph-Arthur Godin, who was a pioneer in his own right: he was one of the first in Montreal to experiment with reinforced concrete structures, a novelty in the city at the time. A century later, Le Riga, by then the property of SHDM, was in serious need of repair. Plans had already been drafted for a complete renovation of the building when a thorough investigation revealed major structural problems. Tenants had to leave on short notice and were temporarily relocated; the building was eventually demolished in 2019. By that time, Atelier Big City had been mandated to design a contemporary building that would replace Le Riga and provide a “place of one’s own” to close to 150 tenants, formerly homeless or at risk of becoming so.
The entire operation sparked controversy, particularly as Le Christin started to rise, showing no sign of nostalgia. The architects’ daring approach was difficult to fathom particularly for those who believe social housing should keep a low profile.
The program, originally meant for a clientele of single men, gradually evolved to include women. In order to reflect societal trends, the architects were asked to design 24 slightly larger units located in the building’s east wing, separated from the rest of the units by secured doors. Thus, Le Christin is able to accommodate homeless couples or close friends, as well as students and immigrants in need.
In order to provide the maximum number of units requested by SHDM, each of the 90 studios was reduced to 230 square feet an adjustment from Atelier Big City’s initial, slightly more generous plans. In a clever move, an L-shaped kitchen hugs the corner of each unit, pushing out against the exterior wall. As a result, the window openings recede from the façade, creating a sense of intimacy for the tenants, who enjoy contact with the exterior through large windows protected by quiet Juliet balconies. Far from damaging the initial design, the added constraint of tightened units allowed the architects to modulate the building’s façades, creating an even stronger statement.
Well-lit meeting rooms and common areas are found near Le Christin’s front entrance, along with offices for personnel, who are present on the premises 24 hours a day. Apart from a small terrace above the entrance, the main exterior space is a yard which literally cuts into the
building’s back façade. This has a huge impact on the interiors at all levels: corridors are generously lit with sunlight, a concept market developers would be well advised to imitate. The adjacent exit stairs are also notable, with their careful detailing and the presence of glazed openings.
Le Christin has achieved the lofty goal articulated by SHDM ’s former director, architect Nancy Schoiry: “With this project, we wanted to innovate and demonstrate that it was possible to provide quality housing for those at risk of homelessness.”
Studios du PAS
In sharp contrast with Le Christin’s surroundings, the impression one gets approaching Studios du PAS , 14 kilometres east of downtown Montreal, is that of a small town. In this mostly low-scale neighbourhood, L. McComber architects adopted a respectful, subdued approach blending in, rather than standing out.
The financing for this small building, planned for individuals aged 55 or older experiencing or at risk of homelessness, was tied to a highly demanding schedule. The project had to be designed, built, and occupied within 18 months: an “almost impossible” challenge, according to principal architect Laurent McComber. From the very start, prefabrication was favoured over more traditional construction methods. And even though substantial work had to be done on-site including the installation of the roof, electrical and mechanical systems, as well as exterior and interior finishes the partially prefabricated components did contribute to keeping costs under control and meeting the 18-month design-to-delivery deadline.
OPPOSITE TOP The project uses a pared-down palette of terracotta tile, wood, and galvanized steel. The footbridge links the upper level to shared exterior spaces. OPPOSITE, BOTTOM LEFT The ground level studios were designed so they could be adapted to accommodate accessibility needs. OPPOSITE, BOTTOM RIGHT Wood siding was used to soften the upper-level balconies, which provide protected outdoor spaces for residents. ABOVE Inside the studio units, storage cupboards for clothes and belongings were added as an extension of the kitchen wall.
The building was divided into 20 identical modules, each fourteen feet wide the maximum width allowable on the road. Half the modules were installed at ground level. One of these, positioned nearest the street entrance, serves as a community room directly connected to a small office for the use of a social worker, allowing staff to follow up regularly with tenants. Flooded with natural light, the double-height lobby provides a friendly and inclusive welcome.
Some of the ground floor units were adapted to meet the needs of those with a physical disability; the other units were designed to be easily adaptable if needed. All studio apartments, slightly under 300 square feet, include a full bathroom, a minimal kitchen, and sizeable storage space hidden behind cabinet doors. Most of the apartments include a small exterior alcove, which provides an intimate outdoor space while creating a subtle rhythm along the front façade.
Conscious of the tradition of brick residential buildings in Montreal, yet wanting to explore alternate materials, the architects selected an earth-toned terracotta tile from Germany. The 299mm x 1500mm tiles are clipped to the façade, allowing for faster installation and easier maintenance. All units enjoy triple-glazed windows and particularly well insulated walls. A high-performance heat pump was installed to lower energy demand and costs for heating and cooling needs.
Pride and Dignity
Le Christin and Les Studios du PAS have little in common except, of course, their program. Architecturally speaking, each represents an interesting solution to the problem at hand. While Le Christin
is a high-spirited, flamboyant statement, Studios du PAS is to be praised for its respectful attitude, and for the architects’ relentless search for interesting alternatives to traditional construction norms.
Atelier Big City is one of few firms in Canada that has the guts and the talent to play with bold colours. Decades of experimentation (not just with public buildings, but also within their own homes), led up to Le Christin, which is perhaps their strongest building to date. Their judicious choices of colour, brick type, and materials transmit a message of pride and dignity.
Both projects demonstrate enormous respect and generosity to their residents: they provide architecture that treats them not as an underclass, but as regular people, who need the stability of dignified housing to start rebuilding their lives.
Odile Hénault is a contributing editor to Canadian Architect.
