45 : houses + housing

Houses, from the most small and poetic, to great social experiments in housing. Houses are individual acts within an ancient typology that is ever with us.

ON SITE r e v i e w

houses + housing fall 2024 45

1854

1905

John Petherick, Abertillery tin works, Monmouthshire , 1854.

1962

Tate T00591

Vivian Colliery and surrounding houses on hillside, Abertillery. Postcard, circa 1905.

L S Lowry, Hillside in Wales , 1962, painted from notes and sketches made near Abertillery.

Abertillery, in the Ebbw Fach valley, Monmouthshire, Daily Herald , February 1965.

1965

Jean-François Pirson, Cahiers de Beyrouth . Bruxelles: La Lettre Volée, 2009

ISBN 978-2-87317-360-0

https://lettrevolee.com

courtesy of Darine Choueiri

ON SITE r e v i e w 45: 2024

houses + housing

On Site review, in balmier times, did two issues on housing; we felt it was critical to revisit housing now, given a housing crisis in Canada brought on by decades of zealous quotas for refugees, immigrants, temporary workers and foreign students, the arrogation of the sector by development, real estate and housing markets and the exit of the federal government from the actual physical provision of housing through CMHC, once the bread and butter for Canadian architects. Drastic as these changes have been, the housing crisis does not seem to have been foreseen. The response to the call for articles was strangely muted. Either the subject, housing , which affects us all whether architects or not, is too small an issue, or too large. What have we seen this past few years on the news every evening? tent cities, the obliteration of both apartment blocks and cottages in Ukraine, the total destruction of high-density urban fabric in Gaza. Rubble and ruins; housing and all the people for whom it was built consigned to oblivion. Housing is the people who live in it. Without housing, people must live short and primitive lives on the ground with tarps against the weather, without security, safety or tenure. Is our project to design a better tent? Hardly. We are paralysed; the lack of housing is not a design problem, it is a political problem. I think this realisation has fried our architectural brains. All this said, we have an issue here with housing ranging from the most intimate to the most ambitious. Let’s just say the old paradigms, including how we talk about architecture, have been thrown out, new ones are waiting to be born.

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masthead Angela Silver Lisa Rapoport Francesco Martire José Neves contributors

contents

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contributors and contents house as conduit what we take and what we leave old shells, new trajectories pinheiros bravos houses, images and memory human right to housing housing for all our home when climate matters reconceptualising urban housing upcycled objects

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call for articles front and back covers

on site 46: architecture and travel Abertillery, 1854-2024

the house as a conduit for superstitious beliefs

things powers time

ANGELA SILVER

A table holding construction tools quickly became an ad hoc exhibition space of the numerous superstitious artifacts we found while renovating our 1880s Seaview farmhouse. The items laid out on the table included a woman’s brown leather shoe next to a child’s shoe, a white corset rusted at its ribbing, a piece of cloth with rudimentary stitching, twine, a seashell, a toddler’s jumper with its pocket detached. An envelope with the house’s address, a series of broken glass dishes and a glass bottle marked Ozone is Life and, on the other side, The Ozone Co. of Toronto. Research online revealed the 1800-century Ozone Company produced a sulfuric drink claiming to cure ailments ranging from eczema to inflamed ovaries. We were euphoric the day we discovered the house’s structural mortise and tenon connections joined as in a ship, without nails. Pencilled numbers marking its assembly on the ceiling joists offered a poetic connection to its builders. Before finding the protective items, I lamented the gutting of the ground floor. Any personal portrait of its previous inhabitants seemed elusive despite removing layers of wallpaper, lath and horsehair plaster, walls, seven stacked layers of flooring, and three strata of ceilings. A sense of the former occupants could not be gleaned from a few white glass buttons, pennies, a Queen Victoria coin and a handwritten list of phone numbers on a layer of wallpaper.

all images © Angela Silver

4 on site review 45: houses + housing

This changed when we discovered four distinct caches of protective items concealed within the home’s architectural cavities. I found the woman’s collection under the sill on the south- facing wall while my partner found a three-foot-long barn augur stamped Thompson Glasgow with a large wooden plank in the same area. It is expected that superstitious caches will be found during renovations to houses in Nova Scotia. Concealing objects in the structural cavities of houses is formally known as immurement . In many cultures, the house was frequently used as a conduit for superstitious prevention practices to ward off evil spirits and to bring good luck. Following traditional belief, items were best placed at entryways, near doorways, or windows within the walls and below the sills. Pieces of textiles cut from clothing and shoes, especially favoured for their increased protective powers, were placed inside the walls to bring its inhabitants good luck and to prevent malicious spirits entering the house.

all images © Angela Silver

I discovered the cache of a man’s items in the cavity to the right of the woman’s objects. The immured talismans were individual acts performed in unison, offering us an intimate portrait of a couple bound by superstition, a promissory note against wraiths in the form of their earthly possessions: the man chose a steel butter knife, the handle half wood on one side, bone on the other embossed Sylvester & Co Sheffield; a worn, black wool-lined leather boot, the cut collar of a white dress shirt stamped 15½, a child’s brown leather boot, a seashell and a net mending tool. Our most recent finding, consisting of a child’s boot with a separated sole and a piece of rope, was found between posts on the staircase to the second floor.

