GOOD WORKS

A LARGE SHELTER ADJACENT TO DOWNTOWN QUEBEC CITY RESULTED FROM A DECADE-LONG CO-DESIGN PROCESS.

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

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

City’s historic and legislative cores, unapologetically claiming space in the city for marginalized people.

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

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

ABOVE On the ground floor, the dining room and kitchen are lined with windows to provide natural light to clients, staff, and volunteers participating in Lauberivière’s meal programs.

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

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

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

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

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

Observation is a Constant that Underlies All Approaches

By Phyllis Lambert (Lars Müller Publishers, 2023)

REVIEW Elsa Lam

Architect and philanthropist Phyllis Lambert has long been a collector and commissioner of photographs. Photographs undertaken with Richard Pare were a key tool in mapping out Montreal’s greystone neighbourhoods, which Lambert became instrumental in preserving. In 1974, long before architectural photography became a popular specialty, she purchased the first photograph for a collection and an institution she had not yet created the Canadian Centre for Architecture.

In the background of this work, Lambert has continuously honed her own photography, which is presented for the first time in this book. In the fifties, she documented the Seagram Building and Plaza, for which she served as director of planning. In the mid-sixties, she photographed ancient theatres while designing the Saidye Bronfman Centre in Montreal. Upon returning to Montreal in the early 70s, she created cinematographic slide shows (complete with recorded soundtracks) of threatened buildings for the preservation organization Save Montreal.

Her photography continued in later travel and on architectural study tours around the world: alternating between black-and-white and colour, analogue and digital. She even reached for a Hasselblad or a Polaroid when the subject called for it, but since 1993, has stuck mainly to pocket-sized cameras: first a point-and-shoot Olympus, then a Canon PowerShot, and lately, a succession of iPhones.

During the pandemic, like many of us, Lambert observed daily life repeatedly at close range. She took advantage of the time to photograph, over and over, the views from her windows, and vistas through the rooms and doorways of her home in Old Montreal. Why has this interest in photography persisted over the decades? “Surely,” she writes, “observation is the constant that underlies all approaches, all levels of interest, and all fascination with the medium.” She adds, “Observation grows with what it feeds on, driven by focused inquiries that deepen exponentially over time.”