LE CHRISTIN
CLIENT SOCIÉTÉ D’HABITATION ET DE DÉVELOPPEMENT DE MONTRÉAL (SHDM) | ARCHITECT TEAM ANNE CORMIER, RANDY COHEN, HOWARD DAVIES, FANNIE YOCKELL, GABRIEL TESSIER, SÉBASTIEN ST-LAURENT, LISA VO | STRUCTURAL DPHV MECHANICAL/ELECTRICAL BPA |
ING CS DESIGN | AREA 4,115 M2 CONSTRUCTION
LES STUDIOS DU PAS
|
CLIENT PAS DE LA RUE | ARCHITECT TEAM L. MCCOMBER—LAURENT MCCOMBER, OLIVIER LORD, JÉRÔME LEMIEUX, JOSIANNE OUELLET-DAUDELIN, LAURENT MCCOMBER. INFORM—DAVID GRENIER, ÉLISABETH PROVOST, AMÉLIE TREMBLAY, DAVID GRENIER PROJECT MANAGEMENT GROUPE CDH | STRUCTURAL DOUGLAS CONSULTANTS
A HOUSING DESIGN CATALOGUE FOR THE 21ST CENTURY
TEXT John Lorinc
RENDERINGS Office In Search Of
During the spring election, the Liberals leaned into messaging that evoked a historic moment from the late 1940s, when Ottawa succeeded in confronting a severe housing crisis.
“We used to build things in this country,” begins Prime Minister Mark Carney in a nostalgic ad filled with archival images of streets lined with brand new post-World War II “strawberry box” bungalows, built for returning Canadian soldiers and their young families.
The video also includes montages from the now-iconic design “catalogues,” published by Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC). These supplied floor plans and unlocked cheap mortgages for tens of thousands of simple suburban houses found in communities across the country. “The government built prefabricated homes that were easy to assemble and inexpensive,” Carney said in the voice-over. “And those homes are still here.”
Over the past year, CMHC has initiated a 21st century re-do of that design catalogue, and the first tranche of 50 plans for garden suites, duplexes, four-plexes and six-plexes went live in early March. A second tranche, with plans for small apartments, is under development.
Unlike the postwar versions, these focus on infill sites, not green fields. One of CMHC ’s goals is to promote so-called gentle density to residential properties with easily constructed plans that reflect regional variations, local zoning and building-code regulations, accessibility features and low-carbon design. As with those postwar catalogues, CMHC ’s other goal was to tamp down on soft costs for homeowners or small builders looking to develop these kinds of housing by providing no-cost designs that were effectively permit sets.
The early reviews are generally positive. “I find the design really very compelling in a kind of understated way,” says SvN principal Sam Dufaux. By making available vetted plans that can be either pre-approved or approved as of right, CMHC will remove some of the friction that impedes this scale of housing. “One of the elements of the housing crisis has to do with how do we approve these kinds of projects,” Dufaux adds. “I’m hoping it is a bit of a new beginning.”
Yet other observers offer cautions about the extent to which the CMHC program can blunt the housing crisis. “It’s a small piece and a positive one,” says missing middle advocate and economist Mike Moffatt, who is executive in residence at the Smart Prosperity Institute and an assistant professor at Western’s Ivey Business School. “But [it’s] one that probably
LEFT The housing catalogue includes 50 low-rise home designs, including for garden suites, duplexes, four-plexes and six-plexes. Each design was developed by local architecture and engineering teams with the intent of aligning with regional building codes, planning rules, climate zones, construction methods and materials.
captures a disproportionate amount of attention because it’s something people can visualize in a way that they can’t with an apartment tax credit.”
This kind of new-build infill is unlikely to provide much in the way of affordable or deeply affordable housing, adds Carolyn Whitzman, housing and social policy researcher, and author of Home Truths: Fixing Canada’s Housing Crisis (UBC Press, 2024). She estimates Canada needs about three million new dwellings that can be rented for $1,000 per month or less. The policies that will enable new housing at that scale, she says, involve financing subsidies, publicly owned land, and construction innovation, e.g., prefabricated or factory-built components, as well as “consistent and permissive zoning and consistent and permissive building codes.”
Indeed, the make-or-break question hovering over CMHC ’s design catalogue is whether municipalities will green-light these plans or simply find new ways to hold up approvals.
A team effort
Janna Levitt, partner at LGA A rchitectural Partners, says that when CMHC issued an RFP for the design catalogue, her firm decided to pitch a team of architects and peer reviewers from across Canada, with LGA serving as project manager. After they were selected, Levitt says they had to quickly clarify a key detail, which was the assumption that the program could deliver pre-approved, permit-ready plans absent a piece of property to build on. “Even in 1947,” she says, “it wasn’t a permit set until you had a site.”
LGA’s team and CMHC agreed to expand the scope of the assignment so that the finished product wasn’t just a catalogue of plans but also included details about local regulations and typical lot sizes. Re-Housing co-founder Michael Piper, an associate professor at U of T’s John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, came on board to carry out research on similar programs, and found initiatives in places like Georgia, Indiana and Texas. “I have not found any that moved forward,” he says. “Canada’s national design
catalogue is pretty novel in that regard, which is exciting.” The noteworthy exceptions are California, which has made significant advances in recent years in pre-approving ADUs across the state, and British Columbia, which last fall released its own standardized design catalogue.
He also carried out a scan of land use and zoning rules in Ontario for 15 to 20 municipalities. “We looked to see [what] their zoning permitted and what the rules were, and as you might expect, they’re all over the place,” he says. “Hence the challenge with the standardized design.”
Levitt says the architects on the team set out to come up with designs that used wood frame construction, had no basements (to save on cost and reduce embodied carbon), and drew on vernacular architectural styles. They researched representative lot sizes in the various regions, and configured designs to suit small, medium and large properties. Some versions have accessibility features CMHC ’s remit included both accessible units and aging-in-place as objectives or can be adapted later on.
As for climate and energy efficiency considerations, the recommended materials include low-carbon components and cladding. The designs do reflect geographical variations, but Levitt says there’s only so much her team could do in terms of energy modelling. “How do you do heat energy calculations when you don’t have a site? You don’t have north, south, east, west [orientations] and you don’t have what zone are you in. In B.C. and Ontario, there are seven climatic regions. There was a lot of working through those kinds of very practical requirements, which were very complicated and actually fed into the design work quite significantly.” As Levitt adds, “in 1947, there were no heat loss models because the world wasn’t like that.”
LGA provided the architects on the team with templates for interior elements, such as bathrooms, as well as standards for features such as bedroom sizes, dining areas, storage sufficient to hold strollers, and access to outdoor space, either at grade or via a balcony. “We gathered together these ideas about the quality of life that we wanted baked
into each of the designs, so that [they] expressed a really good quality of life modest but good quality,” she says. “It’s not about the finishes. People had to be able to live there and live there well.”
