Canadian Architect March 2018 by IQ Business Media

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City building

canadian architect

March 2018

4 VIEWPOINT

Patrick Condon mulls the myth of subway supremacy.

7 NEWS

Pritzker Foundation names 2018 laureate; Rick Hansen Foundation creates accessibility rating system.

26 LONG VIEW

Stefan Novakovic delves into Robert Burley’s urban greenery.

33 Books

Reviews from Tom Kundig, Larry Beasley, Dave LeBlanc and Brigitte Desrochers.

40 Calendar

Design-related events in Canada and elsewhere.

13 City builders

42 backpage

Ian Garrick Mason gives industrial conversions the star treatment.

20 BIG POND

Ponderosa Commons, a mixed-use student residence by KPMB and HCMA presents a microcosm of urbanity on a suburban campus. TEXT Adele Weder

29 Down to the waterfront

The Beaverbrook Art Gallery expansion by MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple connects the heart of Fredericton to the river. TEXT John Leroux

Peter Coffman

Some of the people and projects that define the word “placemaking” now: interviews with Andy Yan, Martha Thorne, Jay Pitter and Ken Greenberg, and projects by Greenberg Consultants, civiliti, and Public City Architecture.

33 ABOVE The Peace Tower, as seen in the guidebook Exploring Ottawa.

COVER and left Image and detail of Actuated (oil on canvas, 2016), one of Etienne Zack’s architecturally evocative paintings that explore the connections between information systems and material construction— the very embodiment of a new approach to city-building in the information age. Image courtesy of Equinox Gallery, Vancouver.

v.63 n.03 The National Review of Design and Practice / The Official Magazine of the RAIC

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canadian architect 03/18

Viewpoint

Editor (2017-2018) adele Weder, hon. mRAIC Editor (on leave) elsa lam, mRAIC Art Director Roy Gaiot assistant Editor Stefan novakovic

Aaron Yeoman

The alluring high-speed underworld. Photo by Aaron Yeoman.

Subway Follies Transportation infrastructure inf luences the shape of cities for centuries. The road pattern of ancient Rome still provides settings for a thousand sidewalk cafés, long after most Imperial buildings have crumbled to dust. Yet governments seldom think carefully about how their transit decisions will influence future city form and the quality of experience enjoyed by—or inflicted on—our children and grandchildren. This is evident in Vancouver, where I am a professor of urban design at the UBC School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. Along part of the city’s Broadway Avenue corridor, current officials insist on building an absurdly expensive ($400-million per kilometre, and rising) subway. Why? Ostensibly because it’s faster, doesn’t conflict with street traffic, and is theoretically capable of moving more people. But other high-capacity surface rail options can be had at less than a fifth of the cost. Toronto also has donned blinders in insisting on an asyet-unfunded $3.5-billion one-station subway extension of the Bloor-Danforth line. Their choice is especially shocking given an earlier provincial government offer to pay for a highcapacity surface light rail system to serve the same district. Toronto is leaving billions on the table to satisfy its urge for a subway, seemingly compelled by a desire for Very Big Things. This is sad, because both cities once enjoyed extensive surface rail transportation—systems that served not just one corridor, but many. Both Vancouver and Toronto are examples of North American “streetcar cities,” built largely between 1890 and 1930, when migrant workers flocked to them and electric streetcars that served every arterial in the city. The legacy of this system is all around us. Both cities have a “sense of place” derived from their low-rise linear corridors that are now some of the most attractive and vibrant neighbourhoods. These residential

Editorial Advisor Ian Chodikoff, OAA, FRAIC Contributing Editors Annmarie Adams, FRAIC Odile Hénault Douglas MacLeod, ncarb, MRAIC Regional Correspondents Halifax Christine Macy, OAA Regina Bernard Flaman, SAA Montreal David Theodore Calgary Graham Livesey, MRAIC Winnipeg Lisa Landrum, MAA, AIA, MRAIC Vice president & Senior Publisher Steve Wilson 416-441-2085 x105

districts have been fertilized by the street railway system that served them. Surface rail provided an even number of customers for each street section, insuring a similar distribution of commercial and then cultural services everywhere. The system induced a perfectly walkable density, with a symbiotic relationship between the customers and streetcars. So if surface rail works efficiently and affordably, then what is the impetus behind such a costly venture as a multi-billion-dollar subway extension? Well, follow the money. Around every station will sprout a forest of high-rise condo towers, both to supply the astronomical need for density needed to both feed and justify the subway, and the development taxes needed to pay for it. Our future cities will boast shimmering necklaces of these towers strung along our rapid transit system. But what of the vast majority of residents who will live far beyond a tenminute walking distance of the stations? For the cost of one short piece of subway, you could provide high capacity, comfortable, surface rail for an entire city. This more evenly distributed approach would capitalize on the huge investment made in the last century to create these “streetcar cities,” and would reinforce the qualities of the neighbourhoods that we hold dear. City builders are now faced with a choice: we can construct a few expensive subway lines to serve largely unaffordable tower districts, while outlying neighbourhoods depopulate and their commercial streets decline. Or we can capitalize on what already exists—the aboveground world—with a surface-transportation system that strengthens the existing structure of our cities, and restores urban enclaves that are more walkable, affordable and sustainable. Which kind of city do we want?

sales MANAGER Faria Ahmed 416-441-2085 x106 Customer Service / production laura moffatt 416-441-2085 x104 Circulation circulation@canadianarchitect.com President of iq business media inc. Alex Papanou Head Office 101 Duncan Mill Road, Suite 302 Toronto, ON M3B 1Z3 Telephone 416-441-2085 E-mail info@canadianarchitect.com Website www.canadianarchitect.com Canadian Architect is published monthly by iQ Business Media Inc.. The editors have made every reasonable effort to provide accurate and authoritative information, but they assume no liability for the accuracy or completeness of the text, or its fitness for any particular purpose. Subscription Rates Canada: $54.95 plus applicable taxes for one year; $87.95 plus applicable taxes for two years (HST – #80456 2965 RT0001). Price per single copy: $10.00. Students (prepaid with student ID, includes taxes): $27.00 for one year. USA: $105.95 US for one year. All other foreign: $125.95 US per year. Single copy US and foreign: $10.00 US. Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to: Circulation Dept., Canadian Architect, 101 Duncan Mill Road, Suite 302 Toronto, ON M3B 1Z3. Postmaster: please forward forms 29B and 67B to 101 Duncan Mill Road, Suite 302 Toronto, ON M3B 1Z3. Printed in Canada. All rights reserved. The contents of this publication may not be reproduced either in part or in full without the consent of the copyright owner. From time to time we make our subscription list available to select companies and organizations whose product or service may interest you. If you do not wish your contact information to be made available, please contact us via one of the following methods: Telephone 416-441-2085 x104 E-mail circulation@canadianarchitect.com Mail Circulation, 101 Duncan Mill Road, Suite 302, Toronto, ON M3B 1Z3 Member of the Canadian Business Press Member of the ALLIANCE FOR AuditED MEDIA Publications Mail Agreement #43096012 ISSN 1923-3353 (Online) ISSN 0008-2872 (Print)

Patrick M. Condon

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Congratulations The Alberta Association of Architects would like to acknowledge our newest architects and licensed interior designers. Moving from internship to registered architect or licensed interior designer is a milestone that takes many years and countless hours to achieve. Congratulations on your hard work and perseverance!

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Simon Fernandes Roberta Freire Addisalem Gebrehiwot Soheil Ghazi-Zadeh Samer Haddad Erin Jess Ketty Kalaria Lama Kamareddine Mohamed Katanbafnasab Kimberly Kraus Jennifer Lau Kevin Lo Eric Longchamp Ivan Ma Alison MacLachlan

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Banff Session 2018

Frank Van Roekel Christopher Vander Hoek Leslie Webb Amber White Julian Wylegly

Licensed Interior Designer, AAA Annette Guercio

Submissions are currently being accepted for the 2018 Prairie Design Awards, held in conjunction with Banff Session 2018. Award categories include: • Recent Work • Interior Design • Landscape Architecture • Small Projects Visit prairiedesignawards.com for entry criteria. Submissions are being accepted until April 6, 2018.

Registration Now

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Every two years, the Alberta Association of Architects hosts a highly anticipated conference in the breathtaking remoteness of the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel. Join us on May 11 + 12 for Banff Session 2018 as we explore the creatives. Sponsorship opportunities are currently available! Visit banffsession.ca to learn more.

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what’s new

The Pritzker Architecture Prize committee has named Balkrishna Doshi as the 2018 winner of architecture’s highest honour. Doshi is the first Indian recipient of award. And for the first time in its 40-year history, the Prize will be formally bestowed in Canada, at a ceremony in May at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto. Doshi´s architecture is both poetic and functional. The Indian Institute of Management (Bangalore, 1977-1992), inspired by traditional maze-like Indian cities and temples, is organized as interlocking buildings, courts and galleries. It also provides a variety of spaces protected from the hot climate. Doshi also designed Aranya Low Cost Housing (Indore, 1989), which now accommodates over 80,000 low- and middle-income residents in a system of courtyards, internal pathways and housing in a broad range of sizes. Overlapping layers and transitional areas bet ween the encourage fluid and adaptable living conditions, customary in Indian society. “My works are an extension of my life, philosophy and dreams trying to create treasury of the architectural spirit. I owe this prestigious prize to my guru, Le Corbusier. His teachings led me to question identity and compelled me to discover new regionally adopted contemporary expression for a sustainable holistic habitat,” said Doshi in a statement following the announcement. The 10-member jury included architects Glenn Murcott, Richard Rogers, Sejima Kazuyo, Benedetta Tagliabue and Wang Shu, facilitated by Pritzker Prize Executive Director Marth Thorne. Canadian Architect’s interview with Thorne, who is also the Dean of IE School of Architecture and Design in Madrid, appears on page 14 of this issue.

courtesy of VSF

Balkrishna Doshi to receive Pritzker Prize in Toronto this spring

ABOVE Balkrishna Doshi, recipient of the 2018 Pritzker Architecture Prize.

www.rickhansen.com

The Gold Medal is the highest honour the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (RAIC) can bestow. It recognizes a significant and lasting contribution to Canadian architecture. The RAIC jury called them “ambassadors for Canadian architecture” who have “built and maintained a high quality of work for decades. “They are one of the few firms that are recognized both nationally and internationally. The work is always innovative and interesting. It’s timeless, consistently elegant, beautifully detailed. They integrate nature beautifully. They don’t compromise. Their work inspires and delights. Their projects are functional, sculptural and beautiful in the landscape. They are spaces that one enjoys being in.” The Gold Medal will be presented at the RAIC/AANB Festival of Architecture, taking place in Saint John from May 30 to June 2. www.raic.org www.saucierperrotte.com

Saucier + Perrotte awarded RAIC Gold Medal

Rick Hansen Foundation posts report on workplace accessibility benefits

Gilles Saucier, FRAIC and André Perrotte, FRAIC have been named the recipients of the 2018 RAIC Gold Medal recipients. The two principals of Montreal-based Saucier + Perrotte Architectes, who founded the firm in 1988, have received more than 100 awards, including eight Governor General’s Medals in Architecture and the Government of Quebec’s Prix Ernest Cormier for lifetime achievement. They represented Canada at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2004 and have been published extensively in the national and international design press.