all images © Angela Silver

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I am familiar with the practice of immurement through my own family’s history. My paternal ancestors were part of a wave of Protestants of German origin, with twenty-seven families sent to settle the Lunenburg area for Britain circa 1753. Numerous renovations to houses in the Lunenburg area have illustrated how frequently original settlers practiced immurement, with their houses a conduit for these protective beliefs. A beloved heirloom I now possess, a tintype of my paternal great, great grandmother Ella Maria Fraser, her likeness preserved in silver halide crystals, was most likely concealed in her ancestral house due to superstitious beliefs. How this photograph came to light is astonishing. My grandmother Evelyn and her cousin used to spend each summer at their family’s house and farm on the LaHave River in Lunenburg County. When they revisited it and while reminiscing about the times they had spent there as children, a woman emerged from the house asking if everything was all right as their prolonged discussion had attracted her attention. Once they explained their ancestral ties to the property, the woman disappeared into the house. She returned with a tintype and handed it to my grandmother. The image showed a young woman holding a book, seated in a plush chair, her hair a river cascading to her waist. A wave of petticoats flares out where her long hair ends, surrounding her legs in a current of ruffles. The woman explained that the tintype had been discovered during a renovation to the kitchen under nine layers of wallpaper, held by its original pin to the wall. My grandmother saw her long-deceased grandmother as an eighteen-year-old girl. To wallpaper over Ella’s tintype was most likely rooted in the superstitious belief that doing so would bring good luck and not tempt fate.

found tintype. collection of Angela Silver

Ella Maria Fraser circa 1880, Lunenburg, Nova Scotia

ANGELA SILVER , PhD, is a visual artist whose most recent work is being realised at Place des Montréalaises, a public commemorative space honouring the women of Montreal. Her work can be found at angelasilver.com

what we take and what we leave

family things care

LISA RAPOPORT

the painting After my dad died (though the much

healthier one, he suddenly died first) my mom was left with caregivers, and my sister embarked on the project of moving her from Montreal to Toronto to assisted living. My mother had always said she wanted to stay home until the end – that way she would not have to ever sort through her ‘stuff’ (thanks ma!). But, with my sister and I both in Toronto, it was very difficult for us to provide any consistent support. The search for a place for her brought up many questions about what home is. Nurses told us that if you move the elderly, it is best to bring as many things as possible that make it as much the same as where they came from – the position of the bed, the carpet, the curtains, the orientation. The familiar combats anxiety. The new apartment needed to be small enough that it would not frustrate her lack of mobility, but also had to have a seriously large wall directly facing the bed. She did not care very much about looking at the pictures of the future apartment, or the 3D fly through, she just said – as long as I can wake up every morning and look at ‘that’ picture, all will be good. That picture is a large abstract painting by the Quebec artist Guy Montpetit (from the Sex Machine /OU Êtes vous donc Series C No 3 1969/1970). It faced her when she was lying in bed (which was a lot of the time) and as she could not move her head to the side very well, this was the straight on view at the foot of the bed. She said she saw in it two people about to hug (separately my father said the same thing, though not sure they ever talked about it). I think that she also saw it as something that was endlessly fascinating – it captured her imagination. It was not the thingness of it, or the ownership, or the story of how it was bought; it was not about memory, instead, it was about its capacity to be changeable, curious, compelling. About other things in the room – she was detached. They were things, but they were not what defined her home.

Lisa Rpoport

Over the last six months, both of my parents have died. I am at an age where most of my friends are experiencing the same, with anxiety about how to move a parent from their home to assisted living, or worrying about what am I going to do with all of their stuff? What did they think is home? Will my siblings want the same things? What are the things that matter? What sums up your parents in their things rather than in your memory? How do you think about their home as your home? My parents had chosen to stay in the family home – my dad was still full of energy and strength in his 90s and my mother infirm. Because of my mother’s lack of mobility, we had a hospital bed for her in the open plan living/dining room and she had enough mobility just to get to the kitchen, living room, and front porch until even the one

step down with someone holding her was too much. Her world was quickly reduced to the ground floor of the house that we had lived in since 1962. My mother was a photographer, and suddenly the only thing she could explore was what she could see from her bed. Her artwork had a strong sense of collage and surprise and so her vivid imagination could see ‘great pictures’ in the way that one part of kitchen cabinets kind of looked like a kimono from the right angle. In her minds’ eye she was shooting it. Although my parents who both had art practices and many, many interesting things in the house including a significant art collection, neither were nostalgic. They liked telling stories about things they had as a kind of prompt (when it was interesting), but did not express deep attachment to the things themselves.

8 on site review 45: houses + housing

the plants Along the front window sill was a collection of succulent plants. My mother could not keep a plant alive if her life depended on it, but loved succulents. She read all about them, but my green thumb dad was commandeered to satisfy this need. The line up at the cash of their favourite Chinese restaurant was lined with rubber plants – she would elbow my dad into breaking off a leaf as she was the shy one in the couple, and they started a short career in leaf nipping (succulents root from any leaf), my mother commanding, my dad complying. Building on successful looting, their succulent garden grew mostly from scratch all along the sill – and was their shared indoor garden. Soon people would trade cuttings and the garden got variety. My mother loved the strong profiles, the way the light came through — and I am sure, she saw pictures in these too — as another part of her photo oeuvre was a series of abstract views of plants at the Montreal Botanical Gardens. After my dad died, the caregivers were given the task of ensuring these stay alive – it was as though they both lived in that set of plants. As we were planning the move, the size of the windowsill and orientation of every apartment we looked at were critical. My mother died before making it to the new apartment in Toronto. I have yet to go through the stuff in the house. There are things of ‘value’, there is an interesting art collection and the extensive archives of their own artworks. All of this we will go through in due time. But in the meantime I brought the plants to my studio in Toronto — and in nurturing them there I am surprised to discover how much it feels like my parents are with me. Like I brought them home with me. To my home.