“This isn’t a boutique home solution,” Whitzman says. “This is a cheap and mass-produced solution. And compared to other cheap and massproduced solutions, whether they be condos or suburban subdivisions, [the catalogue designs] look fine to my untrained eye.”
Will it succeed?
With the plans now public, the other important variables, besides their conformity with local bylaws, have to do with cost and visibility to potential users, including homeowners, contractors and developers specializing in smaller-scale projects.
On the costing side, N. Barry Lyons Consultants (NBLC) has been retained by CMHC to develop models to accompany the design catalogue, but those figures have yet to be released. While pricing is inevitably dynamic, the calculus behind the entire exercise turns on whether the savings on design outlays and the use of prefabricated components will make such small-scale projects pencil, particularly at a time when there are live concerns about tariffs, skilled labour shortages, and supply chain interruptions on building materials.
Finally, there’s the horse-to-water problem. While the design catalogue has received a reasonable amount of media attention since it launched, does CMHC need to find ways to market it more aggressively?
“From my experience,” says Levitt, “they are extremely proactive, and have assembled a kind of dream team with a huge range of experience and expertise. They are doing very concerted and deep work with municipalities across the country.”
Proper promotion, observes Moffatt, “is going to be important in particular, just for political reasons. The prime minister has made a lot of bold promises about [adding] 500,000 homes.” Carney’s pledge to get Canada back into building will take time to ramp up, he adds. “I do think
the federal government needs to visibly show progress, and if they can’t point to a [new] building across the road, they could at least [say], `We’ve got this design catalogue. Here’s how it works. We’ve already got so many builders and developers looking at this.’”
While it’s far too soon to draw conclusions about the success of this ambitious program, Levitt is well aware of the long and rich legacy of the predecessor CMHC catalogues from the late 40s and the 1950s, all of which gave many young Canadian architects their earliest commissions and then left an enduring aesthetic on countless communities across Canada.
She hopes the updated 21st-century catalogue fitted out as it is for 21st-century concerns about carbon, resilience and urban density will acquire a similar cachet.
“These are architecturally designed houses for a group of people across the country who will have never lived in an architecturally designed house,” she muses. “I would love it if, 80 years from now, the consistent feedback [from occupants] was that they were able to live generously and well in those houses, and that everything was where it should be.”
ABOVE AND BELOW At present, high-level overviews for the 50 designs are available, including basic floor plans, 3D axonometrics, and building dimensions. Full architectural design packages are expected to be released later this year.
ARCHITECTURE FIRM COLLABORATORS MICHAEL GREEN ARCHITECTURE, DUB ARCHITECTS, 5468796 ARCHITECTURE INC, OXBOW ARCHITECTURE, LGA ARCHITECTURAL PARTNERS, KANVA ARCHITECTURE, ABBOTT BROWN ARCHITECTS, TAYLOR ARCHITECTURE GROUP
ADDRESSING THE NORTHERN HOUSING CRISIS
TEXT Kristel Derkowski
MARKET-BASED SOLUTIONS DON’T WORK IN CANADA’S REMOTEST COMMUNITIES, WHICH HAVE NO HOUSING MARKET. HOW CAN WE CATCH UP WITH THE GROWING NEED?
The housing crisis in Canada’s North, which has particularly affected the majority Indigenous population in northern communities, has been of ongoing concern to firms such as Taylor Architecture Group (TAG). Formerly known as Pin/Taylor, the firm was established in Yellowknife in 1983. TAG ’s Principal, Simon Taylor, says that despite recent political gains for First Nations, “by and large, life is not improving up here.”
Taylor and his colleagues have designed many different types of housing across the North. But the problems exceed the normal scope of architectural practice. TAG ’s Manager of Research and Development, Kristel Derkowski, says, “We can design the units well, but it doesn’t solve many of the underlying problems.” To respond, she says, “we’ve backed up the process to look at the root causes more.” As a result, “the design challenges are informed by much broader systemic research.”
We spoke to Derkowski about her research, and the work that Taylor Architecture Group is doing to act on it. Here’s what she has to say.
Inadequate housing from the start
The Northwest Territories is about 51% Indigenous. Most non-Indigenous people are concentrated in the capital city of Yellowknife. Outside of Yellowknife, the territory is very much majority Indigenous.
The federal government got involved in delivering housing to the far North in 1959. There were problems with this program right from the beginning. One issue was that when the houses were first delivered, they were designed and fabricated down south, and they were completely inadequate for the climate. The houses from that initial program were called “Matchbox houses” because they were so small. These early stages of housing delivery helped establish the precedent that a lower standard of housing was acceptable for northern Indigenous residents compared to Euro-Canadian residents elsewhere. In many cases, that double-standard persists to this day.
The houses were also inappropriately designed for northern cultures. It’s been said in the research that the way that these houses were delivered to northern settlements was a significant factor in people being divorced from their traditional lifestyles, their traditional hierarchies, the way that they understood home. It was imposing a Euro-Canadian model on Indigenous communities and their ways of life.
Part of what the federal government was trying to do was to impose a cash economy and stimulate a market. They were delivering houses and asking for rent. But there weren’t a lot of opportunities to earn cash. This housing was delivered around the sites of former fur trading posts but the fur trade had collapsed by 1930. There weren’t a lot
of jobs. There wasn’t a lot of wage-based employment. And yet, rental payments were being collected in cash, and the rental payments increased significantly over the span of a couple decades.
The imposition of a cash economy created problems culturally. It’s been said that public housing delivery, in combination with other social policies, served to introduce the concept of poverty in the far North, where it hadn’t existed before. These policies created a situation where Indigenous northerners couldn’t afford to be adequately housed, because housing demanded cash, and cash wasn’t always available. That’s a big theme that continues to persist today. Most of the territory’s communities remain “non-market”: there is no housing market. There are different kinds of economies in the North and not all of them revolve wholly around cash. And yet government policies do. The governments’ ideas about housing do, too. So there’s a conflict there.