The Rick Hansen Foundation has published its findings of a report prepared by the Conference Board of Canada demonstrating the correlation between improved workplace accessibility, labour force participation and consumer spending. Among other findings, the report concludes that workplace improvements would permit over half a million Canadians with disabilities to work more than they do now, increasing GDP by $16.8-billion by 2030; that 57 per cent of currently unemployed Canadians with physical disabilities believe they could find employment if work-

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places were made more accessible; and that 49% of employed Canadians with physical disabilities say they could work longer hours if workplaces were more accessible. The report comes in the wake of the Foundation’s launch of its bid to bring a standardized rating system for building owners and tenants, called the Rick Hansen Foundation Accessibility Certification.™ (RHFAC). The certification programme is a new LEED style rating system to help building owners and tenants measure the accessibility of their buildings and sites, promoting increased access through the adoption of Universal Design principles. The rating system can be applied to determine the accessibility of commercial, institutional, and multi-family residential buildings. The RHFAC will provide expert services to organizations it certifies, including new construction assessments, retrofit assessments, design manual creation, and corporate workshops.

canadian architect 03/18

news

Manitoba’s Michael J. Cox named 2018 RAIC President

Michael J. Cox, FRAIC has been named the 79th President of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (RAIC). Cox received the President’s Medal of office from the 2017 President Ewa Bieniecka, FRAIC at a February ceremony in Ottawa. Cox had been serving as interim President since September 2017, when Bieniecka stepped down. “The RAIC needs to focus on the immediate needs of its members at all stages of their careers and in all sizes of practice,” said Cox, who has been in practice for nearly 40 years. “This includes delivering relevant and accessible continuing-education programs, helping emerging practitioners, and advocating for architects on practice issues such as procurement reform.” Cox, a past president of the Manitoba Association of Architects, said he will encourage significant membership growth among licensed architects, as well as graduate architects, academics and emerging practitioners. www.raic.org

UNCEDED invites Indigenous student participation

Canada’s Indigenous architecture students have been invited to be part of UNCEDED: Voices of the Land, Canada’s Official representative at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. Led by legendary architect and human rights activist Douglas Cardinal, the UNCEDED project will emphasize and celebrate the work

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canadian architect 03/18

News

of Indigenous architects and designers throughout Turtle Island. The inclusion of the students will enrich the educational component of the project; they will participate in daily programmatic proceedings, CLIENT: suchSiplast as being present on the site, offering tours, and responding JOB#: SIPL-17-002 to visitor questions. 2018 Print Campaign UNCEDED co-curator David Fortin had sent a letter to all the direcTRIM: 3.8"w x 9.85"h tors of architecture schools in Canada, asking that students be made LIVE: 3.8"w x 9.85"h BLEED: .n/a of the opportunity, and the responding letters have been eloquent aware COLOR: CMYK and moving. “It is really inspirational to hear these young minds express themselves and how architecture is already providing a vessel to celePUB: Canadian Architect CONTACT: brate their identities,” says Fortin. Steve Wilson With the submission process over, the challenge now is to select swilson@canadianarchitect.com who will go. “I am going to struggle to pick six or eight of this group,” RELEASE: 2/10/18 says Fortin. INSERTION: March “We need to brainstorm about how to afford to get more of them to Venice.” The current plan is to have two students at a time for two-month periods, over the course of the six-month Biennale. Should further funding come forth, the program will be expanded. www.unceded.ca

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canadian architect 03/18

10 Oboh and Kéré awarded African Multicultural Centre  The City of Edmonton has selected a team led by architects Samuel Óghale Oboh and Francis Kéré of AECOM with HCMA Architec ture+Design to design and build the city’s new African Multicultural Centre. Nigerian-born and Edmonton-based,Oboh served as President of the RAIC in 2015. Kéré, who was born in Burkina Faso and is now based in Berlin, is renowned as the designer for the 2017 Serpentine Pavilion, among other works.The design team also includes PFS Studio as lead landscape architects, with Fast + Epp as the structural engineers, and RWDI as Climate Change resilience consultants. www.kere-architecture.com

Diamond Schmitt and B+H to lead Michael Garron Hospital project

Michael Garron Hospital and Infrastructure Ontario have selected a design-build-finance team including Diamond Schmitt Architects for a transformative campus redevelopment and state-of-the-art patient care tower. The EllisDon Infrastructure Healthcare consortium is comprised of EllisDon Design Build Inc., Diamond Schmitt Architects and B+H Architects in joint venture, and EllisDon Capital Inc. Centred on a new eight-storey patient care tower and three-storey podium, the project is designed to bring a light-filled, modern transformation of the Toronto healthcare facility. The $411-million project will add roughly 550,000 square feet of new space and will update an additional 100,000 square feet of the existing hospital. Construction is slated to begin in April 2018. www.dsai.ca www.bharchitects.com

Safdie Architects tapped for Idaho library campus

Safdie Architects has been selected to lead the design of a new main library branch in Boise, Idaho. Led by Canadian-Israeli architect Moshe Safdie, the design team will work in collaboration with local firm CSHQA to create a 10,000-sq.-m. facility, replacing an adapted mid-century warehouse that houses the current library. Located on the banks of the Idaho River, the complex will also house the Boise City Department of Arts and History and a new performing arts venue. “To have an architect of this calibre just makes everything better,” said Boise Mayor Dave Bieter. www.safdiearchitects.com

MEMORANDA Prairie Design Awards call for submissions

The 2018 Prairie Design Awards is accepting submissions from architects in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba for its 2018 awards. The awards is offered every two years and hosted by the Alberta Association of Architects, Saskatchewan Association of Architects and Manitoba Association of Architects. The 2018 categories are Recent Work, Interior Design, Landscape Architecture and Small Projects. Projects must be completed work located in Alberta, Saskatchewan or Manitoba to be eligible. Submissions must be received on a USB device no later than 4:00 p.m. on April 6, 2018. www.prairiedesignawards.com

2018 Banff Session open for registration

The Alberta Association of Architects has opened registration for the 2018 Banff Session, which takes place on May 11 and 12. The biannual conference offers an arena of open dialogue unencumbered by workplace pressures and distractions, in a locale of breathtaking natural beauty. This year, the Banff Session will also host the 2018 Prairie Design Awards. www.banffsession.ca

Spaces Between: AIBC conference coming to Vancouver

The 2018 Architectural Institute of British Columbia (AIBC) annual conference will take place in Vancouver on May 7-9, with the theme “Spaces Between.” The three-day conference will open with the 99th annual meeting of the AIBC, followed by a reception and a keynote presentation by Charles Walker, Director of Zaha Hadid Architects. The remaining days feature educational seminars, networking and other professional development opportunities. www.aibc.ca

OAA annual conference in Toronto this May

The Ontario Association of Architects (OAA) annual conference is returning to Toronto for 2018. Organized around the theme of “Bold By Design,” the three-day conference will take place at downtown’s Metro Toronto Convention Centre and nearby Delta Hotel in May of this year, with continuing education, tours and social events. Further details of this year’s program will become available in the coming weeks on the OAA website. The conference will be held under the auspices of John Stephenson, MRAIC, who has just been re-elected to a second term as OAA President. www.oaa.on.ca

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CITY BUILDERS Interviews by

canadian architect 03/18

insites Adele Weder and Pamela Young

A look at some of the people and projects defining contemporary placemaking

People A example is density, using migration data to stack and pack and rack people into high-rise housing, instead of using that as the start of a conversation. Take the case of family housing: everybody might be focused just on the numbers in terms of size or rents or mortgage payments, but if the housing is badly designed for families or without a human-friendly neighbourhood fabric and nearby transportion and amenities, what have you actually accomplished? CA:

What impact does demographics have on the design of cities?

Well, we have to recognize that demographics change. Take the 1929 Harland Bartholemew plan for the City of Vancouver, which fundamentally structured the urban fabric of our city, even though it was never formally adopted. The plan marked the importance of schools, recreation and green spaces, and annotated these areas for toddlers, school children and adults. But what about the seniors? They are completely omitted from this beautiful illustration in the plan. So I looked at life expectancies: in 1931, the closest census date to 1929, the average male lived to 62 and average female to 65. So the source code for Vancouver urbanism was: you just died before you got old. And now, men and women are both living an extra 20 years. Yet we still haven’t found a comprehensive approach to an aging demographic in our urban-design thinking.

Yan:

Andy Yan is an urban planner and the director of the City Program at Simon Fraser University. A former research director at Bing Thom Architects, he gained plaudits from social activists and notoriety among some developers and realtors for researching and reporting the harsh impact of foreign investment in the Vancouver housing market. CA: As a society, what’s our most urgent need right now in urban design?

To handle the convergence of a world while dealing with climate change, income inequality, migration and technology. We used to think of cities as population basins receiving largely one-way migration, but now we are entering an era of cities as “spaces of flow” as opposed to cities as “basins of populations,” a unique change from previous eras of urbanism. So we have to manage, leverage and adapt to the flows of people, capital and ideas between city regions—not just of the wealthy and privileged but a spectrum of demographic and cultural groups. That’s a really big challenge. But we have no choice: Canada can’t fail. Yan:

CA:

What is our biggest “missed opportunity” in this realm?

Not looking at the connections between land use, transportation, public health and design. We have to create a system that acknowledges and rewards their interrelationships. Architecture and urban design can have a tremendous effect on health and well-being in a way that’s not always apparent. For example, one of the most powerful drugs for physical and mental health is walking. We’re all so caught up in taking a pill, but actually taking a 15-minute walk around the block can eventually save thousands of dollars in healthcare costs. So you have to create buildings and neighbourhoods with walkability in mind.

Yan:

CA:

What is the biggest urban-design myth you’d like to debunk?

Within this renewed quantitative revolution in urban planning, the idea that data is destiny. But I say: data is just a tool in dialogue. Yan:

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CA: How can we resolve the logjammed debate about foreign real-estate investment and its impact on housing affordability for local residents? Some call it xenophobia; others see the wealthiest global 1% taking over. Yan: We haven’t yet created the language to deal with this current phenomenon of global investment that, by circumstance, comes mainly from one country now. This is something that Bing Thom had always drilled into me: create a common language between different groups of people. “Make sure you’re not a duck talking to a chicken,” he’d say—we’re all poultry, alike in most ways but still with some differences. Our country and our cities have changed so much that our language has not caught up. In politics and society, when we talked about “citizenship,” it had a different meaning before. So we need this conversation, this new social contract between individuals and the larger community.

CA:

What do you know now that you didn’t know back then?

Once again courtesy of Bing Thom: that problem-defining is just as important as problem-solving. As a planning student, you’re always focused on finding the solution. During my time with Bing, he would say: Hold on, back up, let’s first define the problem! I wouldn’t be anywhere near where I am today if I hadn’t worked for Bing.

Yan:

CA:

In a nutshell, your word of advice for urban citizens?

Civic virtue. Urbanism is not only about what we’re wanting to do, but the sacrifices we’re willing to make to achieve it.

Yan:

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14 of a city. In my mind, the Bilbao effect is a myth. Architecture can do a lot, but it does so by addressing several problems in concert with other disciplines and phenomena, and other buildings.

CA: Interesting observation, coming from the Executive Director of the Pritzker Prize, whose recent selections have reflected that evolution.