Lisa Rpoport

coda Over the last few decades, real estate speak has replaced the word house with home . I don’t think you can sell homes. Homes are what you make — whether that is your room in a rooming house, or the grand pile — it is something you make. As a design practice, we most often work with clients who have character, they collect things or make things (which could be as simple as being GREAT cooks) – they need a house that will accommodate exactly who they are. Our most wince- inducing question from a client is — would that idea be good for resale? One of the first questions we ask people – is this your terminal house? What we mean by that is — are you doing this for you? or to satisfy some future buyer? The projects we do are for people who want things not because they have seen them before, but because they need their actual life to be supported and celebrated – to make it their home. Sometimes that means their too-much- stuff, or that ugly clock they got from their grandma, but it is what it makes it feel like home to them. You buy a house, you make a home.

LISA RAPOPORT is a founding member of PLANT, an architecture and landscape architecture studio in Toronto, working across Canada and internationally. https://branchplant.com

uncover | recover old shells | new trajectories FRANCESCO MARTIRE

family interiority cores

Whether Georgian, Edwardian or Victorian, there is an extensive supply of old housing stock in Toronto typified by thick shells of double wythe load-bearing masonry walls and timber-framed shapely roofs. It is a specific method of construction containing a substantial amount of embodied energy and a level of craft invested over a hundred years ago. A combination of poor thermal envelopes, antiquated programs such as servants’ quarters, and outdated mechanical systems call for a rethinking of this building type. These heavy masonry shells can be repurposed and revitalised for a new set of requirements framed by contemporary living. Through a kind of interior excavation, the addition of light weight wood framing and gypsum board, and the use of windows and light, a new relationship with the architecture transcends property values and iconography. It breeds a love for new space that prolongs the existence of these shells which become a scaffold both shaping and supporting current material technologies and ways of living. Deep care for a space establishes relationships between family and house that is foundational to the true sustainability of architecture. The life of these masonry buildings can be extended by designing tailored solutions for new and evolving inhabitants. unCover / reCover House is a full renovation of an 1890 Victorian semi-detached single-family dwelling in the west end of Toronto. The house was layered with several modifications over its 130-year history and most recently had sustained damage from a small fire. We peeled away the interior to the exterior load-bearing masonry walls, and reconfigured and layered a set of contemporary spaces tailored for a married couple with two active young children within the existing envelope. The house takes its name from the process of removing the interior lining of lath and plaster and uncovering the spatial potential hidden behind previous layers of inhabitation. The shell of the building, both its load-bearing masonry walls and its multi-faceted shaped roof, remains largely unchanged. Uncovered interior volumes become active participants in the recovered space. The interior demolition uncovered many opportunities to reshape the volume and recover disused space within the building shell. A hidden service stair was found, removed and its volume recovered for the galley kitchen. The removal of a flat ceiling on the third floor uncovered a beautiful series of triangulated sloped surfaces revealing a new spatial volume. Old interior interventions were removed to reveal forms already embedded in the shell waiting to be discovered and brought forward to engage in a new reading of the house.

large [medium] design office

doublespace photography

10 on site review 45: houses + housing

Connecting the three floors plus basement is a new series of staircases, framed by a scalar interpretation of Victorian ornament, the era in which the house was built. The sequence of staircases is a choreographed interplay of materials, textures and colour constantly modified by ever changing conditions of natural light spilling into the space of the stair. Pristine plumb white planes meet the textured imperfections of the existing masonry demising wall in an interplay of form, texture and light.

large [medium] design office

doublespace photography

The floor plans, left and photographs, right, from attic descending to the basement, show a large bedroom and ensuite occupying the entirety of the third floor. The attic was opened to increase the volume of this floor, revealing a beautifully sculpted series of surfaces created by the intersection of the gabled main and dormer roofs. Two bedrooms sit on the second floor flanking a family washroom. A family room that occasionally doubles as a guest bedroom is at the front of the house delineated by a large sliding barn door used to modulate the space. Closed, the barn door reveals a collection of books and separates the front room from the rest of the floor for movie watching, video game playing, and reading. While open, the room participates in the activities, spaces, and daylighting of the rest of the second floor. These two floors are connected with floor opening with glazed guards on the open side to bring natural light into the corridor of the second floor, an otherwise dark hallway. The ground floor is a continuous set of layered spaces moving from entry, to living, to dining, to a galley kitchen, bringing you to a large window and sliding door to a back porch and garden. This large aperture stretches wall to wall and floor to ceiling, linking the interior to the outside, brightening the kitchen end of the ground floor with brilliant morning sunlight. It is the only place where a small portion of the original masonry wall was removed to acknowledge a more contemporary way to occupy a house.

