JOHN MUIR LIBRARY

RESTORATIVE SPACE

A HISTORIC FIRE HALL AND STABLE ARE TRANSFORMED INTO WINDSOR, ONTARIO’S NEWEST LIBRARY.

PROJECT Windsor Public Library—John Muir Branch, Windsor, Ontario ARCHITECT studio g+G inc. TEXT Rebekah Mayer PHOTOS Jason Grossi

Established in 1797, Olde Sandwich Towne is located on the west side of Windsor, and is home to some of Ontario’s oldest heritage buildings. One of those gems is the 1921 Windsor Fire Hall No. 6, and its adjoining mid-nineteenth-century stable—one of few to survive from the era when fire engines were pulled by horses. In 2016, the City of Windsor and Windsor Public Library Board purchased both buildings, aiming to adaptively reuse them for a new library space.

For locals, the resulting John Muir Branch is more than a useful community amenity, and a sensitive piece of heritage restoration—it’s a work of art in itself.

The project was designed by architect Jason Grossi of Studio g+G and completed by Intrepid General Limited contractors. The contractors lived up to their name, as the project proved complex from the start. The sandy soil of the building site haunted the team throughout the project, requiring foundation underpinning and shoring to support a new elevator. The disparate floor elevations of the fire hall and stable also created challenges: in the contemporary addition that links the two historic structures, a suspended walkway on a slight incline connects one building’s upper floor to the other.

OPPOSITE The adaptive reuse included the transformation of the fire hall’s hose tower into a glass lantern lookout.

CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT The library’s main space includes a doubleheight atrium; a suspended bridge links to the former horse stable and negotiates a change in level between the two historic buildings; mobile furniture has helped the library adapt to distancing needs during the pandemic, and will enable the space to be cleared for larger gatherings and special events.

GROUND FLOOR SECOND FLOOR

7

FD

CR 6

5 4

2 3

1 8 9 11 12

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13  1 OUTDOOR PIAZZA 2 CIRCULATION AREA 3 LOUNGE 4 WORKROOM 5 CHILDREN’S AREA 6 COLLECTIONS 7 OUTDOOR ACTIVITY

AREA 8 HISTORIC

COLLECTIONS 9 BRIDGE OPEN TO

BELOW 10 GALLERY OPEN TO

BELOW 11 YOUNG ADULTS’ AREA 12 STAIRS TO TOWER 13 MULTIPURPOSE ROOM

ABOVE LEFT Bespoke shelves line the walls of the new addition linking the fire hall to the stable. ABOVE RIGHT The stable was clad with custom fabricated white cedar clapboard and treated with limewash; the addition is clad with lead-coated flat seam copper.

SECTION

STABLE ADDITION FIREHALL

0 5M

Connections to local heritage pervade the project. In front, a ramp and piazza are paved with cobbles from the original entrance of the Ambassador Bridge joining Windsor and Detroit. The brickwork on the exterior walls was preserved; during the reconstruction, sand and aggregates were collected from the site to use in the mortar repointing. Extra Douglas Fir boards were found in the building during renovations, so Grossi used them to clad the interior of the new addition, specifying the same wood type to frame its multi-paned windows. The stable’s original roof was salvaged and restored; the walls were unsalvageable, and were reconstructed with cedar shiplap siding and a limewash finish.

Inside the branch, part of the fire hall’s second floor was removed to create an atrium; natural light flows through a generous skylight and windows. Tin tiles—reproduced from originals recovered in the renovation—cover the main room’s ceiling. Salt-and-pepper concrete flooring allows sound to travel through this space, one of several areas designed to have specific acoustic qualities by Grossi, who has a parallel career as a composer and classical guitarist. Sounds are more muted in the front section of the library, ideal for library users looking for a quieter library experience. Mobile furniture—from seating to the circulation desk—provides opportunities for performances and other community programs. Most of the collection is housed in shelf-lined walls and stacks on the first floor of the contemporary addition, with the suspended walkway dancing overhead.

On the second floor, visitors can find the non-fiction and young adult collections, as well as a charred, exposed wooden beam across the ceiling—a relic from a 1940 fire that struck when the firefighters were out responding to a call, destroying most of the second floor. Visitors can also walk up another flight to the tower where firehoses were once hung to dry, now home to a colourful beacon light and lookout.

