3A STUDIO / Towards an Architecture of Relation: Designing the Sherbourne Corridor Land Trust/Part 2/2

By: Melody Chen, Nicole Chen & Riling Chen

Foreword by Adrian Blackwell

Studio faculty: Adrian Blackwell, Sandrina Kramar, Marie-Paule Macdonald, Dereck Revington, Jonathan Tyrrell

Teaching assistants: Devin Arndt, Nicole Rak.

one s relationship to the land is spiritual there has to be respect for all of creation understanding that everything is animate you re talking about the rocks (grandfathers) you’re talking about the trees you re talking about the water the air in western thinking they make a distinction between animate and inanimate if inanimate objects exist they are there for the taking nobody owns them and to me this has led to the destruction of land to water to resources but there needs to be respect for everything

luugigyoo patrick stewart, “refusing the colonial grammar of c\a\n\a\d\a”
Scapegoat: Architecture/Landscape/Political Economy, Issue 12, forthcoming 2020

…when we encounter an external body that does not agree with our own (i.e. Whose relation does not enter into composition with ours), it is as if the power of that body opposed our power, bringing about a subtraction or a fixation. When this occurs, it may be said that our power of acting is diminished or blocked. In a contrary case, when we encounter a body that agrees with our nature, one whose relation compounds with ours, we say that its power is added to ours, the passions that affect us are those of joy, and our power of acting is increased and enhanced.

Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 1970.

Waterloo’s third-year winter studio has always been an opportunity to explore the relationship between architecture and the city. The 2020 studio—“Our House is on Fire”— focuses on the intersection between two contemporary crises: the climate emergency and Toronto’s housing emergency. The challenge of the studio was to design a series of deeply affordable apartment buildings on City-owned and currently vacant sites along Sherbourne Street in the center of Toronto’s Downtown East. Each building was required to integrate complementary public programs at grade that would provide a network of support for low-income residents and form a single community land trust that would secure their affordability in the future.

The work shown here is divided into two parts, the first dealing with material relations, and the second dealing with social relations. Each project grapples with the problems of both biophysical and interpersonal relationality.For the full project description, please refer to the first article of the series, 3A STUDIO / Towards an Architecture of Relation: Designing the Sherbourne Corridor Land Trust.

Part 2: Social Relations

“Our House is on Fire” proposes housing as a right. This right is not simply a requirement for the support of bare life. It requires three qualities: generosity, flexibility and sovereignty. As architects Lacaton and Vassal show in their recent apartment building renovations, housing needs to provide a surplus of space. These examples also illustrate how having agency over one’s own home can reduce residential alienation. Additionally, residents need to feel control and security in their space. Although private ownership is one way to accomplish this, high mortgages lock residents into long-term debt. By contrast, collective ownership is more secure because it provides mutual benefits and responsibilities. Any apartment building needs to address these qualities at three different scales: the broader neighbourhood, the public and common spaces on the site, and the private units within it.

The following projects each explore a different scale of social relation. Garrett McGill and Franklin Min address the concept of propinquity at the scale of the neighbourhood, learning from local experiments of “infill” architecture. Garrett sutures the broken street façade with a light and flexible curtain wall and pushes the building’s mass back from the street. Franklin extends the lessons of Diamond and Myer’s Sherbourne Lanes, by designing a pair of low-rise L-shaped buildings that form courtyards with the existing houses. Melody Chen and Cassandra Lesage each create powerful common rooms within their projects. Melody designs a light-filled multi-height corridor and porch space as both access and social condenser. Cassandra uses subtle changes in level to create common rooms that bridge interior and exterior. Anna Supryka and Maddy Kim find novel ways of making kin within the unit itself, pushing and pulling on the nuclear family to form new domestic constellations. Anna creates an urbanism of micro-units that define spaces shared by a cluster of families. Maddy makes use of the enfilade as an architectural type without corridors to remove the hierarchy between rooms, creating flexible arrangements that challenge users to make their own space.

Propinquity

On Route, Garrett McGill

Propinquity first refers to physical closeness between people, but it can be extended to a social distance, the likelihood of coming into contact with others: a functional distance. Design can foster more interactions between people — by designing for exposure and frequency — creating a greater likelihood for connections and friendship to occur in a space, a phenomenon supported by social psychology. Therefore, propinquity is an attribute that can be designed. Architects and urban planners have a unique professional occupation which enables influence of social behaviors of building users through the planning of spatial elements and programs in and around buildings. On Route serves the immediate needs of those experiencing hardship, without relocation. An overnight emergency shelter for elderly men is combined with health and counselling services, community food center, barber and laundromat.

The two existing heritage homes are restored and integrated into the ground floor to maintain the human scale of Sherbourne. The food pavilion to the south and the health pavilion to the north each have a direct entrance from the street to allow visitors to access services they need discreetly. A double height central lounge and laundry mat encourages a lively hub for the community.

