housing | adaptability by caroline howes
rehabilitation apartments diversity
threshold flexibility
Urban Resilience Maynard Lake
Traditionally, capitalism has viewed development as a progressive path — an idea that is crumbling as we realise that our resources are finite and rapidly diminishing. Post-development theory provides an alternative to the linear idea of development. In this paradigm, change is cyclical and regenerative, not singular and abrupt. There is no tabula rasa . ‘Ethical’ design, gaining momentum, encompasses ideas of re-use and adaptability, diversity and resilience.
All buildings hold the potential for adaptation. Additions and renovations are particularly common in residential architecture. The three-storey brick walk-up apartment is a prevalent residential type across Canada, and many of these buildings are in need of rehabilitation, having been built in the mid-twentieth century. The Lakefront Apartments were built for the Canadian Forces in the 1950s: brick, double-loaded corridor apartment blocks. They occupy almost half the shore of Maynard Lake in Darthmouth, across the harbour from Halifax. The buildings are in need of repair both in their physical performance and in their spatial configurations. The original military families have been replaced by civilians living very different lives. The repetitive, monotonous quality of space in and around the apartments arises from a stark opposition of solid and void. There is an abrupt threshold from interior to exterior; interior spaces are strictly delineated, while the wide-open exterior spaces are blank and undefined. Thresholds become the focal points for the design process because they are the points where different publics meet. My working method is based on the idea of different systems operating at different scales. I studied the site at four scales: individual rental unit, apartment building, group of buildings, and the whole site. After studying the demographics of the existing tenants and the local amenities, I chose four main tenant types as my clients. Through strategic additions and subtractions, the apartments were adapted to create a gradient of spaces: from private to communal to public. I re-imagined the site as an urban threshold to the lake, organised around new communal amenity spaces for the inhabitants and new diverse mixed-use spaces for the public. At the heart of the project lay the design strategy of effecting big change in the quality of existing space through small interventions.
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