this page, left, from top: Top floor under the roofs Second floor, the family floor Ground floor, living, dining and kitchen floor Basement, a rec-room and work-from-home office Longitudinal section, showing where on the stairwell side of the house, the original double wythe brick walls (the constraining shell) are revealed.

facing page, from the top: Third floor attic bedroom,

The second floor family room with its sliding barn door that when closed reveals bookshelves and separates the room from the rest of the floor, including the childrens’ bedrooms. With the door open, the room is an extension of the family-oriented second floor. The ground floor facing toward the street: living room at the front, dining in the middle, working kitchen at the back: degrees of public to private family life.

large [medium] design office

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The Victorian façade with its proportions and composition of openings is maintained throughout. High-performance operable windows inserted into the existing openings keep existing stone lintels and sills and the subtle brick detailing around these openings intact. Three existing stained- glass units were salvaged, refurbished and installed neatly in their original positions on the street-facing façade. Afternoon sunlight shines through the coloured glass painting the walls and floors. Sitting within the shell is a layer of light wood stud construction containing the materials of modernity; updated electrical wiring, data cables, and thermal, vapour and air barriers, all concealed behind a new skin of gypsum board. The new interior represents a moment of exchange between the house’s history and its future, a moment of discourse between existing shells and new trajectories. The past is present, its influence is felt. New forms, materials, and uses build enduring relationships between people and the architecture that houses them. This is where we can achieve sustainability.

unCover / reCover House

architecture, interior design, landscape architecture: large [medium] design office

structural: Blackwell Structural Engineers

mechanical: Elite H.V.A.C. Designs

photography: doublespace photography

drawings and diagrams: large [medium] design office

FRANCESCO MARTIRE is an architect, landscape architect and co-founder of large [medium] design office , a multi-disciplinary practice based in Toronto, Ontario. He is also Associate Professor, Teaching Stream at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, University of Toronto. https://largemdo.com

doublespace photography

pinheiros bravos JOSÉ NEVES

land concrete beauty

house of the wild pines 2014-2022

Site: a small plateau on a heavily creased ridge line which visually dominates the landscape of Melides Mountain, in Alentejo, Portugal.

Program: a single open space designed for living, working, reading, playing, dancing, cooking and eating.

Client likes: exposed concrete.

Organisation: The house is located on this small plateau and is organised into three parts: 1. A 35-metre wall, 0.25m thick and 4.20m high, folded and punctured by well-placed openings, forms a kind of fortress which provides the entrance to the house, and contains the bathrooms, ample storage and three bedrooms designed as alcoves, each connected to an intimate courtyard. 2. A low pavilion-like volume contains the living room, slightly sunken in relation to the surrounding ground level and opened to the landscape in a panoramic view of 180 degrees. 3. A narrow volume connecting the bedrooms and the living room, contains the space for cooking and dining – the heart of the house. Materials: The outer walls are pigmented exposed concrete. Interior walls are either covered with lacquered wood (corridor, rooms and closets), with handmade tiles (bathrooms), or with exposed French oak (alcoves) as a kind of comfortable jacket lining. The walls of the patios are covered with painted plaster up to the ceiling height of the interior spaces. The roof is a garden terrace; together with the climbing vegetation planted along the walls of the patios, its seasonal changes and growth delicately mark the passing of time. Place: Porches control the solar incidence during the summer, while extending the living room to the surrounding garden, protected from the predominantly northeast winds given the orientation of the living room. The entrance to the house presents itself as a fortress wall, behind which are the bathrooms, storage and three bedrooms, each connected to an intimate courtyard. Passing laterally through the house one finds the living room with a near unobstructed view of the open landscape.

The wall, 35m long, 0.25m thick and 4.2m high, folded and rigorously cut out in places, shelters the inner life of this house.

atelier José Neves

Daniel Malhão

https://www.joseneves.net

14 on site review 45: houses + housing

Construction sample of the pigmented concrete compared with local stone and a piece of grey plain concrete. The pigmented concrete is compared with the trunk of a cork oak.

The living room is like a blanket that rests on the floor in a carefully chosen place to have a picnic, looking out at the landscape.

atelier José Neves

A branch of the cork oak leans over the wall into one of the bedroom patios.

Daniel Malhão

atelier José Neves

Design Team Architecture: José Neves

All the edges of the walls of the corridor (left) that crosses the house from end to end, patio to patio, are rounded, with no visible door trims. The bedrooms (right) are designed as alcoves, like cozy hammocks that stretch between trees to sleep in the shade.

Collaborators: Fernando Freire, André Matos, José Tavares, André Martins (project phase); Diogo Amaro, Inês Oliveira, João Tereso, Carlos Almada (construction phase); João Pernão, Maria Capelo (colour consultants) Contractor: Matriz - Sociedade de Construções, Lda. JOSÉ NEVES opened his office, Gabinete de Arquitectura , in 1991. Teaching since 1988 he is currently in the Department of Architecture and Urbanism of ISCTE.