The evolution of the Prize comes from the jury and the Pritzker family’s encouragement of deep discussions to keep the Prize strong and meaningful. It certain isn’t the prize today that it was 40 years ago. In the beginning, it was more seen as an individual creative endeavor, because that’s where architecture was at that time—much more about poetry in building. The jury citations are now longer and more explanatory, reflecting society and the current concerns of the design community. Thorne

Martha Thorne, an American architectural scholar, curator, editor, author and urbanist, is currently the Executive Director of the Pritzker Architecture Prize and Dean in at the School of Architecture and Design at IE University in Madrid. CA: As a society, what is our most urgent need right now in architecture and urban design?

Making connections between the built environment and other disciplines. We have to be conscious of the interrelated systems of city policy, rather than saying: Oh, this is a political problem or an economic or an architectural or urban-design or education problem. Those silos just don’t make sense today. As just one example, concerns about health and sustainability are directly related to the physical environment through air quality, which is in turn related to cars and parks and trees and construction materials. But they’re also related to how easy it is to walk on the sidewalk, how safe it is to bike on the road.

CA:

What is your take on technology’s pending transformation of cities?

With the massive rise of technology, we often focus on the tool rather than the outcome. We hear about self-driving cars, but very little talk about how this will impact the physical environment and space once instituted into cities. So I’m skeptical, because designers are not sufficiently engaged. Designers are capable of analyzing not just about road widths and passenger numbers, but also thinking about where people are going and how to ensure that services, workplaces and other elements will meet their needs. Thorne

CA:

Your nutshell advice for urbanists?

Thorne

Always think about interdependence and interconnectivity.

CA: You are a North American working in a European capital. What’s happening overseas that we could learn from on this side?

London is the model for us, having 50 architects and designers working for the city as advisors. That’s more the exception than the rule in European capitals, but in general, Europeans understand that architecture is a cultural expression as much as a technique for building. For public buildings, competitions are the norm, and that brings cultural, symbolic and even economic value to public buildings. Also, there is a big emphasis on social housing, not only for providing shelter but in favour of making quality environments that are appropriate for the residents. City administrations are held a little more accountable for what they build—not just meeting budget constraints and construction timetables, but also that the projects contribute to the fabric of the city. Thorne

CA: As an educator, you’ve developed something unique at the IE School of Architecture and Design: a masters degree in real estate development! What prompted you to create this programme?

Thorne There is a widespread failure to recognize that whatever is built should be of the best quality, though not necessarily the most expensive. Real estate development is about city-making, but our cities are rife with poor-quality developer buildings. About half of our students come from business, and the other half from architecture and design. When they study together, they absorb and share information about real-estate law, business, construction et cetera, as well as about design. By learning the vocabulary and understanding the principles from other disciplines, the architects and designers are empowered, the business people are enlightened, and all the fields are motivated to work more closely together.

CA:

Jay Pitter is a Toronto-based author, placemaker and advocate for more inclusive, safe and vibrant cities. The co-editor (with John Lorinc) of the 2016 anthology Subdivided: City-Building in an Age of HyperDensity, she is currently working on her second book, Where We Live. CA:

Our most urgent need right now in architecture and urban design?

The need to collaborate with professionals outside of design fields. While designers often espouse the value of collaboration, design jargon and antiquated hierarchies across disciplines prevail. Although cities have historically been shaped by a small and vocal group of urban elites, urban dwellers are increasingly resisting having their lives shaped or “problems” solved by designers. pitter:

CA:

What can architects learn from professionals in other fields?

Experts from other professional fields, such as mental health and the violence-against-women sector, are often unrecognized within urbanism, but are at the forefront of some of our most urgent city-

pitter:

What is the biggest city-building popular myth?

Thorne

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That any one building can guarantee the long-term success

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building issues. The once clearly defined boundaries of urbanism are becoming less revered, and I think that’s a good thing. Many of my colleagues—individuals with architectural, urban planning, public health, community arts, and environmental studies backgrounds—are more committed to articulating a bold and holistic form of urbanism. We see the possibilities of our cumulative expertise, and are more committed to urban equity, than any particular design discipline or project.

CA: How much of architecture and urban design is, or can be/should be, social engineering?

pitter: Urban design should be a tool to promote urban equality, not social engineering. Design can be used to encourage positive behaviours like walking or reducing our carbon footprint by embracing local densification. But social engineering is problematic, because it positions people as “subjects” rather than agents of change. Also, the act of shaping behavior and belief is fraught with power imbalances.

CA:

What do you know now that you didn’t know back then?

I’ve primarily worked in professional spaces where people don’t look like me, and so early on I learned to express ideas regarding the city’s class and cultural stratification in a very careful manner. Now, I just tell people that I’ll likely make them uncomfortable up front. I think discomfort is a good thing and essential for growth. This is how I begin lectures and placemaking engagements. pitter:

CA:

So: don’t be squeamish about uncomfortable truths. For example?

I understand that talking about police profiling in parks is not nearly as pleasant as discussing community gardens—and focusing on millennials who can’t afford a million-dollar home is easier than tackling housing instability caused by displacement of Indigenous peoples or mental health issues. However, my placemaking practice, strong community connections and writing keeps me abreast of some of the most heart-breaking issues across several cities. Divides are deepening; more than ever, we need to find ways of having more courageous conversations. Besides, if we’re truly committed to co-creating cities for everyone, what’s a little discomfort? pitter:

CA:

Your nutshell advice for urbanists?

pitter:

Ask yourself: Who’s Not Here?

in Boston, and Master Plan for the Grand Parade in Halifax. His projects relating to the rejuvenation of Toronto’s downtown, waterfront, and neighbourhoods include Harbourfront Centre, Regent Park’s in-progress redevelopment, and The Bentway. CA:

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insites

As a society, what’s our most urgent urban design need in 2018?

It is a multi-headed challenge: to reimagine the city in the throes of a major multi-layered transformation, driven by a profound shift from the auto-driven paradigm of past decades; an urgent environmental imperative in the face of climate change; radical increase in density and diversity; growing social inequities and polarization by geography; a new economy; and a tech infusion, all at once and in combination.

Greenberg:

CA:

What current city-building myth would you most like to debunk?

“Myth” isn’t the right word, but decision makers are finding it hard to let go of some holdover beliefs from the post-World War II paradigm. One is the lingering attachment to land-use segregation of where we live from where we work–the idea that in many cases we are perversely still trying to promote employment by excluding living–despite all we have learned about the mutual benefits of mix and synergy. Another is the continual ranting about a “war on cars” and the failure to understand that the more we get people out of cars and walking, cycling and using transit, the better it will be for those who have to drive. Greenberg:

CA: What cities are blowing you away with brilliant strategies for the public realm—and what could we learn from their examples?

Each city is inspiring in a different way. In Colombia, there’s the Ciclovía in Bogotá [roadways blocked off to cars and turned over to pedestrians and cyclists at set hours each week] and the libraries and cable cars in the hillside barrios of Medellín. I would also mention Amsterdam and Copenhagen, for their sophistication in shared street design for active transportation; Hong Kong and Tokyo, for embracing great density with fine-grained animated street life and extremely efficient transit; Melbourne, for its adaptive re-use of laneways and laneway buildings; New York, for its move back to its multiple waterfronts and its intensity; Barcelona, for its reworking of Cerdà’s Eixample grid to reroute vehicular traffic around pedestrian “superblocks”; Paris, for its auto reduction and re-embrace of the Seine; London, for its emerging King’s Cross area, and on and on. Our Canadian forte in this constellation may be our embrace of diversity and conscious expansion of the shared “commons” in our big cities in a way that most parts of the world are finding very difficult to do.

Greenberg:

CA: What do you consider your greatest professional success–and, if you’re willing to share, your greatest failure?

If I had to pick just a few successes they would be the Brooklyn Bridge Park; the St. Paul [Minnesota] riverfront; and in Toronto, the Kings Regeneration Initiative [1996 planning and zoning changes to support the redevelopment of two formerly industrial areas on King Street], the Lower Don Lands, the ongoing revitalization of Regent Park, and currently of course The Bentway. I can’t honestly cite any failures, but every experience has brought lessons about what works and what doesn’t. A couple that stay with me are the immense value of bringing people together and building consensus, and allowing room for life to take over by avoiding the tendency to be overly prescriptive.

Greenberg:

Toronto-based urban designer Ken Greenberg is a former Director of Urban Design and Architecture for the City of Toronto, and Principal of Greenberg Consultants Inc. In a career spanning more than four decades, he has played pivotal roles on projects including Brooklyn Bridge Park on Brooklyn’s East River shoreline, the Vancouver Downtown View Corridor Study, the Rose Kennedy Greenway District study

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CA:

Your nutshell advice for urbanists?

It is never about one thing in isolation. It is about getting out of silos and seeing connections.

Greenberg:

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projects

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insites

UNDER THE EXPRESSWAY : The Bentway Skate Trail Public Work, Greenberg Consultants TEXT: John Lorinc PHOTO: Andrew Williamson PROJECT

DESIGN TEAM

Anyone with an even passing familiarity with Toronto’s history knows that late 19th-century railways and post-war highways posed an existential threat to Fort York, rendering it physically isolated for decades. But in 2011, planner Ken Greenberg penned an essay in the Fife & Drum, a Friends of Fort York newsletter, arguing that it will (or could) become a kind of central park for the large cluster of condos going up all around it. “That was simply throwing out an idea,” he says. Seven years later, one element of that vision—touted as the first phase of what will be a long-term implementation of urban animation—has come to fruition: The Bentway, a multi-purpose linear park snaking underneath the same elevated Gardiner Expressway that nearly obliterated the Fort many years earlier. Running in a double-S-shaped corridor abutting the Fort’s southern bulwark and its visitor centre by Patkau Architect and Kearns Mancini Architects (Canadian Architect, September 2014) The Bentway has sought to take advantage of the strange beauty of the space beneath the highway, the proximity to new high-rise neighbourhoods and the excess capacity in the “bents,” as the structures that hold up the roadway are known. Funded with a $25 million donation by Judy and Wilmont Matthews, the Bentway will be managed by a conservancy. Greenberg has served as the project planner.

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ABOVE The first completed element of a multi-stage transformation of Toronto’s Gardiner Expressway.

While dense cities like Tokyo and London have reclaimed areas beneath elevated expressways for buildings and sports fields, the height of the Gardiner created not only a cathedral like space, but also provided buffer from highway noise and admitted afternoon sun. “It feels light and airy,” Greenberg says, noting that another Waterfront Toronto project, Underpass Park, offered a template for how the bridge supports could be leverage to animate a forlorn space (in the case of Underpass Park, the bents became dramatic canvases for public art). In terms of architecture, Marc Ryan, a partner at Public Work, says the design was driven by several guiding principles: taking advantage of the anomalies and edge-condition of a rough space; deploying friction clamps and other elevated supports that will take advantage of the load-bearing capacity of the bents to suspend lighting, art, theatrical equipment and even a bike bridge; and allowing for flexibility. As Ryan says, the design and programming were developed in tandem, beginning with the 250-metre skate path that opened early in 2018. “The evolution,” is the exciting part,” he says. “We’ve tried to leave it open, and deliberately so.”

John Lorinc is a Toronto writer on urban affairs.