The federal exit from social housing
After 1969, the federal government devolved housing to the territorial government. The Government of Northwest Territories created the Northwest Territories Housing Corporation. By 1974, the housing corporation took over all the stock of federal housing and started to administer it, in addition to building their own. The housing corporation was rapidly building new housing stock from 1975 up until the mid-1990s. But beginning in the early 1990s, the federal government terminated federal spending on new social housing across the whole country. A couple of years after that, they also decided to allow operational agreements with social housing providers to expire. It didn’t happen that quickly and maybe not everybody noticed, because it wasn’t a drastic change where all operational funding disappeared immediately. But at that time, the federal government was in 25- to 50-year operational agreements with various housing providers across the country. After 1995, these long-term operating agreements were no longer being renewed not just in the North, but everywhere in Canada.
With the housing corporation up here, that change started in 1996, and we have until 2038 before the federal contribution of operational funding reaches zero. As a result, beginning in 1996, the number of units owned by the NWT Housing Corporation plateaued. There was a little bump in housing stock after that another 200 units or so in the early 2000s. But basically, the Northwest Territories was stuck for 25 years, from 1996 to 2021, with the same number of public housing units.
In 1990, there was a report on housing in the NWT that was funded by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC)
Factors influencing the Northern housing crisis
ECONOMIC FACTORS
NORTHERN HOUSING CRISIS
SOCIAL FACTORS
ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS
That report noted that housing was already in a crisis state. At that time, in 1990, researchers said it would take 30 more years to meet existing housing need, if housing production continued at the current rate. The other problem is that houses were so inadequately constructed to begin with, that they generally needed replacement after 15 years. So housing in the Northwest Territories already had serious problems in 1990. Then in 1996, the housing corporation stopped building more. So if you compare the total number of social housing units with the total need for subsidized housing in the territory, you can see a severely widening gap in recent decades. We’ve seen a serious escalation in housing need.
ORGANIZATIONAL FACTORS
The Northwest Territories has a very, very small tax base, and it’s extremely expensive to provide services here. Most of our funding for public services comes from the federal government. The NWT on its own does not have a lot of buying power. So ever since the federal government stopped providing operational funding for housing, the territorial government has been hard-pressed to replace that funding with its own internal resources.
I should probably note that this wasn’t only a problem for the Northwest Territories. Across Canada, we have seen mass homelessness visibly emerge since the ’90s. This is related, at least in part, to the federal government’s decisions to terminate funding for social housing at that time.
INSITES
Today’s housing crisis
Getting to present-day conditions in the NWT, we now have some “market” communities and some “non-market” communities. There are 33 communities total in the NWT, and at least 27 of these don’t have a housing market: there’s no private rental market and there’s no resale market. This relates back to the conflict I mentioned before: the cash economy did not entirely take root. In simple terms, there isn’t enough local employment or income opportunity for a housing market in conventional terms to work.
Yellowknife is an outlier in the territory. Economic opportunity is concentrated in the capital city. We also have five other “market” communities that are regional centres for the territorial government, where more employment and economic activity take place. Across the non-market communities, on average, the rate of unsuitable or inadequate housing is about five times what it is elsewhere in Canada. Rates of unemployment are about five times what they are in Yellowknife. On top of this, the communities with the highest concentration of Indigenous residents also have the highest rates of unsuitable or inadequate housing, and also have the lowest income opportunity. These statistics clearly show that the inequalities in the territory are highly racialized.
Given the situation in non-market communities, there is a severe affordability crisis in terms of the cost to deliver housing. It’s very, very expensive to build housing here. A single detached home costs over a million dollars to build in a place like Fort Good Hope (Rádeyı ¸ lı ¸ Kó ¸ ). We’re talking about a very modest three-bedroom house, smaller than what you’d typically build in the South. The million-dollar price tag on each house is a serious issue. Meanwhile, in a non-market community, the potential resale value is extremely low. So there’s a massive gap between the cost of construction and the value of the home once built and that’s why you have no housing market. It means that private development is impossible. That’s why, until recently, only the federal and territorial governments have been building new homes in non-market communities. It’s so expensive to do, and as soon as the house is built, its value plummets.
The costs of living are also very high. According to the NWT Bureau of Statistics, the estimated living costs for an individual in Fort Good Hope are about 1.8 times what it costs to live in Edmonton. Then when it comes to housing specifically, there are further issues with operations and maintenance. The NWT is not tied into the North American hydro grid, and in most communities, electricity is produced by a diesel generator. This is extremely expensive. Everything needs to be shipped in, including fuel. So costs for heating fuel are high as well, as are the heating loads. Then, maintenance and repairs can be very difficult, and of course, very costly. If you need any specialized parts or specialized labour, you are flying those parts and those people in from down South. So to take on the costs of homeownership, on top of the costs of living in a place where income opportunity is limited to begin with this is extremely challenging. And from a statistical or systemic perspective, this is simply not in reach for most community members.
In 2021, the NWT Housing Corporation underwent a strategic renewal and became Housing Northwest Territories. Their mandate went into a kind of flux. They started to pivot from being the primary landlord in the territory towards being a partner to other third-party housing providers, which might be Indigenous governments, community housing providers, nonprofits, municipalities. But those other organisations, in most cases, aren’t equipped or haven’t stepped forward to take on social housing.
Even though the federal government is releasing capital funding for affordable housing again, northern communities can’t always capitalize on that, because the source of funding for operations remains in ques-
tion. Housing in non-market communities essentially needs to be subsidized not just in terms of construction, but also in terms of operations. But that operational funding is no longer available. I can’t stress enough how critical this issue is for the North.
Fort Good Hope and “one thing that (kind of) worked” I’ll talk a bit about Fort Good Hope. I don’t want to be speaking on behalf of the community here, but I will share a bit about the realities on the ground, as a way of putting things into context.
Fort Good Hope, or Rádeyı ¸ lı ¸ Kó ¸ , is on the Mackenzie River, close to the Arctic Circle. There’s a winter road that’s open at best from January until March the window is getting narrower because of climate change. There were also barges running each summer for material transportation, but those have been cancelled for the past two years because of droughts linked to climate change. Aside from that, it’s a fly-in community. It’s very remote. It has about 500-600 people. According to census data, less than half of those people live in what’s considered acceptable housing.
