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