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west elevation

Free run : Toboggan Run, St. Vital Park, Winnipeg Public City Architecture TEXT: Lawrence Bird PHOTOS: Jacqueline Young PROJECT

DESIGN TEAM

“Only in Manitoba do we have to build hills,” says Peter Sampson, co-principal with Liz Wreford of Public City Architecture. Although Saskatchewanites might commiserate, it’s true that the flat topography of Manitoba in general, and Winnipeg in particular, limits sledding to river banks and artificial structures. As a result, one regional typology that has thrived here is the toboggan run. These spaces between artifice and nature also bridge the rural and the urban. Resolving that condition here entailed a further challenge: at the urging of its Universal Design Coordinator Judy Redmond, the City of Winnipeg decided to make this their first universally accessible toboggan ramp, at St. Vital Park in the south end of the city . The Public City team seized the opportunity to develop a design that speaks, appropriately, of movement. The ramp shoots out over an existing gentle hillside. Halfway up, among the treetops, wood decking gives way to a galvanized steel grille, emphasizing the leap through space. Beneath, a dizzying array of stilts touch the ground; the space between accommodates the informal sledding that predates the formal program of two toboggan chutes. As inclusive-design consultant Marnie Courage observes, “the ramped structure allows access to the first slide allowing kids with toboggans, families with strollers and people with mobility devices to access the slide the same way.” Though she adds that either a second ramp or doubling the width of the existing ramp would increase the accessibility, she lauds the Public City toboggan hill as truly an inclusive design. Indeed, one wonders why toboggan runs have not always been built this way. Parks Capital Projects Manager Jason Bell explains that this project is one of several upgrading the park’s Centennial-era infrastructure to contemporary standards. The long-term plan is to provide access-

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ABOVE The St. Vital Park Toboggan Run provides a free-for-all, accessible-to-all tobogganing centre in a completely flat park.

ible washrooms and parking close to the ramp, which would make it more completely accessible. According to Brian Everton, a designer on the NRC’s Task Group on Accessibility for the Canadian Commission on Building and Fire Codes, Manitoba’s progressive amendments to the NBC “raised the bar” for accessibility regulation in this country, and this project offers one good option for accommodating ranges of mobility in the built environment. The structure serves that range of mobilities, while relaying both a contemporary language and a hint of nostalgic warmth. A galvanized steel cowl at the top of the run is perforated by a herring-bone pattern evoking in equal parts a dappled tree canopy, knit patterns from the 1950s, and a quasi-digital code. The interplay between this steel vertical and the horizontal fir-clad volume beneath helps the structure work as both a shelter and a landmark. And its hot-pink interior extends the palette of vivid colours Wreford famously used in her Hygge House Warming Hut on the nearby Assiniboine River) This fits squarely in Public City’s big-picture ambition/vision/ intention/aspiration: to create not just architecture or landscape, but a fusion [OR symbiosis] of the two. Or in Sampson’s words: “not to design spaces, but seasons.” City life means living in public throughout the year, and some of the most successful urban centres, such as Copenhagen, impress us precisely because they activate spaces in the cold. Winnipeg has no shortage of projects and programmes in this regard—RAW:Almond (Canadian Architect, February 2018) and the Warming Huts stand out as examples. To these we can now add this valuable step towards making public spaces—even the most chilly and challenging—truly inclusive. Lawrence Bird, MRAIC is a Winnipeg artist, planner and architect.

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pedestrian friendly Guido-Nincheri Park, Montreal civiliti TEXT Stefan Novakovic PHOTO Stéphane Najman PROJECT

ARCHITECT

A block west of Olympic Stadium in Montreal, the Guido-Nincheri Park reclaims that small corner of the urban realm from the automobile, creating a new pedestrian realm while resolving the intersection through a simplified road geometry. Civiliti, a Montreal-based landscape architecture firm, designed the new park at the corner of Sherbrooke and PieIX Boulevard, hitherto an awkward intersection of two major streets and the smaller Rue Rachel. Despite being in the shadow of an iconic Olympic landmark, the busy and dangerous intersection conveyed hostility rather than welcome to pedestrians. No longer. The playfully kinetic coloured walkways energize the small space, making it an effective symbolic gateway to the grander attractions of Parc Maisonneuve to the northeast. A warm lighting program by UDO Design contours the linear park, adding a welcoming sense of texture that enhances the spatial quality. The park’s meandering, striated surfaces present an abstracted woodgrain pattern, in homage to the trees that once covered the site. Framing the two-tone, gently sloped path are sculpted walls and circular planters, evoking the knots of a tree and providing extensive public seating. With the lights, it’s a welcoming space to linger on a summer evening. The park’s introduction last August was folded into Montreal’s 375th anniversary celebrations. But unlike those effusive celebrations, GuidoNincheri Park is neither grand nor declarative, and it needn’t be. The park is a thoughtfully conceived space, with well-integrated design elements that are elegantly complementary of one another. A healthier urban fabric now surrounds one of the city’s most iconic landmarks }of the 1970s. And it feels distinctively like Montreal.

ABOVE The new Guido-Nincheri Park unites many once-bleak roadway sections into a linear park leading to Montreal’s Olympic Stadium. ABOVE The site plan clearly shows the path’s evocative imagery of woodgrain and knots.

Stefan Novakovic is Assistant Editor of Canadian Architect.

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Adrien Williams

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BIG POND

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an ambitious mixed-use project creates a microcosm of urbanism within a sprawling campus Ponderosa Commons, University of British Columbia, Vancouver KPMB Architects with HCMA Architecture + Design Text Adele Weder photos Nic Lehoux, Martin Tessler, Adrien Williams project

Architect

Universities are sometimes described as giant daycare centres for bright but otherwise unemployable youth, and the lack of urban amenities on most suburban campuses does little to dispel that notion. The University of British Columbia’s new Ponderosa Commons complex—designed for teaching, research, art-making, lounging, eating, living and sleeping— is conceived as something of a full-service community. The multi-phase project, designed by KPMB Architects in joint venture with HCMA Architecture + Design, is in many ways a test case for the myths and realities about creating a vibrant community. “The Pond,” as it’s affectionately known, is designed to provide not just more student shelter but also more safety, social animation and connection. As such, the project presents not just a paradigm for a campus, but a microcosm of a city. Led by Shirley Blumberg at KPMB Architects and Karen Marler at HCMA Architecture + Design, the dual design teams have brought to fruition the two phases of what is arguably the most ambitiously

urbane project on campus as the university winds up its eighth year of a 10-year transformation plan. For UBC’s chief architect, Gerry McGeough, Ponderosa Commons is in some ways a distillation of the decade’s work. When he implemented the current master plan, he faced the daunting challenge of a campus built on a peninsula segregated from seven square kilometres of parkland. McGeough has ramped up the calibre of individual buildings at UBC, enriching the campus with striking projects like the 2012 Pharmaceutical Sciences building, by Saucier + Perrotte with HCMA. Yet the campus still felt unsafe at night in parts, and projected little sense of cohesion or density: walking from one UBC building to another has mostly felt like negotiating your way through an upscale suburb—which, in essence, the university had become. The programming, massing and density of Ponderosa Commons responds to that shortcoming. The complex is a major part of the university’s evolution to a 24/7, year-round community, with evening vitality This page The East and West buildings of Ponderosa Commons Phase 1, completed in 2013, whose rich mixed-use programming set the stage for the Phase 2 complex, built across the way in 2016.

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nic lehoux

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and summer activity—for social, financial and safety reasons. As such, the complex is more about urban energy than architectural form. It is not iconic, not keychain-friendly; a walk around and inside of it leaves little lasting impression on the retina of its overall form. What you do remember is the spontaneous human choreography: stand in its thirdfloor student lounge of the Phase 1 building and behold the stage before you on a dusky winter evening: students, mostly solitary, criss-crossing the mall and lawn and roadway below you. From that vantage point, thw spontaneous pedestrian movement reads like the opening act of a reality-based theatre performance. This is not the haphazard campus of 20 years ago, which turned into a ghost town at sundown.

Phase 1 of Ponderosa Commons was completed in 2013, with some community mutterings of concern about whether the project signaled a future of high-rises engulfing the verdant campus—“high-rise” being a relative term here on this mostly low-rise campus. But Phase 1 was not about simplistically stacking classrooms or sleeping quarters for maximum density and cost savings; it focused on a strategic—almost eclectic—mix of classrooms, dorm rooms, faculty departments, research centres, grocers, art studios and a pizza parlour. It has pathways between and inside of buildings, and the buildings themselves feature a varied massing that evokes the jogged silhouette of an organically evolved cityscape. These concepts have been around since the 1961 publication of Jane Jacob’s Death and Life of Great American Cities, but has wended its way slowly across North American urban centres—and even more slowly, or not at all, on university campuses. In large part, notes McGeough, that’s due to the iron-clad grip of the original Jeffersonian ideal for the built landscape of higher education, embodied at Monticello: removed, in a faraway land, away from the distractions of the workaday world. “The issue we’ve inherited is that many North American campuses are singleuse,” observes McGeough. “The notion was that to keep a healthy democracy, you kept students at least five miles away from industry and downtown.” That notion, robustly debunked by deleterious election outcomes at all levels of government, has now been put out to pasture. So, times have changed. “Universities are in the knowledge-creation industry, so it’s about creating collisions between different players—in the sciences, arts, psychology,” says McGeough. And so Ponderosa Commons is configured as a mixed-use, multi-discipline, highly animated complex. The mere presence of a pizza parlour helps. But the physical design configuration enhances the sense of urban variegation. The walk inside, between and around the buildings is also a spatially rich experience, enhanced by the design team’s careful orchestration of exterior bridge, cantilevered stairways, walkways and underpasses. Animation is also generated by the strategic use of glazing. From the subgrade lounge at the southeast corner of Phase 2, students can look up through what is essentially a giant clerestory, and flag down any passing friend they might spot walking outside, as I watched one student do. At the buidling’s opposite end, the downward slope brings this lower level above grade, and the design team has taken that opportunity to transform

Martin tessler

ABOVE The site’s huge Ponderosa pine, flanked by three wings of Phase 2. The building is clad in pre-fab “concrete sandwich” panels with insulation in the middle, reducing construction costs. left Mercante Pizzeria, the centre of activity and social connection. opposite above A courtyard at Phase 1 East, shared with the film school on the right, is enhanced by a painted steel stair and mirrored steel soffit. The space is programmed for performance art and possibilities for film screening. opposite below A student lounge at the base of Phase 1 West features cedar and black chalkboard-paint walls.