The biggest problem is housing adequacy. That’s CMHC ’s term for housing in need of major repairs. This applies to about 36% of households in Fort Good Hope. In terms of ownership, almost 40% of the community’s housing stock is managed by Housing NWT. That’s a combination of public housing units and market housing units which are for professionals like teachers and nurses. There’s also a pretty high percentage of owner-occupied units about 46%.
The story told by the community is that when public housing arrived in the 1960s, the people were living in owner-built log homes. Federal agents arrived and they considered some of those homes to be inadequate or unacceptable, and they bulldozed those homes, then replaced some of them but maybe not all with public housing units. Then residents had no choice but to rent from the people who took their homes away. This was not a good way to start up a public housing system.
Then there was an issue with the rental rates, which drastically increased over time. During a presentation to a government commit-
tee in the ’80s, a community member explained that they had initially accepted a place in public housing for a rental fee of $2 a month in 1971. By 1984, the same community member was expected to pay $267 a month. That might not sound like much in today’s terms, but it was roughly a 13,000% increase for that same tenant and it’s not like they had any other housing options to choose from. So by that point, they’re stuck with paying whatever is asked.
On top of that, the housing units were poorly built and rapidly deteriorated. One description from that era said the walls were four inches thick, with windows oriented north, and water tanks that froze in the winter and fell through the floor. The single heating source was right next to the only door residents were concerned about the fire hazard that obviously created. Ultimately the community said: “We don’t actually want any more public housing units. We want to go back to homeownership, which was what we had before.”
So Fort Good Hope was a leader in housing at that time and continues to be to this day. The community approached the territorial government and made a proposal: “Give us the block funding for home construction, we’ll administer it ourselves, we’ll help people build houses, and they can keep them.” That actually worked really well. That was the start of the Homeownership Assistance Program (HAP) that ran for about ten years, beginning in 1982. The program expanded across the whole territory after it was piloted in Fort Good Hope. The HAP is still spoken about and written about as the one thing that kind of worked.
Funding was cost-shared between the federal and territorial governments. Through the program, material packages were purchased for clients who were deemed eligible. The client would then contribute their own sweat equity in the form of hauling logs and putting in time on site. They had two years to finish building the house. Then, as long as they lived in that home for five more years, the loan would be forgiven, and they would continue owning the house with no ongoing loan payments. In some cases, there were no mechanical systems provided as part of this package, but the residents would add to the house over the years. A lot of these units are still standing and still lived in today.
Many of them are comparatively well-maintained in contrast with other types of housing for example, public housing units. It’s also worth noting that the one-time cost of the materials package was from the government’s perspective only a fraction of the cost to build and maintain a public housing unit over its lifespan. At the time, it cost about $50,000 to $80,000 to build a HAP home, whereas the lifetime cost of a public housing unit is in the order of $2,000,000.
This program was considered very successful in many places, especially in Fort Good Hope. It created about 40% of their local housing stock at that time, which went from about 100 units to about 140. It’s a small community, so that’s quite significant.
What were the successful principles?
The community-based decision-making power to allocate the funding.
T he sweat equity component, which brought homeownership within the range of being attainable for people because there wasn’t cash needing to be transferred, when the cash wasn’t available.
Local materials they harvested the logs from the land, and the fact that residents could maintain the homes themselves.
The Fort Good Hope Construction Centre
The HAP ended the same year that the federal government terminated new spending on social housing. By the late 1990s, the creation of new public housing stock or new homeownership units had gone down to negligible levels. But more recently, things started to change. The federal government started to release money to build affordable housing. Simultaneously, Indigenous governments are working towards Self-Government and settling their Land Claims. Federal funds have started to flow directly to Indigenous groups. Given these changes, the landscape of Northern housing has started to evolve.
In 2016, Fort Good Hope created the K’asho Got’ine Housing Society, based on the precedent of the 1980s Fort Good Hope Housing Society. They said: “We did this before, maybe we can do it again.”
The community incorporated a non-profit and came up with a five-year plan to meet housing need in their community.
One thing the community did right away was start up a crew to deliver housing maintenance and repairs. This is being run by Ne’Rahten Developments Ltd., which is the business arm of Yamoga Land Corporation (the local Indigenous Government). Over the span of a few years, they built up a crew of skilled workers. Then Ne’Rahten started thinking, “Why can’t we do more? Why can’t we build our own housing?” They identified a need for a space where people could work year-round, and first get training, then employment, in a stable all-season environment.
This was the initial vision for the Fort Good Hope Construction Centre, and this is where TAG got involved. We had some seed funding through the CMHC Housing Supply Challenge when we partnered with Fort Good Hope.
We worked with the community for over a year to get the capital funding lined up for the project. This process required us to take on a different role than the one you typically would as an architect. It wasn’t just schematic-design-to-construction-administration. One thing we did pretty early on was a housing design workshop that was open to the whole community, to start understanding what type of housing people would really want to see. Another piece was a lot of outreach and advocacy to build up support for the project and partnerships for example, with Housing Northwest Territories and Aurora College. We also reached out to our federal MP, the NWT Legislative Assembly and different MLA s, and we talked to a lot of different people about the link between employment and housing. The idea was that the Fort Good Hope Construction Centre would be a demonstration project. Ultimately, funding did come through for the project from both CMHC and National Indigenous Housing Collaborative Inc.
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The facility itself will not be architecturally spectacular. It’s basically a big shed where you could build a modular house. But the idea is that the construction of those houses is combined with training, and it creates year-round indoor jobs. It intends to combat the short construction seasons, and the fact that people would otherwise be laid off between projects which makes it very hard to progress with your training or your career. At the same time, the Construction Centre will build up a skilled labour force that otherwise wouldn’t exist because when there’s no work, skilled people tend to leave the community. And, importantly, the idea is to keep capital funding in the community. So when there’s a new arena that needs to get built, when there’s a new school that needs to get built, you have a crew of people who are ready to take that on. Rather than flying in skilled labourers, you actually have the community doing it themselves. It’s working towards self-determination in housing too, because if those modular housing units are being built in the community, by community members, then eventually they’re taking over design decisions and decisions about maintenance in a way that hasn’t really happened for decades.