Daniel Malhão

houses and housing STEPHANIE WHITE There are a few house images, years old, lodged in the back of my mind, that have become touchstones for how I think about houses. They are part of a photographic and drawing archive: not quite present unless I decide to examine them, which I have, for this essay on remembering and interpretation.

reduction multiplication agency

NT 628396

2 Cloud’s Hill, a cottage in Dorset that T E Lawrence lived in in the 1930s before he died in a motorcycle accident in 1938. Because of his archaeological interests and political contacts throughout Arabia, Mesopotamia and Syria, Lawrence was involved in the 1921-22 peace conference in Cairo, whereby post-Great War victors, mainly France and Britain, mapped, seemingly at random, the region into new entities leading to a state of ongoing war that continues today, including the long-standing displacement of the Palestinian peoples. After all this high-powered political manoeuvring, Lawrence joined the RAF in 1922 under an assumed name, was outed in 1923, joined the Tank Corps in Bovington, Dorset, took this nearby cottage, left the army and rejoined the RAF in 1925, eventually buying the cottage and renovating it to suit, which was ascetic in the extreme. 1 He appears in none of the images of this cottage, introverted extrovert that he was. His life here was measured in material things: in 1933 he wrote to a friend, ‘I have lavished money these last . . . months upon the cottage, adding a water-supply, a bath, a boiler, bookshelves, a bathing pool (a tiny one, but splashable into): all the luxuries of the earth. Also I have thrown out of it the bed, the cooking range: and ignored the lack of drains. Give me the luxuries and I will do without the essentials.’ It was quite small, this cottage: two rooms up and two down. Upstairs, the book room, was opened into one room completely lined with bookshelves. The downstairs became the music room. He was delighted by its austerity and self-sufficiency: ‘...books and gramophone records and tools for ever and ever. No food, no bed, no kitchen, no drains, no light or power. Just a two-roomed cottage and five acres of rhododendron scrub. Perfection, I fancy, of its sort.’ Perfection, but also a kind of punishment, but perhaps he had lived too much and needed something elemental out of life and house. It is curious, one’s house should not be one’s life, yet it inevitably is.

1 A 1929 500 ft 2 CPR worker’s house in Calgary next to the CPR mainline. There are dozens of these same houses in the neighbourhood: a gabled box with a covered porch on the front and steps to the ground at the back, 4’ foundation wall, chimney on the original back wall serving the back kitchen and the rest of the house. Mine was renovated in 1964 by Bruno and Maria, part of the 1960s exodus from Italy to Canada, who excavated a basement by hand, Bruno shovelling and Maria carrying the sandy silt out with buckets. They walled in the front porch, extending the front room and put in a picture window. They added a bedroom on the back. It became 865 ft 2 . They had five children. I bought this house in 1981 and spent the first year removing layers and layers of carpet, thick paint, v/a tiles, linoleum, wallpaper and flimsy drywall walls and closets, doors, the entire kitchen, plywood rooms in the basement, and went back to the foundation wall, the original floors, stripped old fir trim. It became very light . At their best, houses are eternally additive and reductive, they can be changed, and will be, something that rarely factors in the design of houses or housing today where the house is less of a skeleton in which to build a life, and more a financial commodity to be produced, bought and sold, a particularly first world twenty- first century luxury. With my sixty cents on the dollar career in architecture (my era not a particularly kind or equitable one for women) I did not aspire to build (expensive), but to remove (cheap). The startling economies of vernacular architecture taught me much. Not just economy of means, but how much can be done with hand tools, ordinary materials and years of time.

site: England: rural

site: Canada: medium city, old neigbourhood, near downtown.

1 https://telsociety.org.uk/about-lawrence/

16 on site review 45: houses + housing

https://divisare.com/projects/280780-elemental-alejandro-aravena-lo-espejo

3 Alejandro Aravena’s Elemental project. circa 2015. 2 This was a well-reported project at the time, in the mid-2010s. Housing cores: a half-house on the ground floor, a two-storey apartment above with an empty slot between the apartments meant to be built into, when time and money permits. A 70-unit housing project in Santa Catarina near Monterrey, Mexico, used government funding for the expensive part of any development: access, roads, sewer systems, busses and other infrastructural elements necessary for a community; and for house services — plumbing, wiring, stairs, foundations, party walls and roof. This is the first half. The second half is occupation and the eventual building out of the space between these cores. Similar Elemental projects have been built in Chile, with less money and for poorer people. It is a case of putting whatever funds are available where they are most useful, and leaving the rest to individuals who have some building skills and often innovative ways of occupying space, but not the wherewithal to build a strong structure, a kitchen and bathroom, or to connect them to utilities infrastructure. Formally-built social housing all over the world is a landscape of regimentation; in contrast, informal barrios and slums all over the world are landscapes of desperate invention. Elemental ’s model combines both: safe building standards and people’s participation in their own dwellings, which become an ongoing project. This is the basic idea, which I really like, but must admit I quail at a drone video of Villa Verde in Constitución, Chile, a company town built in partnership with COPEC, a Chilean Oil Company, showing an island of Elemental houses in a plantation sea of green forest, as harsh a contrast as any raw subdivision carved out of the woods.

https://www.rushdixon.com/rush-dixon-architects-blog/2020/2/3/place-matters-the- architecture-of-wg-clark