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martin tessler

Adrien williams

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Axiom / section

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1 faculty Lounge 2 informal Student Study & Lounge 3 EDST & MED Admin 4 faculty office 5 atrium 6 Digital Conferencing Offices 7 bike storage 8 Covered Hanami Garden 9 Research and Learning Commons 10 Lower Courtyard 11 upper Courtyard Garden 12 mechanical room 13 electrical room 14 Student Services Offices & Lounge 15 waste room 16 Long Term storage

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The areas between Phase 1 and Phase 2 buildings feature several seating-equipped outdoor zones, encouraging students to relax, socialize and enjoy a spontaneous “learning commons.” The symmetric landscaping provides an elegant but visually inert vista for students to contemplate. opposite below Section drawing of Phase 2 complex, which houses the education faculty, offices, lounges, food store, Collegium for daytime commuting students, and lots of residences. ABOVE Ponderosa Commons is mixed-use not only in programming but also in academic discliplines. In the Phase 1 building, this well-equipped printmaking studio is a 30-second stroll to the psychology department’s Centre for Gambling Research. opposite

that wall into a fully glazed visual and literal connection to the outdoors. That said, Phase 2 of the Pond is more inward-looking, a tripartite U-shaped massing comprised mostly of housing units (called Cedar House), with a faculty lounge, offices and a large student lounge and study area at ground level. That’s because this second project phase is devoted more to the pragmatics of providing classrooms, conference rooms, and beds for students that convert into hotel rooms in the summer. Or as McGeough puts it: “less on choreography and relationship outcomes, and more on needs assessment”—an inverted Maslow hierarchy, if you will. The three wings of Phase 2 wrap around the site’s towering Ponderosa Pine, the project’s namesake. It’s virtuous that the university has chosen to showcase rather than raze the tree. Still, positioned between the building’s three wings, with a wooden picket fence around the base of its trunk, it evokes a huge captive beast in a too-small pen. Throughout Ponderosa Commons, the landscaping underwhelms. The landscape architecture is by Hapa Collaborative, a talented and highly respected firm with an impressive portfolio of work. But in this project, missed opportunities abound. Most students spend chunks of their days in rectilinear classrooms, writing or tapping notes on rectangular papers or keyboards . Landscape architecture offers the possibility of escaping that orthogonal rigidity, in counterpoint to human-made forms. Yet around Ponderosa Commons, the landscape reads as a rigid geometric matrix. Between the buildings, saplings stand in an orthogonal grid, like a very small tree farm. The foliage between the wings of Phase 2 is less rigid, but generic and uniform, dominated by knee-level bracken and bland shrubbery. Spatially rich on the inside, this project cries out for a more dramatically varied landscape outside. To be sure, the upper-floor student residences—whose inhabitants are selected by lottery—offer spectacular ocean and mountain views. The lower-level spaces, such as Phase 1’s third-floor student lounge, offer an exalt-

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ed view of the human activity outside: this lounge, in theatrical terms, is the mezzanine, the best vantage point to take in that choreography of pedestrians criss-crossing the mall. So indulgent is the view that an American art-history student told me that her decision to study at this particular university was prompted by her earlier tour of Ponderosa Commons—this view, these amenities, the people, this lounge. And yet for all my half-dozen research trips to the Phase 1 secondf loor lounge, I rarely saw more than a handful of students in it, and sometimes none. On my last visit, I asked the lounge’s sole occupant, a third-year engineering student tapping intensely into his laptop, why he chose to hang out in this particular space. “Because there’s usually nobody else here and I can have the place to myself.” As long as the summer hotel revenues across the way can help keep the lights on, maybe that’s okay: we don’t have to force-feed sociability on everyone. The campus in general, and Ponderosa Commons in particular, feels much safer and livelier than the dodgy-at-dusk community of 10 years ago. It is not a comprehensive community; it’s a matrix that has what McGeough calls “nodes of community.” The Pond isn’t a cureall for human malaise, but it can help the finding of one’s tribe, or one’s solitude, for the handful of summer days or academic years where this place is home. As McGeough says, “We all need a sense of place.” Client UBC Properties Trust | Architect Team KPMB Architects: Shirley Blumberg, Bruno Weber, Bryn Marler, Coben Christiansen, Lily Huang, Christopher Pfiffner, Marcus Colonna, Fang Hsu, Terry Kim, Ramon Janer, Carolyn Lee, Danielle Sucher; HCMA Architecture + Design: Karen Marler, Daniel Philippot, Craig West, Elena Chernyshov, Juenessa Collins, Karen Nolan, Greg Knight, George Gogoulis, Nicolas Worth, Rachel Wilson, Nathan Chow, Vincent Siu, Steve DiPasquale, Kate Busby, Aiden Callison, Charles Leman | Structural Nelson Engineering Inc | Mechanical/ Electrical/ sustainability Stantec Consulting | Civil IKamps Engineering | Geotechnical IGeoPacific | Landscape Hapa Collaborative | Area 292,658 sq.ft. (Phase 2) | Budget $92 M | Completion 2016 (Phase 2)

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long view

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HOw green IS OUR VALLEY

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Robert Burley finds new perspectives of urban wilderness

Photograph, C.P. Railway bridge in E.T. Seton Park, 2012 Robert Burley TEXT Stefan Novakovic art

@Robert burley

ArtIST

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Below the nearly endless landscape to the north, the narrow belt of our country’s population makes for a profoundly urban nation, whose wilderness is at once urban and remote, real and imagined, unsentimental, and inspiring. Our natural world is not found in the white settler mythologies of the rural north, but here within the messy beauty of the city. Squint your eyes, flip through the pages, and Robert Burley’s photographs meld into a collage of southern Ontario idyll where waterlines, escarpments, rivers, and forests stretch into the horizon. Look closer, and the spell is broken. In Burley’s images of Toronto parklands, the natural and the human-made coexist in the beautiful and matter-of-fact urban landscapes of Canada’s largest city. Here are ravines, forests, beaches, apartment towers, power lines and the odd glimpse of humanity. Published last year, An Enduring Wilderness: Toronto’s Natural Parklands surveys the terrains that imperceptibly define the contours of urbanity. From the Scarborough Bluffs to the Don and Humber rivers and—especially—the ravines that run like veins beneath the grid of streets, the photographs take in the eclectic and unexpected reality of Toronto’s landscapes. Eschewing the pastoral fantasies of Canadian wilderness, Burley’s urban lens captures a refreshing jolt of reality. Dotting the quietly majestic compositions are fishers, partiers, cyclists, and kayakers and the occasional bare-assed swimmer. The vistas unfold with uncomplicated grace, acknowledging the moments where daily life meets the sublime. There are untouched landscapes too, of course, but what makes the book so compelling is Burley’s understanding of the city itself as a part of nature. Buildings enter the frame as a beaver damn, solitary caribou or flock of seals might meet the photographer’s eye hundreds or thousands of kilometres away. It’s not pretty in the same way, but it’s often beautiful all the same. Hints of history also inform the images. In the E.T. Seton Park, the rusted underbelly of the CP railway bridge meets the verdant landscape of the Don Valley, with the camera staring down the barrel of that long span of steel. Above, the rapidly growing Toronto of the future beckons with glass and spandrel and the vague promises of a tech giant’s pending colonization. But take a few steps down, and a different kind of place comes into view. It’s an archeological view of history, where the past is not chronologically behind us but literally below us. The notions of time, nature and culture explored in the photographs are complemented by selections of writing from Toronto authors, including such Canadian literary lights as Anne Michaels and George Elliott Clarke, while Robert Burley’s own foreword describes the joy of another Toronto—“down there,” as he dubs it. So much less restrictive and more mysterious than “up here.”

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Experience. Innovation. BILCO Roof Hatches Add Unique Element to D.C. Housing Project

Photo: Studio Trejo

The historic buildings, monuments and scenery around Washington D.C. draw tourists from all over the world. Tenants of 32 new townhomes in the city’s swanky Capitol Hill will have a unique and private vantage point to the area with individual roof hatches, offering them a perspective that is available to only a few residents of the nation’s capital. Buchanan Park is a residential development being built by Ditto Residential. It will include 41 condominiums in a redeveloped historic three-story school building that dates to 1895 and was named after James Buchanan, the nation’s 15th president. Buchanan Park includes a central green, multiple outdoor gathering areas and pedestrian walkways. The 32 three- and four-bedroom townhomes will line 13th and D Streets in Washington, surrounding the Buchanan School. Inspired by the Federal-style homes in the neighborhood, the townhomes will include brick exteriors and spacious living areas. The architect for the townhomes, Maurice Walters, designed them to provide residents with individual access to rooftop deck areas. DJB Contracting is installing 32 thermally broken roof hatches from The BILCO Company to meet the architect’s request. “We have used BILCO roof hatches all the time,’’ said Eric Ward, project manager for DJB, whose business has been providing roofing and related services to the Washington area for more than two decades. “We had never used the thermally broken roof hatches before this project. I think it’s a good fit for the situation. It’s an access point to the roof, and I like that they are pre-fabricated and pre-coated. It makes the job a lot easier.” BILCO’s E-50TB thermally broken roof hatch offers a new standard in energy efficiency, making them ideal for the project at Buchanan Park. The hatch minimizes heat transfer and the effects of condensation. The unit includes a thermally broken cover and curb featuring R-20+ insulation. The unit also offers corrosion resistant aluminum construction. “The increased R value makes this hatch superior to its competitors in the industry,’’ Ward said. “Typically, roof hatches don’t have much insulation in the cover. It’s made of aluminum, too, while others are made of steel around the base. It’s much lighter. I like this model because it’s lighter and maintenance free.”

When DJB started the project, the general contractor pushed for a quick install of the roof hatches. BILCO delivered them swiftly so that Ward and his team could meet the project timeline. While there have been other delays in the Photo: Metin Yikar construction process, BILCO’s customer service team delivered astonishingly fast. “BILCO’s customer service is great,’’ Ward said. “They did what they promised they would do. I absolutely loved working with BILCO.” Ward believes the residents of the townhomes will appreciate the roof hatches. Besides increasing energy efficiency, they will allow residents rare private access to their roofs. Most city housing projects that offer rooftop access accommodate multiple tenants, and not individual access. “I think the hatch will work great,’’ Ward said. “I’ve never seen this application before, but I think it’s a great idea and tenants will find they really like the BILCO product.”

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 products. Over these years, the company has built a reputation among architects, and engineers for products that are unequaled in design and workmanship. BILCO – an ISO 9001 certified company – offers commercial and residential specialty access products. BILCO is a wholly owned subsidiary of AmesburyTruth, a division of Tyman Plc. For more information, visit www.bilco.com.

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DOWN TO THE WATERFRONT

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The venerable Beaverbrook Art Gallery opens up to the river

Beaverbrook Art Gallery expansion, Fredericton, New Brunswick McKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects TEXT John Leroux PHOTOs James Brittain, except as indicated PROJECT

ARCHITECT

With its idyllic setting facing the Saint John River opposite the Provincial Legislature, the Beaverbrook Art Gallery has been a distinguished presence in Fredericton from the moment its doors opened in 1959. The building’s clean, symmetrical form and simple lines presented a midcentury masterpiece in a city better known for Loyalist and Victorian structures. Since that inauguration, the gallery has episodically transformed itself by responding to expanding audiences, growing collections, and benefactors. Three additions between 1983 and 2010 have more than doubled the area of the original public spaces. But its newly completed expansion is its boldest and most ambitious transformation yet. As a longtime resident of Fredericton and an adjunct curator at the Beaverbrook since

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2008, I have seen many of these changes first hand, and I have long admired how such an institution can contribute to the city through its architecture. That said, the gallery has over most of its life presented a somewhat formal and opaque presence, which has hampered its connection to pedestrians and to the waterfront—until now. Led by Halifax-based Mackay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects, the expansion propelled the institution into the 21st century. New features include lofty new galleries, a bright café, visiting-artist studio, learning centre and lecture hall, additional art storage space, outdoor sculpture court, improved wheelchair access and other accessibility improvements. But most significantly, its new three-storey, 14,000-sq.-ft. pavilion has

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ABOVE The addition and adjacent outdoor plaza open up the Saint John River—the region’s dominant natural feature, which bisects the city—to the gallery visitors as well as to downtown Fredericton. opposite top The new pavilion’s elegant massing, proportions and stone cladding respond to New Brunswick’s 1882 Provincial Legislature Building nearby. Opposite bottom Plan and east elevation of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery addition.