Transitional homeownership
My research also looked at a transitional homeownership model that adapts some of the successful principles of the 1980s HAP. Right now,
in non-market communities, there are serious gaps in the housing continuum that is, the different types of housing options available to people. For the most part, you have public housing, and you have homelessness mostly in the form of hidden homelessness, where people are sleeping on the couches of relatives. Then, in some cases, you have inherited homeownership where people got homes through the HAP or some other government program.
But for the most part, not a lot of people in non-market communities are actually moving into homeownership anymore. I asked the local housing manager in Fort Good Hope: “When’s the last time someone built a house in the community?” She said, “I can only think of one person. It was probably about 20 years ago, and that person actually went to the bank and got a mortgage. If people have a home, it’s usually inherited from their parents or from relatives.” And that situation is a bit of a problem in itself, because it means that people can’t move out of public housing. Public housing traps you in a lot of ways. For example, it punishes employment, because rent is geared to income. It’s been said many times that this model disincentivizes employment. I was in a workshop last year where an Indigenous person spoke up and said, “Actually, it’s not disincentivizing, it punishes employment. It takes things away from you.”
Somebody at the territorial housing corporation in Yellowknife told me, “We have clients who are over the income threshold for public housing, but there’s nowhere else they can go.” Theoretically, they would go to the private housing market, they would go to market housing, or they would go to homeownership, but those options don’t exist or they aren’t within reach.
So the idea with the transitional homeownership model is to create an option that could allow the highest income earners in a non-market community to move towards homeownership. This could take some pressure off the public housing system. And it would almost be like a wealth distribution measure: people who are able to afford the cost of operating and maintaining a home then have that option, instead of remaining in government-subsidized housing. For those who cannot, the public housing system is still an option and maybe a few more public housing units are freed up.
I’ve developed about 36 recommendations for a transitional homeownership model in northern non-market communities. The recommendations are meant to be actioned at various scales: at the scale of the individual household, the scale of the housing provider, and the scale of the whole community. The idea is that if you look at housing as part of a whole system, then there are certain moves that might make sense here in a non-market context especially that wouldn’t make sense elsewhere. So for example, we’re in a situation where a house doesn’t appreciate in value. It’s not a financial asset, it’s actually a financial liability, and it’s something that costs a lot to maintain over the years. Giving someone a house in a non-market community is actually giving them a burden, but some residents would be quite willing to take this on, just to have an option of getting out of public housing. It just takes a shift in mindset to start considering solutions for that kind of context.
One particularly interesting feature of non-market communities is that they’re still functioning with a mixed economy: partially a subsistence-based or traditional economy, and partially a cash economy. I think that’s actually a strength that hasn’t been tapped into by territorial and federal policies. In the far North, in-kind and traditional economies are still very much a way of life. People subsidize their groceries with “country food,” which means food that was harvested from the land. And instead of paying for fuel tank refills in cash, many households in non-market communities are burning wood as their primary heat source. In communities south of the treeline, like Fort Good Hope, that wood is also harvested from the land. Despite there being no exchange of cash involved, these are critical
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Racialized inequities in the Northwest Territories
economic activities and they are also part of a sustainable, resilient economy grounded in local resources and traditional skills.
This concept of the mixed economy could be tapped into as part of a housing model, by bringing back the idea of a ‘sweat equity’ contribution instead of a down payment just like in the HAP. Contributing time and labour is still an economic exchange, but it bypasses the ‘cash’ part the part that’s still hard to come by in a non-market community. Labour doesn’t have to be manual labour, either. There are all kinds of work that need to take place in a community: maybe taking training courses and working on projects at the Construction Centre, maybe helping out at the Band Office, or providing childcare services for other working parents and so on. So it could be more inclusive than a model that focuses on manual labour.
Another thing to highlight is a rent-to-own trial period. Not every client will be equipped to take on the burdens of homeownership. So you can give people a trial period. If it doesn’t work out and they can’t pay for operations and maintenance, they could continue renting without losing their home.
Then it’s worth touching on some basic design principles for the homeownership units. In the North, the solutions that work are often the simplest not the most technologically innovative. When you’re in a remote location, specialized replacement parts and specialized labour are both difficult to come by. And new technologies aren’t always designed for extreme climates especially as we trend towards the digital. So rather than installing technologically complex, highefficiency systems, it actually makes more sense to build something that people are comfortable with, familiar with, and willing to maintain. In a southern context, people suggest solutions like solar panels to manage energy loads. But in the North, the best thing you can do for energy is put a woodstove in the house. That’s something we’ve heard loud and clear in many communities. Even if people can’t afford to fill their fuel tank, they’re still able to keep chopping wood or their neighbour is, or their brother, or their kid, and so on. It’s just a different way of looking at things and a way of bringing things back down to earth, back within reach of community members.
Regulatory barriers to housing access: Revisiting the National Building Code
On that note, there’s one more project I’ll touch on briefly. TAG is working on a research study, funded by Housing, Infrastructure
and Communities Canada, which looks at regulatory barriers to housing access in the North. The National Building Code (NBC) has evolved largely to serve the southern market context, where constraints and resources are both very different than they are up here. Technical solutions in the NBC are based on assumptions that, in some cases, simply don’t apply in northern communities.
Here’s a very simple example: minimum distance to a fire hydrant. Most of our communities don’t have fire hydrants at all. We don’t have municipal services. The closest hydrant might be thousands of kilometres away. So what do we do instead? We just have different constraints to consider.
That’s just one example but there are many more. We are looking closely at the NBC, and we are also working with a couple of different communities in different situations. The idea is to identify where there are conflicts between what’s regulated and what’s actually feasible, viable, and practical when it comes to on-the-ground realities. Then we’ll look at some alternative solutions for housing. The idea is to meet the intent of the NBC, but arrive at some technical solutions that are more practical to build, easier to maintain, and more appropriate for northern communities.
All of the projects I’ve just described are fairly recent, and very much still ongoing. We’ll see how it all plays out. I’m sure we’re going to run into a lot of new barriers and learn a lot more on the way, but it’s an incremental trial-and-error process. Even with the Construction Centre, we’re saying that this is a demonstration project, but how or if it rolls out in other communities would be totally community-dependent, and it could look very, very different from place to place.
