reconceptualising urban housing af terword There has been much press notice about Reconceptualising Urban Housing , usually focussing on the diversity, the geographic reach and the gender of the participants. No doubt one could find nine male architects doing sensitive work, but the framing would be different: not about gender, but about that which draws together nine much-awarded, critically-favoured architects at the top of their game engaged in radically re-thinking housing that solves both its shortage and its ability to empower its residents. My ruthless weeding of the statements describing their ambitions that each architect has written for Reconceptualising Urban Housing has taken out all the worthy generalities that everyone shares – building community, being sustainable. Instead, I’ve picked out the phrases and sentences that seem to be instructive examples of provocative lateral thinking. There are very particular ways that these designers, all women, approach urban housing so that it is instrumental, progressive, full of agency. Each project is a thesis, even a manifesto, on how to proceed for a better, inclusive future. There is a shared language in this exhibition, and the sense that there are shared goals. Like-mindedness formed groups such as CIAM, the Situationists, or Team 10; the act of grouping like-minded artists and architects is not new. What is new is the claiming of attention and space by women who are saying that they, as women, collectively have something specific to say. If I count my career in architecture from my first year in an architecture school, I have seen 55 years of women in architecture, how they work, how they are presented, what they bring to the table whether acknowledged or not. Athough architects all have the same training, what women were allowed to do was different from what they wanted to do and what they could do. In Reconceptualising Urban Housing , certain words, phrases and qualities keep occuring: heterogeneity, diversity, open access, agency, community and safety. Sustainability of materials, systems, community and use. Surveillance not as police presence but as eyes on the street; privacy when desired. Housing plus the incorporation of retail, shared spaces, gardens, daylight, breezes, shade, trees, neighbours, families that grow and shrink, lives that are in flux; these things are the givens, the non-negotiables in reconceptualising urban housing. These are the things that must be made to fit into budget, site and density calculations, not just blown away as idealistic in the early stages of a project. And the nine architects and 18 projects of Reconceptualising Urban Housing , almost all either built or in progress, demonstrate possible ways to do this.
1. Context is treated as if it is full of clues, rather than as a set of tight rules. An urban building plot is literally a palimpsest of its history; one is free to select aspects, as has Alison Brooks in Unity Place , but not to throw them away entirely: they can be used to advantage. Other geometries, other materials can be used, street walls do not need to be walls, they can be zones. Fernanda Canales uses the fact of abandoned buildings within existing neighbourhoods as an existential context. Context is used where it supports the goal of identity and commonality. 2. Landscape is not generic green space, but appears as gardens – which need tending, and which are seamless parts of shared neighbourly access points: an entry, either to a building or to a unit is not just a hallway to the elevator but rather a porch on the street: semi-private, semi-communal. At ground level, gardens are parks and playgrounds: meeting points, not simply visual green. 3. Materials are often linked to labour and industry: local materials whether the rammed earth of Manuelle Gautraud’s Folie Mauguerra or Eleena Jamil’s use of bamboo as a structural material, or Adengo’s proposal to set up a compressed brick industry that supports her affordable housing — these link the means of production to a very local set of conditions. 4. The number of assemblages of buildings is striking, site- dependent but with an eye to staged development: Mecanoo, Dubbeldam, Canales, Adengo all show projects where the dwelling units are not subsumed in a comprehensive envelope, but rather assemble themselves according to rates of construction, specificities of site condition, to program elements beyond the dwelling units that contain supplemental public uses. The glue that holds a community together is given physical identity. 5. Ambiguous boundaries, stated explicitly in Meyer-Grobruegge’s Kurfürstenstrasse , abound in all this work, and this includes the central condition of house as refuge and housing as community: one enters a project through a public part of the city: a sidewalk, a road, a civic plaza. Then one passes through a part of the project that might be retail, might be services, might be park. Then one enters a circulation system of stairwells, elevators and walkways that is public to the project, private to the outside world. Then many of these projects use porches and decks as communication devices, literally in shared entries, as in Dubbeldam’s Incremental Density , or visually as with Studio Gang’s angled balconies on City Hyde Park . Again, this ambiguity is given unambiguous form. There is a sense of some rather marvellous collective here, developing a vocabulary, a syntax and a direction while showing it isn’t just theoretical — almost all of these projects are built or in construction. Progressive, in a lateral way. o
STEPHANIE WHITE is editor of On Site review. www.onsitereview.ca
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