created a new openness and visual connectivity between the inside and outside. The result is distinctively contemporary yet sensitive expansion of Lord Beaverbrook’s original building design. Talbot Sweetapple, the partner-in-charge of the project, respected the art gallery’s unique siting at the converging point of the river, the riverside park, and the city centre. “The expansion is an opportunity to connect to these landmarks, realizing the Gallery’s full potential through a stronger relationship to the urban context and the public,” says Sweetapple. He felt that to truly engage the public, “the Beaverbrook Art Gallery must extend outwards beyond its walls into the open air and the civic realm.” The way to do this, he calculated, was to first create strategic views from the gallery interior to the outside, and vice versa; and then to create vibrant new outdoor spaces. A sweeping new sandstone-clad loggia-like pavilion wraps around the east end, opening to the Saint John River and Fredericton’s cherished riverside park, known as the Green. Two giant picture windows open from the main f loor galleries to the exterior landscape, sharing art with the city and enticing passers-by with discreet views of the art

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within. And visitors inside the gallery now can behold the panoramic landscape vistas through which Fredericton has defined itself. It is said that while Lord Beaverbrook loved the art that hung on the gallery walls, his favourite painting was the great north-facing window that offered a broad vista of the River and the landscape beyond. The window was filled in decades ago during a later addition, but it originally constituted the rear facade of the central High Gallery, right next to Salvador Dali’s enormous painting Santiago el Grande. MLSA’s huge new windows and continuous ribbon of glass at the ground level are bold and effective gestures that rekindle that rapport. These large expanses of glass feature protective coatings, ceramic fritting and louvres, shielding the artworks from sunlight while maximumizing views to the outside. The two levels of the addition provide much-needed public amenities and versatile contemporary galleries for the Beaverbrook’s permanent collection as well as touring exhibitions. Floor-to-ceiling glass on the lower level brings in natural light and establishes its public presence through the sunken sculpture garden and a secondary entrance. The café

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Matthew MacKay-Lyons

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east elevation

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20'

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Courtesy of Harvey Studios

ABOVE The feature window gently illuminates the paintings, from left to right: Late, Late Spring by David Bolduc, Two Slants by Jack Bush, and Armed (portion) by Jules Olitski. Below The original 1959 building. pre-addition, was exemplary of clean midcentury modernism.

and learning centre face the street and the Green, and their activities will spill out onto the sculpture garden terrace during the warmer months. The marquee spaces of the sweeping east wing are the three large galleries that fill the main level: the Elizabeth A. Currie Gallery on the Green, the Jean Irving River Gallery and the Dali Gallery. Two smaller gallery spaces feature drawings as well as paintings by emerging artists. At the end of this procession sits the shrine-like Salvador Dali Gallery, a space carefully tailored in ceiling height and overall proportion to fit Dali’s masterpiece Santiago El Grande and the Beaverbrook’s three other Dali portraits. The renovations also included refinements to some of the original gallery spaces, such as the Harriet Irving Gallery and the Orientation Gallery, both adjacent to a refitted entry lobby. At the lower entry level of the new wing, the hard-surface landscaped sculpture courtyard will provide an important place for public art and outdoor performances. An articulated concrete wall serves as a boundary as well as a place to sit. It also helps protect the lower level from the city’s periodic spring floods. The architectural language of MLSA’s Beaverbrook addition is consistent with the firm’s rigorous approach of fusing form and function in a Maritime context. The design team has created a volume and spatial layout that is spare but refined, and this contextual respect is perfectly aligned with the spirit of the original building. Both the original gallery and the new pavilion convey a spartan sensibility, with quality materials and a textural play of light and shadow on clean walls. Beyond the formal distinctiveness, the new facility fuses architectural goals with social and cultural purpose, anticipating enhanced public programs and new audiences. It is a superb fulfillment of its role as the provincial flagship art gallery. John Leroux, MRAIC is a Fredericton-based architect and historian presently completing his PhD in History at the University of New Brunswick. Client beaverbrooK art gallery | Architect Team talbot sweetapple, mraic; brian mackay-lyons, fraic; peterbroughton, miranda bailey, diana carl, melanie hayne, kevin reid, david bourque, matt jones, Matthew bishop, william green, jennifer esposito, rimon soliman | structural eastern designers & co. Mechanical crandall engineering Electrical rsei consultants | civil gemtec ltd. Contractor maxim construction | Area 12,167 m 2 | Budget $92 M | Completion october 2017

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The Work of MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects: Economy as Ethic By Robert McCarter, Thames & Hudson, 2017 REVIEW

TOM KUNDIG

Economy as ethic. For the Halifax-based firm MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple, this book illustrates more than an architectural approach. And for Brian McKay-Lyons in particular, it describes the underlying values that inform his teaching, his projects, and the way he lives. For him, architecture is about rigorous editing as a means of expressing the essence of a situation, the essential beauty. And it’s something to which we should all aspire. I have been lucky to spend time with MacKay-Lyons in the remote, humbling landscape surrounding Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he lives and works. I have participated in his Ghost conferences and spent weekends in his Shobac Cabins, and I have travelled with him through other far-flung landscapes such as Mali’s Dogon region. For those who have never experienced Nova Scotia or the firm’s architecture, The Work of MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects: Economy as Ethic, the latest survey of his work with partner Talbot Sweetapple, provides a window into their world. For those like me, who have already peered into this world and experienced the work, this book offers a new perspective into their particular way of thinking. The firm’s way of approaching architecture combines rationality and poetry—it is straightforward and coherent but speaks to larger issues of community and place. The simplicity of the book’s subtitle, “economy as ethic,” belies the depth of consideration that informs the architecture. Critical essays by Juhani Pallasmaa and Kenneth Frampton help to plumb these depths, but perhaps the most illuminating texts are in

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the book’s postscript, where MacKay-Lyons’ longtime friend and local storyteller Barnell Duffenais offers a poetic reading of the work. In many ways, the poetic is the most difficult aspect of the firm’s practice to capture, and yet I think it is the most important. Not just because MacKay-Lyons himself gravitates towards storytelling—“In Nova Scotia,” he once wrote, “simple primary forms are perched on the land like brightly coloured dice, or their skins join to make a good urban fabric”—but because his work is in dialogue with larger issues that transcend architecture and speak to our shared humanity. There is always a dialogue in the work of MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple—between history and community, building and place, interior and exterior. These conversations are evident in Economy as Ethic in the way that projects are represented. The book is divided into two main sections: Private Houses and Public Places. Each project is presented through finished photography but also through diagrams, process sketches, tectonic details, plans and context imagery. These images help us discover how their work is more explorative and open-ended than the restrained finished forms might suggest. Although a survey, the book is not arranged chronologically. Instead, it is organized to open up connections between and across individual projects. It seems that MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple is constantly searching for linkages: moments of conversation and connection. As MacKay-Lyons himself writes in the book, “The ultimate purpose of architecture is community.” The selection of projects presented

in Economy as Ethic show how, for them, architecture is a social art that aims for the integration of people, place and culture. Their work is as much about history and people as it is about the architectural forms they craft. Sometimes, the forms come directly from this shared history, as in the Shobac community where MacKay-Lyons has restored several historic structures in an experiential study of Nova Scotia’s vernacular building traditions. The “Origins” section of Economy as Ethic is particularly revealing—here, MacKay-Lyons offers an insight into the intersection of this community’s needs and his own inspirations. MacKay-Lyons writes that in Shobac and his work at large, he strives for the moment where “the building and its parti become one and the same.” Economy as Ethic names a mode of practice wherein an economy of means allows projects to convey a clear, unified position. The buildings are rational and they are edited. And yet, through this very simplicity of form, his buildings reveal and unfold their contexts. They frame their sites, they focus attention, and they speak to their surroundings without competing with them. In drawing on vernacular architectural traditions, the projects establish a place that extends beyond the building itself. I have long known Brian MacKay-Lyons to be interested in these spaces of “in-between.” In describing the barnyard at his Shobac community, he writes, “This place underlines the value of places between buildings—what artists call ‘white space’ or ‘negative space,’ or what we now refer to as ‘microclimate.’” This way of thinking—of understanding that the open spaces are as important as built ones, and that providing space does not mean prescribing it— typifies MacKay-Lyons’ process. Interestingly, it means that what is most compelling about his work is what isn’t built. Take his Ghost Labs, for example. This series of thirteen laboratories were held at his Shobac community, and I was honoured to participate in the last Ghost Seminar in 2013. “Laboratory” is a fitting name for these gatherings, as they are clearly experimental exercises for everyone: for MacKay-Lyons, his students, and invited participants. The labs are an opportunity to have a dialogue about how we build architecture and community. They are about opening up a space between the theory and practice of architecture where we can have a conversation about what architecture means to us as people. As the book makes clear, it is this dialogue between architecture and community where the work of McKay-Lyons Sweetapple comes to life.

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books

Tom Kundig, FAIA, is co-founder and a principal at Olson Kundig in Seattle.

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v oice s

the

la n d

Canadian Entry to the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale DOUGL AS CARDINAL It is with deep cultural significance that UNCEDED: Voices of the Land was selected through a national juried competition to represent Canada at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. The uniquely Indigenous design team is led by Douglas J. Cardinal, renowned architect, philosopher, human rights activist, Officer of the Order of Canada, and “World Master of Contemporary Architecture”.

www.unceded.ca Join Douglas J. Cardinal and team in Venice and share in this significant moment in Canada’s history, as a key supporter of UNCEDED: Voices of the Land, the Canadian entry to the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale.

Media Kit 2017

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26/01/2018 9:34:49 AM 2018-03-09 5:17 PM

The Art of the City By Raffaele Milani McGill-Queens University Press, 2017 REVIEW