In doing any research on Northern housing, one of the consistent findings is that there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Northern communities are not all the same. There are all kinds of different governance structures, different climates, ground conditions, transportation routes, different population sizes, different people, different cultures. Communities are Dene, Métis, Inuvialuit, as well as non-Indigenous, all with different ways of being. One-size-fits-all solutions don’t work they never have. And the housing crisis is complex, and it’s difficult to unravel. So we’re trying to move forward with a few different approaches, maybe in a few different places, and we’re hoping that some communities, some organizations, or even some individual people, will see some positive impacts.
The Round Houses of 1959
Designed by Architect James Strutt
By Peter D. Geldart (Petra Books, 2025)
The post-WWII years brought a need to house returned veterans and their new families, along with an excitement about new types and forms of housing. Working in the spirit of the age, 35-year-old Ottawa architect James Strutt in 1959 worked with six clients on round houses a set of designs intended to reduce building costs by using materials most efficiently, while creating modernist, open-plan spaces.
The designs, inspired by the work of Buckminster Fuller and Frank Lloyd Wright, were for single-floor structures in which a curve of rooms and an open living-dining area surround a central hexagonal service core built of concrete block. The whole is topped by a geometrically complex roof, shaped using tongue-and-groove Western Red Cedar to create a hyperbolic paraboloid, or saddle-like shape. Strutt’s own family home of 1956, built according a similar scheme over six weeks for less than $1,800, survives in the Gatineau Hills, near Ottawa, and is being rehabilitated by the National Capital Commission.
Author Peter D. Geldart’s family were the original residents of a Strutt-designed round house. Geldart, who has a background in architecture, gives a thorough overview of the architectural drawings of the six round houses using Strutt’s original hand-drawn materials, now held at the National Archives of Canada.
These show variations on the theme, with schemes varying from 1,400 to 2,000 square feet, and extra wings swapped out for carports. By publishing this material, Geldart hopes to contribute to a contemporary revival of Strutt’s ideas. “Is the concept of a ‘low-cost house of 1,000 sq. ft.’ viable in the 21st century?” he asks. “While the house was built to the standards of the day, it can now be built using modern materials and techniques.”
The Barrack, 1572-1914: Chapters in the History of Emergency Architecture
By Robert Jan van Pelt (Park Books, 2025)
The largest artifact in the touring exhibition Auschwitz. Not Long Ago. Not Far Away., currently on display at the ROM in Toronto, is a wooden barracks building. It’s from the Auschwitz-Monowitz camp, a satellite to Auschwitz created to provide slave labour to the IG Farben corporation for the construction of a synthetic rubber factory.
The discovery of a sister building, back in 2012, led exhibition chief curator and architectural historian Robert Jan van Pelt, University Professor at the Waterloo School of Architecture, on a research journey to write a comprehensive history of the barracks temporary buildings that have not only housed prisoners, but also provided shelter for military servicemen and women, refugees, and natural disaster survivors. “Many people have experienced, for shorter or longer time per-
iods, life in a barrack, and for all of them it represented life on the edge, for better or worse,” writes Van Pelt.
Van Pelt’s book criss-crosses with ease through architectural history, military history, and the history of medicine all of which played crucial roles in the evolving development of this seemingly simple building type. The book is arranged in a dozen episodes, with the barrack at the centre of each, serving as an anchor point for unfolding the rich intellectual and historical context shaping the way these structures were developed and deployed. The book is richly illustrated with archival materials a feat in itself, given that the documentation for temporary buildings, particularly before 1900, is scarce. These drawings, photos, and paintings are supplemented with 20 worm’s eye views of key buildings, carefully composed by a team of Waterloo architecture school students and alumni.
Like many vernacular buildings, temporary structures larger than a tent, designed to house soldiers in the field, have existed at least since Ancient Rome. One of the first visual accounts of barracks came centuries later, in the winter of 1572, when the Spanish laid siege to the Dutch city of Haarlem, and cartographer Thomas Thomaszoon sketched the position of dozens of Spain’s wood-and-straw structures outside the city. The siege was successful, but only a few years later, the Dutch Republic gained the upper hand. As part of the creation of a standing army, they began to develop more precise instructions for the layout of camps, including the construction of temporary barracks. The Napoleonic army made use of barracks in both military camps and training camps; by the mid-1800s, the construction of various barrack types was detailed in field construction manuals issued to officers in many European armies.
During the Crimean War (1853-56), over 3,500 prefabricated barracks were manufactured in a Gloucester factory, as a solution to the appalling conditions at the front. But when the structures arrived at port, British forces were not able to unload and erect them the materials for a single building weighed more than two tons, and each would require 60 horses (or 150 men) to transport to camp on the muddy roads.
Prefabrication was also used, with somewhat more success, towards the end of the conflict to erect field hospitals designed by British engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel with a priority on cross-ventilation to limit the spread of disease. Low mortality rates from these structures led to a continued preference for “barrack hospitals” based on groupings of low-slung, well-ventilated pavilions,
ABOVE RIGHT The growth of use in construction materials dominates in a chart showing the use of raw materials, by category, in the United States from 1900 through 2020. The quantity of agricultural products is plotted at the base of the graph, but is not visible at the scale of this figure. Materials embedded in imported goods are not included.
rather than conceived as single grand structures. The model was further refined with the addition of primitive underfloor heating and ridge ventilation by former surgeon William A. Hammond for the Union Army during the American Civil War (1861-65).
Barrack hospitals were constructed for civilian use, as well. Following the conclusion of the Franco-Prussian war (1870-71), such designs were built to house patients with infectious diseases in Berlin and proposed as a means to bring professional medical care to Germany’s rural areas. A barracks-inspired hospital was built in Saint Petersburg, Russia, in 1889, and continues to be operational.
If the barrack as an accommodation for the sick is a progressive tale, the 19th-century history of the barrack is equally checkered by the building type’s use for prisoner accommodation, including in the penal colonies of Australia and French Guiana. In North America, barracks were used in an internment camp for Native American Dakotas, and Civil War-era Union barracks at Camp Douglas were used to house Confederate prisoners. The oldest preserved barrack in the world may be in Canada, at Grosse Isle national park. Here, barrackstyle quarantine sheds were used to detain thousands of Irish immigrant families during the typhoid fever epidemic of 1846-47, and their damp, fetid conditions contributed to many deaths an episode Van Pelt describes as a “blot on the national consciousness of Canada.”