4 Croffread House, James Island South Carolina, by Clarke and Menefee, 1989 .3 A cube, in concrete, big windows. Looks like a SoHo loft from the 1970s, stacked and transported to the steamy, estuarine, hurricane-prone climate of the South Carolina coast. Which is the romance of it — not the climate, but its loft-like nature, where one is given large concrete spaces and industrial glazing and then left to get on with assigning places for various functions, which, in the end, comes down mostly to furniture. Less than a quarter of each floor plate is given a function and only because that is where the plumbing is stacked. This is a vault of a house, sitting like a Scarpa erratic in what I wish was a landscape something like Sea Island in Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust : immoveable, accruing moss and meaning over a very long time. Maybe it does, maybe not, but it is possible. The architecture makes it possible. The photograph is what tells me about possibility: I’ve not been there, I’m vaguely interested in W G Clarke, I see something in this image which is possibly not there but tells me something about how to live.

site: USA, expensive neighbourhood, lots of architect-designed houses, beachfront.

site: Chile, cleared sites for projects

3 https://www.rushdixon.com/rush-dixon-architects- blog/2020/2/3/place-matters-the-architecture-of-wg- clark

2 Elemental plans are open source. Download the working drawing packages for four Incremental Housing Types here: https://www.elementalchile.cl

As always when writing, the idea starts channelling other material, other ideas and notes, which may or may not be coherent. Reading Dan Hicks, an archaeologist who writes extensively on material culture quotes Susan Sontag, ‘Photographs are valued because they give information. They tell one what there is; they make an inventory. To spies, meteorologists, coroners, archaeologists, and other information professionls, their value is inestimable. But in the situations in which most people use photographs, their value as information is of the same order as fiction.’ 1 Hicks himself: ‘In Barthes’ terms, the ‘essence’ ( noeme ) of the archaeological photograph is not ‘what has been’ ( ça-a-été ), but ‘as if’ ( comme si ), not fixed on the remnant, but at once both scientific and imaginary.’ ...As if a photograph were not a still ...As if human life were a blur....As if archeology could be more than interpretive, and less than representation. As if the past were more than ruins.‘ 2 These are images, Croffead , Cloud’s Hill , Elemental and one lived house, another lens through which to see such houses. My mind sheds each image’s context, its socio-economic reality, climate, cost. They exist, for me, as photological images of architectural form, perhaps their most reductive presentation and more powerful for it. These are all basic houses, whether by design, tradition, relative poverty or some other minimalist desire. How much house do we actually need? Three things. New subdivision developer houses are absolutely complete, for ever; everything chosen and installed before going on the market, nothing to be done, which means the occupant need make no personal investment in the house or apartment other than money. The second thing, and this applies to Elemental , is the critical limit to which replication of an idea is effective. One half-house is an idea; 100 of them makes a homogenous community of after- market builders. Is this homogeneity desirable? Would 25 be better? or 10? Fifty years on, will clusters of 300 Elemental houses in varying states of augmentation be economic ghettos of an early twenty-first century idea of participation or will they be a rich tapestry of housing history? Zoning favours homogeneity over the heterogeneous mixing of classes, peoples, possibilities. Zoning is efficient for construction and services, but cuts off eccentricity, agency, difference. How does one plan and build for difference? Third, as long as bigger equals better, we will always have a housing crisis as small comes with massive stigma and the smallest market return. If capital accumulation is the goal, whether space or things, then staying still in a small dwelling isn’t progressive ; hardly worth it. 1 Susan Sontag, On photography , New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973 2 Dan Hicks, ‘Memory and the photological landscape.’ in S. De Nardi, H. Orange, S. High and E. Koskinen-Koivisto (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Memory and Place . New York: Routledge, 2020. pp. 254-260.

This is a still from a promotional video for Vila Verde, Chile. A company town, the forest appears to be a plantation, so uniform is it. The sharp demarcation between housing and plant life indicates something mat-like about both. This doesn’t appear to be an organic relationship between housing and environment, but a rather brutal collage of two distinct kinds of capital accumulation.

W G Clarke, a Habitat for Humanity multi-unit complex designed for a SECCA (Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art) competition in 2010. From an unattributed (possibly SECCA) Clarke quote on an archived blog: ‘His intention is to form a community (as opposed to a neighborhood) with different size options to accommodate different sized households and a variety of design choices available to the residents. A green structure, power would be supplied by photovoltaic strips on the roof, which is slanted so water runs off into a channel in the central courtyard to be collected into a reservoir. This water is used for irrigation of the communal vegetable beds that take the place of lawn. The structure seems to sum up what Clark is about: low impact, democratic and stripped down to the bare essentials. It is a triumph of graceful design.’

Google aerial of Inglewood, Calgary, with its main street cutting through from downtown to an industrial and transportation hinterland, ringed by railway lines and the Bow River. Originally a CPR neighbourhood, very diverse, four churches within two blocks of my house, including one for the CPR porters and their descendants. Strong community, resists erasure every couple of decades, now re-zoned to medium (12 storey) multi-family housing. Losses: access to the fertile floodplain soil which supports tree cover and gardens; access to sun at ground level; access to diverse peoples who are priced out of participation.