LARRY BEASLEY

Raffaele Milani is beside himself with concern about the current deplorable state of modern megacities. As an Italian, he has lived the contradictions as his lovely country, with its distinguished history of glorious cities, and has been wounded by industrial sprawl and thoughtless construction, especially in the north. It causes him to draw out how that has become the prevailing truth, like a bad dream, around the world. As a scholarly professor of aesthetics, he reacts to his anxiety not with a knee-jerk emotional rant but through a careful inquiry into what has made it all happen and explanation of why his worry is so well founded. In his book, The Art of the City, Milani takes us on an intensive tour of mythical, philosophical and psychological explanations throughout history about our relationship with cities and what cities have contributed to the human spirit. In three main sections—entitled “The City as Habitat,” “What is the City?” and “The Art of the City,” the author describes the current state of cities, zeroing in on what he thinks has been lost. He poses a rhetorical question for architects and planners of whether or not the art of city-making still exists. And then, he suggests directions for a revitalization of that art. Milani explores what the city has been in human culture by discussing the history and

commentary of real cities, celestial and imagined cities in literature, and even apocalyptic cities in films and news footage. He emphasizes how we experience the city, highlighting how we take things in with the “gaze”, the essential act of observing, and do that in motion through what the French call flânerie, or aimless strolling. He shows how scale and pattern, how representation and metaphor, and how natural ecologies came together with utility as the formula for successful and beloved cities in the past. And he posits that urban planning and building, through a political act, puts this all together to create “places,” not just “spaces,” whose “meaning illustrates the limitations of abstract geometric design.” His commentary is awash in his admiration of both the urbs, or stones that have structured the city, and the civitas, or community of citizens that have populated the city. But Milani declares that the city as it was always used and understood—and as it fed human culture—no longer exists. He laments that all we now have are endless “built-up landscapes” rather than “cities,” where the best that can be said, quoting Rosario Assunto, is that they are places for “the useful.” He suggests that virtual reality, from the cell phone to the hologram, will take our built-up landscapes to an even lower ebb where “cyber-flânerie,” which collapses the public and the private spheres into vacuity, will become more important than fixing the problems. He expresses anguish that mass production, urban expansion, destruction of the beautiful and natural, triumph of the machine, deterioration of historic centres and over-emphasis on functionality have all conspired to obliterate the dignity of urban life. To paraphrase his words, he further says that we see too many things, yet we see nothing at all; that contemporary architects deconstruct historic systems of style only to shock. In the end, though, Milani is not a pessimist. He notes that the chaotic growth has caused disastrous disorder but hopes that this dysfunction offers an opportunity to rethink society. Then he tries to tell us how this might happen. Through Lewis Mumford, Milani refreshes our memory of the garden city and contemporary extensions of green (as in landscape-rich) architecture. As examples, he describes the architecture of Emilio Ambasz and mentions the Musée du quai Branly by Jean Nouvel. He urges that we go back to antiquity for inspiration. He shows in the work of Kenzo Tange how “the ancient can be the foundation for the modern.” Milani insists that a delicate understanding of context can help to not only offer suitable contemporary form and fit, along with sensitivity to the historic, but also instill a harmony that is desperately needed. To illustrate, he cites

the designs of David Chipperfield, who says that “architecture is an encounter and a gift.” Yet in a dialectic embrace that brings a smile, Milani also enjoys Frank Gehry as the contrarian who creates place by shocking the senses, as in his new digs for the Fondation Louis Vuitton. Milani calls on architects bring a new focus to the meaning and narrative in their designs—that, quoting Vittorio Gregotti, they “express thought as form” to bring the soul back to the city. His suggestion for planners— a little more vague—is to apply what he calls “coherent stereotypes,” which apparently are walkable-scaled modules for living and working, within “territories” (his word for undeveloped lands) to bring humanity back into the urban scene and encourage strolling as the way to take it all in. Frankly, Milani is better at diagnosis than prescription. His erudite references to historic thinkers and commentators, and the extensive bibliography, are commendable, but his dense style, frequent digressions and difficult language (maybe exacerbated by the translation from the Italian) can make it a struggle to follow his arguments and reasoning. He’s at his best when he tracks the essential qualities that cities need to generate and nourish human culture, by contrasting the past with their modern, vacuous, undifferentiated mass through globalization. While advocating respect for ecology and natural settings, Milani pays little attention to the extraordinary, progressive work currently happening in the realm of sustainable design. Although he does mention “green building,” it is only in the old-fashioned definition as basically about plants on walls and roofs. He references the “smart city” but does not embrace it, because he sees it as a dominating force rather than a balancing one. And although he decries the generic anonymity of megacities, he does not mention even one of the many district-scaled urban alternatives underway or already built through the efforts of urban designers and planners to address that malaise, such as Hammarby Sjostad in Stockholm. He frets about how urban cores and historic centres are emptying out, but does not mention the strategies for core revival that are showing great success from Seoul to Boston to Vancouver to Melbourne. So, this is not a particularly helpful book to read as a practitioner’s guide for the future. But it is a sober unpacking of the dilemma of modern megacities—and a delightful, lyrical view of the traditions of the city from the past.

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Books

Larry Beasley, CM, FCIP is the former co-director of planning at the City of Vancouver and the principal of the international planning consultancy Beasley and Associates.

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Books Toronto Architecture: A City Guide By Alex Bozikovic, McClelland & Stewart, 2017 REVIEW

DAVE LEBLANC

Even when it was first published in 1985, and in 1989 when the second edition was released, I’m not convinced booksellers filed Patricia McHugh’s Toronto Architecture: A City Guide under “Walking Tours.” Yes, the book is divided into geographical sections such as Front Street East, Yonge Street, Jarvis Street, The Grange, and Southeast Rosedale, but based on the huge swaths of territory covered and lack of walktimes—I once led a gaggle of architects up Jarvis Street from Lake Ontario to Bloor and it took the better part of a business day—or helpful suggestions for coffee break locations, my assumption was always that the book was more of an armchair guide. It was, however, packed with solid research: for each building entry, McHugh listed year of construction, architect, original use, subsequent alteration(s) and use(s) and those architects responsible, and, finally, personal observations. For the iconic Gooderham Building (a.k.a. the “Flatiron”), she wrote: “This theatrical endeavour owes its eye-catching appeal to more than just shape. With a richly textured façade and kingly chateauesque towered roof that still dominates this busy corner, the building stands as an apt symbol of the Gooderham family’s powerful position in the community.” As an architecture columnist with a particular passion for heritage buildings and adaptive reuse, I’ve turned to McHugh dozens of times during my 14 years at the Globe & Mail. And, after finding the address I’d needed to confirm, I’d usually (and willingly) let myself fall down her cheerful rabbit-hole for an hour or more…not for procrastination’s sake, but rather for the sheer optimism of her writing. That’s why I’m a little disappointed with the 21st century reboot. With McHugh gone (she passed in 2008), the awesome responsibility of adding hundreds of new buildings was handed to Globe and Mail architecture critic Alex Bozikovic. While Bozikovic has done the impossible by writing about a city that continues to reinvent itself and has added entirely new sections for neighbourhoods McHugh hadn’t considered, such as “Suburbs West,” or ones that weren’t yet a twinkle in the developer’s eye, such as “South Core,” all that running around seems to have made him cranky. Where McHugh came off as cheerleader, trying to infect readers with a “get out there and see it!” bug, Bozikovic sometimes treats his entries (each marked “PM,” “AB” or “PM/ AB” if Bozikovic has added to original text)

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as a place for criticism that can border on cruelty. For example, he tells readers to “avert their eyes” when confronting The Berczy, the 2014 condominium across from the Flatiron. By Young & Wright/ IBI Group with heritage firm ERA , he calls the midrise building a “muddle,” describing it as follows: “The base is precast concrete pretending to be stone, not convincing anyone; the brick middle tries to copy the neighbour lofts, not very well; the top is a cloud of pale, grim spandrel, perhaps trying to disappear into the sky. If only.” His description of Aura, currently Canada’s tallest residential building, is equally fierce, labeling it “titanically bad” overall, while describing the ground level retail spaces as “cramped and cluttered, overshadowed by an ominous cantilever.” He finishes by warning that the building “makes for a junky skyline” and that the “next round of very tall towers better improve on this.” And it’s not just that I disagree with these assessments; who wants a guidebook that tells the reader what not to look at? But perhaps my memory of McHugh is clouded by my tendency to wear rose-coloured glasses. So, to be fair, I randomly tallied 50 entries each by McHugh and Bozikovic as positive, neutral or negative. The results are telling: McHugh clocked in at 37 positives, 11 neutrals, and two negatives. However, even her negatives offered hope. While she criticized a 1903 factory at 469 King Street West for having “too many fussy light-coloured stone details” and an “unfinished” roof line, she still can’t deny the “charm of winged cherubs decorating Ionic capitals at the entrance.” By contrast, Bozikovic’s positive reviews routinely add charcoal linings to silver clouds: after praising the 1978 Palace Pier condominium tower on the Etobicoke waterfront (for years the tallest thing west of High Park), he writes that the “grim jumble of high-rise condos that joined it a generation later…should have learned some lessons here.” Not surprisingly, Bozikovic’s count broke down as follows: 25 positives, 19 neutrals, and six negatives. Perhaps I’m wrong. Maybe Bozikovic is simply feeling a sense of urgency, since anything published about booming Toronto will be out of date within a few years (in fact, he writes about buildings that aren’t even a hole in the ground yet), or his harsh tone is nothing more than a rallying cry to build a better city. Or perhaps the sad reality is that the only way to sell walking tour books in the 21st century is to favour arsenic over architectural lace. Toronto writer Dave LeBlanc pens “The Architourist” column for The Globe and Mail.

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Exploring the Capital: An Architectural Guide to the Ottawa Gatineau Region By Andew Waldron, Figure 1 Publishing, 2017 REVIEW

BRIGITTE DESROCHERS

The American Insitute of Architects guides to major American cities have long made Canada seem like a poor cousin. But historian Andrew Waldron’s book on Ottawa architecture is of a quality comparable to the AIA guidebooks, and it matches Harold Kalman’s and Robin Ward’s Exploring Vancouver in the

calibre of its scholarship and presentation. As such, it is an important step towards realizing the national series of architectural guidebooks we deserve. And as Kalman and Ward did in 2012, Waldron sees buildings through a civic-minded lens that has a distinctly Canadian ring. Waldron hopes to “raise the civic consciousness of the city,” as he puts it, by writing “a citizen’s guide as well as an architectural guide,” organized around 11 tours that can be walked, cycled or driven. The book documents and maps 350 points of interest in the Ottawa and Gatineau region, with descriptions that range from landscape features to development schemes to vernacular architecture to landmarks. The commentaries are dense with information, but a fun and easy read. They might describe a late 19th-century real estate experiment or mention where its stone was quarried, and then casually identify the architectural style that informs it. One may read about the reversals of fortune of a prominent family, the multiple uses of their property over time, and changing patterns of trade. The result is a matrix of anecdotes that help readers see all buildings as vital, and telling pieces of a city’s history. Waldron wanted to “bring an everyday normalcy abut buildings and their information,” and he largely succeeded. As a professional migrant to the city, I have become acquainted with Ottawa as a tourist, a consumer, a commuter and a voter. But as a citizen? One familiar building at a time, one anecdote after another, this guide opened the doors of that collective,

The Largest Art : A Measured Manifesto for a Plural Urbanism By Brent D. Ryan MIT Press, 2017

While many think of urban design as scaled-up architecture, author Brent Ryan argues for a more comprehensive view of the field— the largest of the building arts, with its own unique qualities. Ryan, an associate professor at MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning, distinguishes urban design from other arts by its pluralist aspect, in terms of scale, time, land, creators, stakeholders and forms. From a Brancusi sculptural ensemble in Romania to a Bronx housing project, the author looks at urban design through the lens of pluralism. He concludes his manifesto addressing the ceaseless activity cities and tasking urbanists with designing them to survive perpetual change.

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multigenerational work that Ottawa really is. It made for a soothing and grounding read. Waldron has come to this task equipped with 25 years of experience as an architectural historian, including years of serving as the Canadian Registrar of Historic Places and manager of the Federal Heritage Buildings Review Office. He based his work on a long out-of-print 1983 architectural guide of Ottawa by Harold Kalman (who has contributed to this new version), and benefited from the generous input of the local heritage community. Bringing material from a broad variety of sources into a consistent format, this guide is of immense benefit for the research community. It’s already being called “authoritative” although a few minor points might need correcting, and misses some opportunities to include perspectives that are typically not well represented in the current archives. For example, the book includes Indigenous projects, but more of their communities’ views and perspectives should certainly enrich editions to come. This book is in full colour, with excellent maps and all-new photography by Peter Coffman. It has a high-quality binding to withstand the wear and tear of multiple excursions, it comes in both official languages and it’s comfortingly affordable. It is a model to be followed in other Canadian cities, and a staple for every architect’s library.