Upon opening in the fall of 2019, the branch quickly became a favourite meeting place for the community, and the unique programs created by library staff were widely successful. Six months later, this momentum halted as the world locked down. When the branches in the Windsor Public Library system reopened with limited services, the openconcept, flexible design of the John Muir Branch allowed for easier physical distancing within the branch. As the project team had hoped, the building continues to adapt to changing user needs—both long- and short-term.

Rebekah Mayer (MLIS) is a public service librarian at Windsor Public Library’s downtown branch.

CLIENT CITY OF WINDSOR / WINDSOR PUBLIC LIBRARY | ARCHITECT TEAM JASON GROSSI | STRUCTURAL HADDAD MORGAN AND ASSOCIATES LTD. | MECHANICAL/ ELECTRICAL STANTEC CONSULTING | LANDSCAPE BEZAIR AND WHITE | INTERIORS STUDIO G+G INC. | CONTRACTOR INTREPID GENERAL LIMITED | AREA 687 M2 | BUDGET $4.6 M | COMPLETION 2020

Modern Architecture (Fifth Edition)

By Kenneth Frampton (Thames & Hudson, 2020)

Modern Architecture and the Lifeworld: Essays in Honor of Kenneth Frampton

Edited by Karla Cavarra Britton and Robert McCarter (Thames & Hudson, 2020)

REVIEWS Elsa Lam

For several generations of architects worldwide, the figure of architectural critic and historian Kenneth Frampton looms large. According to architecture professor Mary McLeod, he is “arguably the most influential architectural historian since Sigfried Gideon.” Frampton has been a respected scholar, teacher, and practitioner for five decades; his book Modern Architecture: A Critical History has been translated into thirteen languages and his 1983 essay “Towards a Critical Regionalism” into many more. His wide-ranging interests and generosity towards both architects and colleagues are encapsulated in an oft-quoted quip among architectural researchers—that the definition of a “rare architectural book” is one that doesn’t bear a preface by Frampton. Frampton’s legacy comes to the fore in a new festschrift, or book of celebratory essays, marking his 90th birthday in 2020. The volume, titled Modern Architecture and the Lifeworld: Essays in Honor of Kenneth Frampton, is edited by architectural professor Karla Cavarra Britton and architect and writer Robert McCarter. Its publication coincides with the release of the fifth edition of Modern Architecture.

Taken together, the two volumes describe the expansion of Frampton’s scholarship and influence over the decades. Modern Architecture began as a largely European-centred account of the evolution of the Modern Movement in architecture; at 735 pages, the current edition more than doubles the length of the original tome, and includes accounts of Modernism’s manifestation in regions around the world. The expansion is thematic, as well: an afterword entitled “Architecture in the Age of Globalization” addresses issues such as globalized capital, the crisis of housing, and sustainable design. As Frampton remarks, “The impasse of escalating climate change […] is ever more apparent today as we encounter the worldwide crisis of democracy and the accompanying hysteria of populist political reaction.”

In fact, politics were always intertwined with Frampton’s understanding of architecture, as he consistently espoused a humanist, placebased vision of architecture, grounded in his readings of philosophers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hannah Arendt, and Walter Benjamin. Frampton’s affiliations with the leftist Frankfurt School of political philosophers, and his attempt to square these readings with an interest in architecture’s experiential qualities, is detailed in Mary McLeod’s essay in Modern Architecture and the Lifeworld, entitled “Kenneth Frampton’s Idea of the Critical.”

This confluence comes to the fore in the essay “Towards a Critical Regionalism,” where “[Frampton’s] position seems closer to that of both Habermas and Gramsci, who emphasize culture’s potential as a constructive form countering prevailing ideologies, than to that of Tafuri and Adorno, who seem to accept a darker, more totalizing view of capitalism’s power,” writes McLeod. That essay—with its hopefulness about architecture’s ability to create meaning and to resist the forces of globalization and capitalism— has made an impression on many architects. In Modern Architecture and the Lifeworld, luminaries such as Wang Shu, Steven Holl, Wiel Arets, Marion Weiss, Michael A. Manfredi, and Emilio Ambasz testify to the impact of Frampton’s writings, and especially of “Towards a Critical Regionalism.”