18 on site review 45: houses + housing

house: the one-off place in which one lives, full of your stuff, your status or lack of it, your address; as small as a room, as large as a palace. houses: collectively make a neighbourhood where standards are set and maintained through variable social pressure, from the most forgiving to the most restrictive. One’s autonomy bends a bit. housing: where the typology of house is subsumed in an arithmetic calculation of site, cost, zoning, market, product and precise demography. One’s security is dependent on all these factors. There is an axis, or a gradient, of freedom and self-actualisation here which is deeply embedded in history and place. The discussion that applies to Calgary or Houston, is not the discussion one has in Marseilles or Kharkiv. Nor is it the one taking place in Lagos or the abandoned new cities in China. What everyone across the world has, or wants to have, is secure tenure: their own place, no matter how it is found, or built, or paid for. This is the starting point. Beyond this it is all theory.

The photo-essay on the front and back covers of this issue of On Site review speaks to the longevity of housing, and the anonymity of any one unit in a housing project. It started with a postcard which has been on my wall for years, of L S Lowry’s small 1962 drawing of two housing terraces on a hill in Abertillery, Wales: smooth hills, the isolated crenellation of roofs and flat fronts. I looked up Abertillery to see if this line of houses still existed. It does, joined by other lines of houses, which turn out to be streets built in fields as if they were in a town. These are typical nineteenth century Welsh mining towns, either coal or tin — company towns. The joined-up repetition of a basic house unit is a synecdoche for the miners and their families. All different, but also all the same to the company. A street view of one of the Abertillery roads shows how literally it terraces the hillside. There are shops, there is a bus stop, no doubt a pub; each street a small community. Lisa Rapoport concludes her essay on page 8 with this: ‘You buy a house, you make a home.’ We could also say, you build a house, someone else makes a home out of it, followed by someone else making a different home, and on and on. If we were designing with this long horizon in mind, our houses would be much simpler, more reductive, more open to change. At the same time if we are looking for aesthetic solutions with the political clarity modernity demands, we are in danger of overlooking the richness of messy everything, everywhere, all at once-ness that finds houses and housing everywhere, anywhere. In an unregulated space there is opportunity for many, many ways of living: new social relationships, new material and architectural formations.

STEPHANIE WHITE , editor of On Site review , practiced architecture, studied the influence of literary theory on architecture, taught many, many architectural design studios, and did a PhD in urban geography. Quelle vie .

the human right to housing

process obstacles agency

GRAEME BRISTOL

housing is a right Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights identifies access to medical care, education and housing as rights. In Canada, we can thank the persistence of Tommy Douglas for our ongoing access to universal health care. We are sorely in need of another Tommy to push us towards acting on the right to housing. It’s not only the right to housing, though, that needs attention. There is an ongoing crisis – one that requires more than talk. In 1987 United Nations held the International Year of Shelter for the Homeless. Nearly 40 years later we still can’t define ‘affordability’ much less build it. Politicians, planners and architects keep talking as the bottom falls out and the citizenry responds with tent cities which are almost daily torn down by authorities. As a now-retired architect, I have been thinking and researching this ongoing crisis in housing since my glazed student eyes were opened when the world came to Vancouver in 1976 for the first United Nations-Habitat conference. 1 After returning to Canada from a long career abroad, I became involved in a response to the housing crisis in British Columbia. It is a story that begins in hope. microhousing, perhaps In Victoria, BC, nearly a decade ago, newly elected mayor Lisa Helps addressed the growing crisis in housing in a series of workshops on microhousing — groupings of stand-alone houses, each 300 ft 2 or less. She brought in an architect from Portland and a housing activist from Eugene, Oregon who were having some success in building microhousing communities, and who followed the principle that the right to housing should first be directed towards people who were well outside the housing market ( hint : if we continue to think of housing as a ‘market’ we will fail to understand it as a right). After a week of workshops and seminars, local activists and supporters organised to see if microhousing should be implemented locally. Guided by the principle of ‘nothing about us, without us’, meetings were held at Our Place in Victoria, a community centre and shelter for the homeless. At least half of the participants were people who had been or were currently homeless, many of whom were using Our Place as shelter. A steering committee collected and exchanged information about the common search for access to land, financing, basic requirements for units and for the community (design parameters), criteria for membership in the community and other such vital factors. It met once a month, subcommittees met bi-weekly, reporting their progress to the steering committee. Microhousing Victoria was registered as a BC non-profit, a legal entity that could open a bank account. Seed money was provided by the City to help pay for the ongoing expenses of the committees.

To garner support from potential funders, providers of access to land, the planning and building departments and City Council, the steering committee needed something to show. An architect was hired to provide presentation material; out of that came sketches, PowerPoint presentations, renderings and provisional costs. In the meantime no actual housing was built. The committee had, though, developed design criteria for housing which were little different from that for any tenant or homeowner – close to services, access to nature, privacy. There was little on their list that would differentiate these residents from any other citizen. Two key issues that did stand out were harm reduction and autonomy. Harm reduction in drug use is critically connected to decriminalisation and direct access to relevant services. Autonomy is something a typical homeowner assumes – variations of ‘my home is my castle’. However, this is not an assumption that can be made by the homeless and those living day to day in shelters or in tent cities. Having a place of one’s own is an undelivered and deeply desired dream which must be recognised. From the listed criteria, preliminary designs were prepared, reviewed and amended by the people who planned to live in them. Microhousing Victoria had provisional approvals from the building department, the fire department, the planning department, and the majority of City Council. However we had no land on which to build. We talked about parking lots, land left vacant awaiting development, unused city land, church land. While the search for land continued, one of the steering committee members, Peter Gould, borrowed the use of a workshop and built a prototype on his own with scrap materials and his own money. It was a successful temporary mobile shelter, no bigger than a shopping cart that unfolded to provide the length of a bed; lockable so it was possible to store some belongings and small enough and light enough to be pulled or attached to a bicycle.