In the mid-rise tower to the West of the site, the typical floor-plate utilizes a single loaded corridor, which surrounds a central winter garden. This looks onto a six story suns-pace – an integral condition to the climatic strategies of the building.

*At the south, greenhouses allow for onsite food production. A rooftop terrace provides a quiet destination for those who wish to take leave of their sleeping room.*

Community First, Franklin Min

This project plays on multiple levels of proximity. From afar, the urban infill approach respects the existing context and aims to naturally integrate into the neighbourhood fabric. The balanced play of addition and subtraction between architectural masses understands the history of the site and aims to create a kinship between the old and new. Up close, the space focuses on the proximity and availability of social services inspired by the housing first approach. The design encourages and provides opportunity for social gathering and therapy on a voluntary basis that feels welcoming.

Working on a site with an existing community, efficiency in construction and minimizing displacement is key as demonstrated by the shortcomings of Regent Park. This informed the material selection, which consists of prefabricated and modular pieces. The three main materials are precast concrete, prefabricated CLT, and a layer of polycarbonate skin.

Situated along an existing housing project, Sherbourne lanes, this proposal carries over the ethos and sensibility developed from the preceding projects. The unique context of the existing architecture, that of the Victorian houses and Sherbourne Lanes, was a driving factor towards maintaining as much existing context as possible.

*This connection between different spaces is a generous hallway serving as a sun space, with large, south-facing windows and ample room for flexible community activities.*

Common Rooms

Home is in the Spaces You Live In, Cassandra Lesage

Common spaces can facilitate community and interaction, becoming vibrant and dynamic places. Through a series of common spaces, each of varying scales and levels of privacy, this project creates gradients of social life and interaction between the residents. Hallways are enlarged to create occupiable space that acts as a porch for each unit. Residents also have access to terraces that are public, semi public, and private.

The street front is dotted with wall openings, allowing furniture to straddle the sidewalk and interact with passerbys. The space is a link to the library and inner courtyard and is used to host flexible events or pop-up programs.

The sunken courtyard straddles both interior and exterior, connecting the spaces to create an open reading/multi purpose area. Due to its connection with the outside, this space is simultaneously inviting and private.

The first two floors house a community center which is linked to the courtyard and second building. On the north side of the site there are three-storey, townhouse style residential units. A shared pedestrian/vehicular lane opens into the interior courtyard, allowing access to the courtyard facing entrances. A corner cafe brings commercial life to the site.

Affordable Housing for Family Living, Melody Chen

High-density social housing in Toronto has been commonly described as undesirable and isolating. In order to combat these issues, vertical social spaces and increased personal agency were important to the design. This project is made up of a series of different masses that frame an open courtyard within a protected community.

*The nature of the central courtyard is to bring together the different buildings on the site through its uses: backyard for the townhouse, schoolyard for daycare, and front lawn for towers.*

Each tower includes a shared corridor which runs up the entire length that acts as a vertical social space. The configuration of the floor plates includes cutouts to create relationships between the different floors, giving the residents a chance to know their neighbours and creating a sense of community within the building. These winter gardens also provide porch and patio-like conditions for each unit that residents have agency over. The ability to personalize their units provides families with an increased sense of home.

*The winter garden becomes both a social area and circulation passage. The configurations of the floor plates allow for different types of interactions to occur in the space.*

Making Kin

Room to Grow, Anna Supryka

To many of us, family is everything. Whether you define family as your parents, cousins, friends, or mentors, these are the people we rely on and grow with. Designed for women and their children experiencing homelessness, this co-operative housing complex prioritizes opportunities to build these familial support networks.

Each apartment houses up to nine related or unrelated residents. Flexible private bedrooms accommodate a variety of existing relationships, while communal kitchen and living spaces support opportunities to grow as a collective. Facilities on site supports ties within the greater Sherbourne Street area, inviting connections through cooking, fitness, and play.

Through developing shared communal spaces (including kitchens, dining areas, and living rooms) cross-ventilation can be employed in every apartment unit. The bedroom areas behave as sub-units, which also have access to exterior and interior windows for ventilation.

The majority of the existing on-site buildings were maintained to preserve the historic face of Sherbourne Street and mitigate the negative climatic impacts of demolishing and rebuilding. Two new residential buildings were added to the site, stepped to face the street, creating an interstitial garden space between them.

Loving Neutrality, Maddy Kim

Robert and Alison Smithson wrote on “loving neutrality”, a phrase characterizing a neutral space as an inclusive space: a space for anything and for anyone. Through the creation of socially and energetically open, flexible spaces, the project provides cooperative housing for families on the Sherbourne Corridor.

Drawing precedent from the work of MAIO Architects, the unit is a fluid, flexible space: a series of rooms tessellating around a central strip of kitchens and bathrooms. As rooms are added or subtracted, the unit may grow or shrink to accommodate families of varying sizes. This layout challenges the rigid, hierarchical structure of the typical household and is capable of adapting to its residents’ evolving needs.