“To understand Frampton’s impact on the field of practice, it is important to reflect on the state of the profession in the late 1970s and early 1980s,” writes Brad Cloepfil, founder of Allied Architecture. He notes how, at that time, international modernism seemed to be coming to an end, the influence of major corporate firms was apparently waning, and a new culture of ‘studio’ architecture was emerging in New York and Los Angeles. Yet, discourse had been frozen between a view of architecture as a kind of rarified art-from, or as a kind of container for symbolic meaning. “Practitioners and theorists alike were locked in a desperate battle of association and borrowed authority,” writes Cloepfil. Into this atmosphere, Frampton’s concept of critical regionalism, with its emphasis on the material and structural tectonics of architecture, “effectively asserted the very specific language of architecture as the critical cultural pursuit […] The building, the made artifact, can embody and transmit something true about its own construction, and by extension, the cultural forces at work upon it.”

As Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, co-founders of Grafton Architecture, summarize: “The main thrust of these ‘Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance’ is to make sure that we do not forget the value of our senses,

REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION FROM THE KENNETH FRAMPTON FONDS, CANADIAN CENTRE FOR ARCHITECTURE. GIFT OF KENNETH FRAMPTON OPPOSITE Kenneth Frampton, New York, 2010. LEFT Sketches by Kenneth Frampton of Alvar Aalto’s National Pensioners Institute, Helsinki, Finland, c.1977

encouraging us to remember our impulse to touch, encourage us as architects to value the totally immersive poetics of construction.”

Frampton’s impact has equally been felt in Canada, where the idea of regionally inflected architecture is especially pertinent to a country with immensely varied geography, cultures, and land-based Indigenous and vernacular building practices. Frampton has long cited the work of Brian MacKay-Lyons, Brigitte Shim and Howard Sutcliffe, and John and Patricia Patkau as exemplars of critical regionalism. In the newest edition of Modern Architecture, he extends his assessment of Canada back to the 1960s, citing works in Montreal including Ray Affleck of ARCOP’s Place Bonaventure, Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67, and Dan Hanganu’s Pointe-à-callière museum. Turning to Toronto, he makes note of Ron Thom’s Massey College, John Andrews’ Scarborough College, and Barton Myers and Jack Diamond’s HUB dormitory at the University of Alberta. In Vancouver, he marks the importance of Erickson’s Simon Fraser University, University of Lethbridge, and Robson Square complex.

Characteristic of Frampton’s writing, this summary of modern Canadian architecture’s highlights is delivered in a compact six pages, including a sprinkling of carefully selected images. Modern Architecture’s fundamental role, Frampton writes, is as a “convenient reference work or textbook.” For someone unfamiliar with a particular subject, it’s best accompanied by illustrated companion texts, and perhaps an internet search engine, close at hand.

For this reader, it was a refreshing to alternate between the compact writing of Modern Architecture and the mix of narrative and academic texts in Modern Architecture and the Lifeworld. Canadian references show up here, too—from Mary McLeod’s opening essay, which mentions the impact of “Towards a Critical Regionalism” on architects and firms including John and Patricia Patkau, to the closing essay, written by Brigitte Shim and Howard Sutcliffe.

Shim and Sutcliffe’s “From the Archives of Kenneth Frampton” is based on a close examination of six documents, selected from Frampton’s archives, which are held at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal. “There, in the light-filled study centre, as we contemplated a very large stack of archival boxes, we fully understood the breadth of Frampton’s insatiable curiosity and prodigious interest in the world and its relationship to architecture and life,” write Shim and Sutcliffe. Their selection of archival objects ranges from Frampton’s sketches of Alvar Aalto’s National Pensioners Institute in Holland, “in which Frampton interrogates […] Aalto’s choice of building materials, examining carefully his construction details and building connections,” to his measured drawings of Pierre Chareau and Bernard Bijvoet’s Maison de Verre in Paris.

Looking at materials from the archive, Shim and Sutcliffe assert that Frampton’s interests in global architecture, as well as the integrated role of landscape, built form and topography in shaping the public realm, are deep rooted. In the Frampton fonds, they discovered a letter from Frampton to Cornelia Oberlander from 1999, asking for an image of Robson Square to use on the cover of a book he was writing on megaform. He didn’t receive the photo he had in mind in time—but eight years later, he delivered a lecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design entitled “Megaform as Urban Landscape,” using the photo he eventually received from Oberlander.

One of the most delightful parts of Modern Architecture and the Lifeworld is a succinct tribute to Frampton from Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza: In space and time a lifelong traveler. Eyes, ears and voice that find, receive, understand and send—open to the sharing.

Indeed, Frampton’s life’s work has played no small part in nurturing a critical understanding of modern and contemporary architecture today—as well as pointing towards architecture’s continued transformative potential for the future.