At the turn of the 19th century, the prefabricated portable barrack came to the fore with the manufacturing of the Doecker barracks,
by Christoph & Unmack, a firm based in Copenhagen and Germany. Developed by a former military officer-turned-tentmaker, the technically sophisticated model used large rectangular frames that could be clipped together, and covered with “felt-cardboard” dense felt pressed onto canvas and impregnated with linseed oil. The self-supporting structures proved easy to set up, dismount, and transport, making them suitable for both military applications and, with little modification, for humanitarian aid. The Red Cross deployed Doecker barracks for use as field hospitals in Manchuria and Yokohama during the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05).
The Barrack, 1572-1914 wraps up in in the early 20th century, but with the note that in the ensuing decades until 1945, millions of barracks were produced by many of the world’s major nations and that most of these were erected in barbed-wire-ringed compounds. “This is the period in which tens if not hundreds of millions of people, many of whom were civilians, were forced to live in barracks, as refugees, as expellees, as civilian internees, as forced laborers, as prisoners or war, as concentration camp prisoners, and as people made homeless by the destruction wrought by war,” writes Van Pelt. Up until 1914, he notes, this building type largely carried a sense of achievement an image that would change sharply with the Age of the Camps. But although a WWII barrack was responsible for instigating Van Pelt’s initial investigation, that time period will need to await a second volume on this simple building type with a rich, complex, and complicated history.
Sustainable Housing in a Circular Economy
By Naomi Keena and Avi Friedman (Routledge, 2024)
The next frontier for housing is one that looks to embedding housing as part of a circular economy. Is it possible, this book asks, to disrupt the “take, make, waste” model of producing housing to instead provide affordable, waste-free housing?
A circular economy approach is often associated with waste recovery: designing buildings so that their component parts can be disassembled and reused. But an equally important aim is to right-size buildings and keep them in use for as long as possible, through strategies including engaging in the sharing economy and planning for flexibility in the use of spaces. The book also explores the role of digitization and data standardization, such as in digital passports that track raw materials as they are used and reused over time.
This book is primarily intended as an academic text, but for architects interested in the topic, there are gems to be gleaned, especially in the global case studies. A particularly revealing graphic shows the exponential growth of construction material use in the United States over the past century a mountain that dwarfs all other resources. A circular economy approach to housing is not just a luxury but will be necessary to reverse the trend, and ensure a sustainable future.
A LIVING HOME
TEXT Elsa Lam
A SHELTER FOR INDIGENOUS WOMEN OFFERS A PLACE OF NURTURE AND GROUNDING FOR ITS CLIENTS.
Fifty years ago, four grandmothers founded the organization Anduhyaun Ojibwe for “Our Home” to respond to the needs of the city’s Indigenous women. The organization used a city-owned heritage house in the Annex to offer shelter to women and children suffering from the traumas of violence and homelessness. Last year, they moved to a building designed by LGA Architectural Partners.
The architects took the organization’s name to heart, aiming to provide not just basic shelter, but a place of nurture and grounding. The organization’s long-time executive director, Blanche Meawassige, told the designers that the building needed to feel like it was alive.
“From Blanche, we understood that a shelter is a place where rehabilitation growth and healing begins,” says architect Brock James, partner at LGA . “Yes, it’s a roof over your head and safety, but it’s also where that spiritual part starts; it has to be about growth and life.”
This thinking shows in the bedrooms, 16 of which are compact, single-occupancy rooms and two of which are designed for fam-
ilies with up to three kids. (Some rooms can also be interconnected, to accommodate larger families or to provide a physical link between friends.) Each room has its own bathroom, a wooden desk, adjustable lighting, and a curved ceiling-to-wall transition that reflects daylight through the space. The curve, says James, “makes the room very ‘here’. It’s only here. It’s not generic.”
Curves recur on the main floor, where seafoam-coloured tiles sweep along flowing walls, adding to the building’s sense of aliveness and alluding to Indigenous teachings about water. The curves lead to a large communal kitchen and a central ceremonial space, currently known as Nookomis, or “grandmother.”
Many details illustrate LGA’s commitment to creating specialness with economical means. Nookomis, for instance, is clad with cedar shingles that came in pre-cut profiles. (“It’s just a matter of coming up with a pattern, which I did in my living room during the pandemic,” says James.) The burgundy walls of Nookomis’s interior are made, in
ABOVE In the centre of the building, a ceremonial room is a calming space that invites community meetings and healing.
part, with a simple foam in a custom colour. (“It’s a straightforward product that’s not good if you were touching it but up high, controlling the sound, it works.”) A skylight caps the space, like a full moon casting a soft glow from above.
Meawassige originally asked for the outside of the building to be anonymous, but later decided that the Indigeneity of the interior should be expressed outside, too. The architects created a design with a similarly elevated attention to detail. They achieved a high level of airtightness in the envelope, and composed a façade made out of standard Vicwest metal, applied in a pattern that ensures that the 300mm width of the panels would stay intact, with no cuts.
“Good design, an elevated section, beautiful tiles: it’s things like that that makes it feel like somebody cares,” says James. “When I think about aesthetics, we can have lots of stories about them, but I know that it’s communicating that Anduhyaun cares. This is their building, and it’s emoting that they care.”
OPEN FOR ENTRIES AUGUST
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CANADIAN ARCHITECT INVITES ARCHITECTS AND PHOTOGRAPHERS TO ENTER THE 2025 AWARDS OF EXCELLENCE
Since 1967, our annual national awards program recognizes the architectural excellence of projects in the design and construction phases.
Submissions will be accepted in PDF format , up to 12 pages with dimensions no greater than 11” x 17” . Total file size is not to exceed 25 MB . There is also the option to submit a video up to two minutes in length.
This year, we are also presenting the sixth edition of the Canadian Architect Photo Awards of Excellence.
Winners of the architectural project and architectural photo competitions will be published in a special issue of Canadian Architect in December 2025.
Deadline: Friday September 12th, 2025
For more details and to submit your entry, visit: www.canadianarchitect.com/awards
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