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Paul Raff and David Warne Strachan House (Street City)

Strachan House is a community of 60 chronically homeless persons in a renovated factory. A recent governor General’s Award in architec- ture cited its innovative approach to public spaces that support healthy collective life, offering both private enclaves and shared spaces. The architectural design of Strachan House, by Levitt Goodman Architects, is organised around an interior street, to encourage safe and vital social interaction. The street itself has been designed and constructed as a commissioned art work. It follows the architect’s analogy to a typical street, but extends it to explore poetic and metaphorical potentials. A city street differentiates itself from a concrete corridor by its texture, signs of previous life and its imperfections with its cracks, puddles and slopes. When experienced from a child’s imaginative perspective, the streetscape is indeed a vast terrain: a microcosmic landscape. The result is an organic formal field: a groundscape in which every moment is unique. Unlike a traditional floor pattern, it is not predictable, but rather is open to imagination. Like a complex puzzle of intercon- nected, interdependent pieces that form a whole, it is a metaphor for this social collective of truly individual characters.

Filiz Klassen shares her ideas with interior design students at Ryerson University and is an independent curator. Her research is in urban issues that involve transformability and sustainability in a hybrid practice of fashion, interiors, architecture and graphics.

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