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Books

Brigitte Desrochers is a former Architecture Officer for the Canada Council of the Arts.

Designed Leadership By Moura Quayle Columbia University Press, 2017

As architects know, design thinking can unleash the mind and spark innovation, helping employees thrive and businesses succeed. In Designed Leadership, designer and academic Moura Quayle shares her plan for integrating design and leadership. Quayle, the pro tem director of the University of British Columbia’s School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, draws on her long experience as a landscape architect focused on urban ecology to translate processes and principles into tools of change for professional leaders. She unpacks the primordial concepts of “designed leadership,” including learning from natural systems, to demonstrate how a strategic design approach to business can ignite creativity and generate collective energy at the workplace and beyond.

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Solarban 90® glass by Vitro Architectural Glass (formerly PPG Glass) offers exceptional solar control and a neutral appearance similar to clear glass from both the interior and exterior of a building. In a 1-inch IGU, it achieves a SHGC of 0.23, VLT of 51% and an LSG of 2.17. To learn more and request samples, visit: www.vitroglazings.com/solarban

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Planitop® 330 Fast provides a flat, fast finish Planitop 330 Fast is a quick-setting, polymer-modified, fiber-reinforced cementitious rendering, patching and leveling mortar. It can be applied from 1/8” to 1-1/4” (3 mm to 3,2 cm) in thickness in a single coat. Planitop 330 Fast can be used for ramping, smoothing and leveling clean, interior and exterior concrete and screed floor substrates to prepare them for installing ceramic, stone or waterproofing systems. www.mapei.com

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2018-03-09 5:17 PM

canadian architect 03/18

calendar ACROSS CANADA

Edmonton

Vancouver

03/20—03/21

03/18-05/08

Culture at the Centre An exhibition offering insight into the important work of Indigenousrun cultural centres and museums in British Columbia. Five centres representing six communities are showcased: Musqueam Cultural Education Centre, SquamishLil’wat Cultural Centre, Heiltsuk Cultural Education Centre, Nisga’a Museum and Haida Gwaii Museum/Haida Heritage Centre at Kay Llnagaay. At the UBC Museum of Anthropology.

Buildex Edmonton Featuring more than 35 credit-approved educational seminars, Buildex Edmonton will feature over 150 exhibits about new, innovative products, materials, technologies and services in over 100 different categories for the entire spectrum of building design, construction, renovation and management. www.buildexedmonton.com

Banff 05/11—05/12

Banff Session 2018

http://moa.ubc.ca/portfolio_page/cultureat-the-centre/

05/5—05/09

Spaces Between: AIBC Conference 2018 The 2018 Architectural Institute of British Columbia conference theme is “Spaces Between”—ideas that are seemingly opposed connect, where innovation, technology and materiality meet.

The Alberta Association of Architects (AAA) conference brings speakers from around the globe to share ideas, innovation and ingenuity. Hosted at the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel, the 2018 session offers an arena of dialogue unencumbered by workplace pressures and distractions. www.banffsession.ca

www.aibc.ca

Winnipeg

—05/15

04/11

Asim Waqif: Salvage Installed at the Vancouver Art Gallery’s outdoor satellite Offsite location on Georgia Street, Asim Waqif ’s project repurposes waste from Vancouver demolition sites, employing materials from derelict buildings anticipated for development. The New Delhi-based artist’s site-specific installation combines architecture with a strong contextual reference to contemporary urban design and the politics of occupying, intervening and using public space. www.vanartgallery.bc.ca

Winnipeg Wood Solutions Fair This one-day educational event showcases the use of wood in commercial, institutional, industrial and multi-unit residential construction. www.wood-works.ca

Toronto —04/01

Winter Stations WinterStations is now in its fourth year of an international design competition to bring temporary public art installations to and celebrate Toronto’s winter waterfront landscape. www.winterstations.com

—05/27

ABOVE

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“Salvage,” by Asim Waqif.

Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors This major exhibition also shows the evolution of artist Yayoi Kusama’s immersive, multi-reflective installations. www.ago.ca/exhibitions/kusama

05/11—05/12

Architect@Work Held at the Enercare Centre, the two-day event offers a series of innovation-focused seminars for architects and interior design professionals. www.architectatwork.ca

05/23—05/25

Bold by Design: OAA Conference 2018 This year’s Ontario Association of Architects conference will explore how architects should use the skills and knowledge of the profession— creativity, design thinking and critical analysis—to challenge existing models and develop innovative approaches to complex problems. www.oaa.on.ca

Ottawa 05/14—05/18

International Making Cities Livable Conference The 55th annual conference of International Making Cities Livable (IMCL), organized in partnership with the City of Ottawa. This year’s theme is “Healthy 10-Minute Neighborhoods.” www.livablecities.org

search. Case studies from the 19th and 20th centuries are presented through CCA archival material, as well as models, scientific instruments and photographs. Curated by Evangelos Kotsioris. www.cca.qc.ca

Saint John, New Brunswick 05/30—06/02

RAIC Festival of Architecture The Royal Architectural Institute of Canada’s annual Festival of Architecture comes to New Brunswick in 2018. Keynote speakers include Odile Decq, Diébédo Francis Kéré and John Leroux. The conference is offering numerous continuing education sessions, and the annual RAIC Awards of Excellence. ConEd tours include the McAdam Railway Station, Kinesiology Building at University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, and Sir William Van Horne Estate at Ministers Island. Social tours include day trips to 19th-century Martello Tower at St. Martins & the Bay of Fundy, New Brunswick wineries, St. John’s Reversing Falls and local walking tours. www.festival2018.raic.org

Montreal —04/15

Fostering Society: Foster + Partners An exhibition on the work of Foster + Partners at the UQAM Centre de Design. This ambitious exhibition focuses on the many achievements of the Londonbased firm, as well as its advances in sustainable development, long before environmental responsibility became a central cultural tenet.

ABOVE

Carleton Martello Tower.

St John’s, Newfoundland

www.centrededesign.com

—03/22—09/02

Lab Cult: An unorthodox history of interchanges between science and architecture This Canadian Centre for Architecture exhibition investigates the concept of the lab as an allegory for experimentation, and imagines new modes of transdisciplinary re-

05/22—05/25

Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada Conference This year’s conference will be held at the base of Signal Hill, a National Historic Site overlooking the entrance to St. John’s Harbour. St. John’s is one of the oldest European settlements in North America. www.canada-architecture.org

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INTERNATIONAL

Atlanta

Norwalk

Venice

New York

05/08—05/11

05/15—05/18

05/26—11/25

—04/08

Thinking Machines: Art and Design in the Digital Age The Museum of Modern Art brings artworks produced using computers and computational thinking together with notable examples of computer and component design. The exhibition reveals how artists, architects and designers operate at the vanguard of art, construction and technology. www.moma.org

Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia —01/13/19

From 1948-1980, Yugoslavia’s architects responded to contradictory demands and inf luences, creating a postwar architecture that expressed the diversity and idealism of the Yugoslav state.

Coverings 2018: North America’s largest tile and stone exhibition returns to the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta with nearly 1,100 exhibitors from over 40 countries. www.coverings.com

London 03/28—08/12

Hope to Nope: Graphics and Politics 2008-2018 At the Design Museum, an exhibition with objects and displays of protest placards, posters and internet memes that showcase how graphic design and technology have played a key role in dictating and reacting to the major political moments of our times, from Wall Street to Sao Paulo. www.designmuseum.org

Iconic Houses Conference The 5th annual conference will focus on the themes of: Modernism on the East Coast–Philip Johnson and the Harvard Five, and Iconic Houses in Latin America www.iconichouses.org

07/15—01/13/19

Vienna —04/04

Form follows Rule The Architekturzentrum Wien exhibition questions the rules that regulate architecture. Acts, ordinances, guidelines and standards are key factors in the design of the built environment. The survey reveals the arcane and usually invisible backgrounds to architecture and urban development. www.azw.at/en/event/form-follows-rule

La Biennale di Venezia Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara curate the 16th installations of the legendary international architecture exhibition, on the grounds of the Giardini in Venice. The Biennale Architecture 2018 will be titled “Freespace,” evoking the spirit and humanity at the core of architecture’s agenda. This year, the Canadian entry to the biennale is UNCEDED: Voices from the Land. Led by Douglas Cardinal, FRAIC the exhibit will emphasize and celebrate the work of Indigenous architects and designers throughout Turtle Island, grounded in the legacy of the Calls to Action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report.

canadian architect 03/18

Calendar

www.labiennale.org/en www.unceded.ca

www.moma.org

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backpage

Photo stills: Ian Garrick Mason

canadian architect 03/18

SoMETHING old, SOMETHING NEW TEXT

John Lorinc

An independent filmmaker captures the spirit of the new industrial conversions. As big cities become denser, all open areas have to contribute to the vitality of the public realm, including ones long deemed not just marginal but also inaccessible, such as the abandoned Manhattan rail spur that became the High Line. “Walking [it] felt like a remarkable experience to be enjoyed when visiting New York City,” observes filmmaker Ian Garrick Mason, “but at the same time raised questions about what a “park” actually is and what we should expect it to do or offer.” The question prompted him to make his newly released documentary short, entitled Something New from Something Old: How cities are making parks that work in places almost everyone forgot , a thirteen-minute film that stars a series of transformed spaces long considered derelict and disposable. In dense modern cities, as Toronto urban planner Jennifer Keesmaat observes in the film, “No space is frivolous.” It’s a hot topic right now: how to create public spaces in dense urban cores where there is little opportunity left to build traditional parks. While architects and designers have been

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repurposing industrial buildings like power plants and factories for decades, they are now making similar conversions to abandoned infrastructure, including decommissioned wharves and elevated expressways. Mason plans to send the film to leading urban designers and architectural schools in Canada and elsewhere. “The idea is simply to spread its ideas and lessons as widely as possible.” Absent affordable property for landscaped parks, Joshua Laird, the New York Harbour National Parks commissioner, tells Mason, “what is out there are these residual spaces.” In the film, New York planning consultant Jamie Torres Springer offers a vivid analogy: they’re left over as the industrial glacier recedes. The energy invested in recent years is producing a remarkable legacy of amenities. Mason’s camera shows the buzz of activity drawn to Brooklyn Bridge Park, a series of open areas constructed on long abandoned piers jutting into the East River. The financial model underwriting these spaces is also very different than the traditional city park. With The Bentway, the linear park beneath Toronto’s Gardiner

ABOVE Ian Garrick Mason’s short film features Toronto’s Bentway, New York’s High Line, and urban planner Jennifer Keesmaat et al.

Expressway (see p. 17 of this issue), the resources come from philanthropists and are managed by a conservancy. As for the High Line, we hear Brooklyn Bridge Park president Eric Landau calling the vaunted New York elevated park “the ultimate private public partnership.” Mason gleaned that those involved in managing these new public amenities understand the risk of allowing private funders to determine their usage, and have sought ways to ensure universal access. “Wrapping the influence of money in a web of other influences,” says Mason, “is a realistic way to make and sustain parks where the public’s purse is constrained.” Indeed, wide-spread attention, including from films like Something Old, Something New are helping to put more eyes on these public spaces, and therefore ensure that they become the great urban parks of the 21st century. Ian Garrick Mason’s film Something New from Some-

thing Old: How cities are making parks that work in places almost everyone forgot is viewable online at canadianarchitect.com as well as at Park People (parkpeople.ca).

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