Peter Gould’s self- contained mobile sleeping unit.

1 ‘Participation is a right’ was recognised in the Vancouver Declaration at the first UN Habitat conference in 1976.

Graeme Bristol

20 on site review 45: houses + housing

Peter’s prototype of temporary and extreme microhousing was a hit on the local news. Here was the homeless addressing the crisis in their community by building something themselves while the planners, politicians, and experts talked – something of an instructive parable of the housing crisis writ large. What are slums, after all, but the efforts of the poor to stake a place in the city, a leverage point for opportunity. Peter had addressed an alternative access to shelter built with what little he had. He gave it to a woman he knew who had been evicted from shelter space because she was disruptive as a result of ongoing mental issues. She found a place to put it where she felt at least a little bit safe. Of course, one of the problems with her use of the mini-microhouse was that she was now isolated from the community. In part, she wanted to be away, but it was hardly safe behind a bush in a park. Around this time, the city offered a piece of land for a prototype cluster of microhouses. The steering committee felt confident that a door was finally opening, the first of many to come. However, there was a little hitch. As the site was used for tenant parking for an adjacent house, if Microhousing Victoria used the site, the tenants would have to use street parking which only allowed hourly parking, not overnight, which meant the bylaw for that particular area would have to change – a change that would have to go through the processes of City Hall with final approval from Council. The other hurdle was the proposed lease between the City of Victoria and Microhousing Victoria. Lawyers for the City were concerned that Microhousing Victoria had no history of managing housing for the homeless. They could only agree to the lease if it partnered with a local organisation having a trustworthy record of such management. One of their sticking points was that irate neighbours would call the City at four in the morning to deal with these prospectively unruly neighbours. As noisy neighbours and disputes are part of life in any neighbourhood, rich or poor, why should these tenants be treated any differently? Nevertheless, liability is an issue for any landowner, in this case the City itself. In their attempt to meet these requirements, Microhousing Victoria approached several local organisations with whom to partner. These pointed out that they already had their hands full and were only funded for their current responsibilities. Microhousing Victoria would have to find additional funding to be able to pay staff to undertake such management – management the steering committee wanted to avoid or at least minimise, considering the importance the committee membership placed on self-management. These were obstacles Microhousing Victoria was unable to overcome. The Steering Committee dwindled to an ‘executive committee’. The only productive result was Peter’s mini- microhouse, self-financed, self-built and entirely outside the system. And yet, the ‘system’, the City Council, the Mayor, the planning department and the building department were entirely supportive of microhousing. It was an initiative promoted by the mayor: everyone was behind it. Volunteer construction workers, architects and social workers were on the steering committee as technical support to a broader community of people seeking homes in the city. With all that support, how could it fail?

If there is a hero in this story, it is Peter who designed, financed and built a tiny shelter for one person, while the experts listened and talked and planned. This is not to say that planning for the execution of a larger idea of housing is pointless. It isn’t. But there must be clear steps forward, action to make the words, the planning, mean something in the world. Can there be a crisis without an immediate response? There were lessons learned. Eventually the City took some of the ideas coming out of the steering committee and built temporary housing in the Royal Athletic Park in Victoria. The many months of talk resulted in something that was built, but not by Microhousing Victoria. A City project managed by Our Place opened in 2021 as temporary housing, closing in the fall of 2023 when the residents of ‘Tiny Town’ moved into permanent housing. It reopened in the spring of 2024 — a notable success that in the continuum of housing, this is a viable and needed form of transitional housing. A few other lessons run deeper. Direct action is not just an anarchist slogan. Direct action is critical to solidarity. Solidarity is bound by a vision which must be visible. Visibility is created through direct action in and by the community. Peter’s effort was visible. It was on the local news; it was a morale booster for us and for the community. However, Microhousing Victoria was not able to build on Peter’s first step. Another underlying issue is that this is all temporary housing. Land was sought that could be used on an interim basis. Everyone knew, even from the design parameters, that this housing would relocate. In the back of everyone’s mind was the threat of yet another eviction. Although more permanent and more like a house than a tent, it was still temporary and at the whim of the development sector and their economic imperatives. It doesn’t much matter if it’s the police telling you to ‘Move along’ or if it’s urban land economics saying the same: You don’t belong here. There is a higher and better economic use for this piece of land. In due course you will need to be out of sight, out of mind, out of the market, and out of our policy initiatives. Samuel Beckett said: ‘No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’ I thought this nihilistic when I first read it, now I find some resonance. We learn with each failure and each of those failures helps to move us forward and solidarity can grow. There is a vision statement in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its first article: ‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.’ This crisis is about dignity and solidarity. There must be an embracing architecture of belonging, of hope, not quite achieved by a tent. coda A few weeks after the photograph of Peter with his prototype was taken, the little blue mini-microhouse was stolen and never seen again. o

GRAEME BRISTOL is the founder of the Centre for Architecture and Human Rights https://architecture-humanrights.org . He practiced architecture in Vancouver and Papua New Guinea after which he taught architecture in Bangkok.

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