Serious Fun: The Landscapes of Claude Cormier

By Marc Treib and Susan Herrington (ORO, 2021)

Landscape historians Marc Treib and Susan Harrington teamed up to create this volume on the landscape architecture of Montrealbased Claude Cormier—a work that encompasses themes including humor and wit in public places, kitsch, sexual orientation, and social regard. “Cormier’s particular brand of landscape architecture has provided a needed breath of fresh air to Canada’s urban populace as well as to the landscape profession,” they write. Anyone who has visited his works—from Sugar Beach and Berczy Park in Toronto, to Pink Balls and Lipstick Forest in Montreal, or seen places to which he has contributed, including the National Holocaust Monument in Ottawa and Evergreen Brick Works in Toronto—would doubtless agree.

LOCAL RESOURCES

TEXT Elsa Lam

AN ARCHITECT-OWNED AND -OPERATED COWORKING HUB ANTICIPATES THE FUTURE OF WORKPLACES.

Like many architects whose portfolio includes commercial office design, Heather Dubbeldam spent a good deal of last year speculating on the future of the workplace. But the stakes were higher for Dubbeldam—who not only designs offices for others, but also owns her own office space—along with owning and operating a coworking space called Lokaal (Dutch for local).

Just before the pandemic, Dubbeldam Architecture + Design acquired and renovated a three-storey brick building on Toronto’s busy St. Clair West, transforming the graffiti-ridden corner property into a mixed-use creative hub. Besides their own offices and coworking space, each of which occupies a full floor, the building contains a ground-floor marketing agency and indie coffee shop, as well as a residential unit in a raised basement.

Many of these spaces emptied out when the pandemic hit. Luckily, the marketing agency’s work remained stable, and they even renewed their lease mid-pandemic. But only one of Lokaal’s members—a building envelope consultant, with a staff of four—stayed put. “They had the whole floor to themselves,” says Kevin McIntosh, Dubbeldam’s business and life partner.

Dubbeldam, McIntosh, and their seven staff all returned to their office in August, as soon as everyone was fully vaccinated. They have also seen interest pick up in Lokaal. As people negotiate the changing landscape of workfrom-office and work-from-home, the need for a third space—not home and not office—has made Lokaal busier now than pre-pandemic. The space hosts small businesses and start-ups, and its occupants have also included several medical students who came to study for exams away from their partners and young children at home, and others who work full-time from home, but use Local for a change of scene. Recently, a Montreal architect worked out of Lokaal for a few days with his intern, who lives nearby.

On a wintery Monday in December, the space was pleasantly abuzz, but not uncomfortably crowded. The organizers of a Latin American film festival conversed around a table in the kitchen, a marketer went over the week’s social media content with a colleague, an architect who recently took an office chatted over coffee with a hot-desker about the recent snow—it was the hot-desker’s first winter in Canada. About two dozen people from some 20 businesses currently have access to the space, though not everyone comes in every day.

Mandatory vaccination, social distancing, and masking policies are in place. There are also marbled white-and-grey felt dividers between workstations, which complement a bespoke red felt pendant light in the lounge and a pleated felt entrance wall. The dividers, called deskPETs, are designed by Dubbeldam; both the luminaire and wall feature are by felt artist Kathryn Walter (whose studio is nearby). By design, there is flexibility built into the space—if the meeting room is occupied, members sometimes use Dubbeldam’s meeting room upstairs; conversely, as Dubbeldam’s own office grows, they’ll use some of Lokaal’s desks for overflow. Outside, painted drop-shadows around the windows animate the façade, giving the brick building a dynamic presence on the street.

“Almost all of the members of Lokaal are from our neighbourhood,” says Dubbeldam, recalling how several members were drawn to the space by its lively façade. As post-pandemic models of online and hybrid work settle into place, Dubbeldam and McIntosh are confident that places like Lokaal will become even more essential to the urban fabric—flexible, community-oriented spaces that allow people to work together, even when their formal work arrangements might otherwise keep them apart.

ABOVE Sitting atop Dubbeldam Architecture’s own offices, a community-oriented co-working suite offers a “third space” for start-up businesses and locals working from home.

This building façade features Dekton® Halo in our 12mm thickness large format, used for ventilated façade applications

8X On The Park 1111 Richards St, Vancouver,BC Architect: GBL Architects Inc Fabricator/ Installer: Keith Panel Systems