What about architecture in North America – its history, policies, but also building codes – makes it particularly vulnerable to the global housing crisis? And how can those inherent flaws be counteracted with purposeful residential design and a more inclusive approach to the architecture discipline?
In a presentation at World Architecture Festival 2023 under the programme theme ‘Catalyst’, Johanna Hurme and Sasa Radulovic, Co-Founders of Winnipeg-based 5468796 Architecture, showcased how these and other questions are key to their building style and also addressed in their forthcoming book platform.MIDDLE: Architecture for Housing the 99%.
Residential retreat and comfort are central to the firm’s design ethos, as seen in their category-winning entry Veil House project, along with an effort to make architectural practice more holistic and collaborative across generations. The ArchDaily team had a chance to sit down with Hurme to speak about how she hopes to achieve this and why issues of rapid urbanization, profit-making, and our accelerating environmental emergency call for a type of city building that is more socially and economically sustainable.
Related Article
Design for Density: Housing in India as Social Infrastructure
What about North America makes it particularly vulnerable to the current housing crisis?
I think the main issue in North America is that we let the private sector drive all things related to housing, and increasingly so. In Canada, only 3.5 % of the total housing stock is social or public housing and in the United States, that number is even less, 0.7 %. This is a big difference to our counterparts in Northern Europe where comparative numbers are 30% and up. But we don’t have to look elsewhere to find better models. In Canada, for example, in the early 70s, 20% of the total housing stock production was public housing. And then de-regulation and taxation changes essentially ended the development of large-scale purpose-built public housing projects. Without a strategy to channel more housing units into the hands of publicly-led or nonprofit organizations, we are not going to solve the current housing affordability crisis. Certainly in Canada, directing public funds in the hands of the profit-driven private sector has not produced the desired result over the past fifty years.
In Winnipeg, about a quarter of the people fall outside of the affordability criteria that the current federal incentive programs are set up to address. Not only that, but private developers receive funds to build housing units, but they only have to provide the units at the so-called affordable rental rate for a limited time – ten years – at which point the rent returns to market rate. There's something fundamentally and systemically wrong with that.
At the same time, the things that guide architectural form-making are also pretty limiting. Both the US and Canada have a dual exit requirement for all multifamily housing above 2 and 3 stories in our building codes, which generally results in double-loaded corridor designs that prevent dual aspect units from occurring and therefore natural ventilation and better access to light. We also don't really have any public policy that would require quality. Compared to, for example, Sydney, Australia, where they have a Flat Design Code that requires a certain amount of sunlight to reach the back of the unit.
North American multifamily housing is mostly driven by the private sector. What that often results in is really fat floor plates to maximize efficiency and to reduce unsellable, non-rentable square footage in a building at the cost of quality for the end user. Together with the requirement for two fire exits and lack of public policies architects are stuck trying to to create good architecture out of the very limiting parameters.
It's no wonder that multi-family housing isn't the typology that the majority of the people in North America want to live in. But there are reasons for this beyond just the regulations – I think we just don't understand collective outdoor space. We don't value what the collective can give to families, individuals, and seniors as a place to play and connect with one’s immediate community. Having grown up in an apartment setting in Europe, where our collective yard consisted of sandboxes, swing sets, play courts, seating, and BBQ for all the surrounding residents to use and identify with, I have begun to believe that it is the quality collective spaces between buildings that would enable better adoption of multi-family housing scenarios in North America. And when you think about the environment, when you think about embodied energy, when you think about all the related factors, we'd be so much better off housing a bigger proportion of our population in condo and apartment settings with shared amenities.
I also think that oftentimes architecture schools don't deal with costs, financial pro formas, regulatory realities, or the expectations of developer clients. Students aren't prepared when they come out of school to know that these are the factors they have to battle – to know it's an 85% efficiency that they have to hit. Having said that I also think that it is the responsibility of the design profession to provide value to our client – and indirectly to the end user – that’s not necessarily about square footage. And show other possibilities for meeting financial targets.
What are some of the measures that you have come up with to tackle these issues? Is there a particular toolkit that you'd recommend to architects and designers?
It’s not that we are necessarily promoting any design in particular, but we wanted to share what we have learned from the projects that we've done in the past sixteen years in the book. It’s all about finding ways to carve a little bit more room to invest in quality of the projects. To try and answer the question of what can we do to improve the efficiency of a building plate so that we can allocate that money elsewhere.
The architectural Micro book contains a set of strategies that work within the given regulatory framework we have to operate in. What can we do to make the architectural outcomes better? There are various categories within the book with typical issues and conditions one encounters in the design of multi-family housing and responses we hope may be useful to others in our profession, colleagues just entering housing design, or the younger generation coming out of universities and wanting to innovate within the typology. We hope that they don't have to try to search and absorb the broader issues for years, or go through trial and error for decades, but rather, could get a bit of a head start. That's what we're hoping to do with the book. Earnestly try to share knowledge so that others can use it positively.
Can you identify some of these tactics in one of your built projects?
If we take a look at 62M Apartments, a project that's just gaining occupancy now in Winnipeg, it has things like exterior passageways, which in a cold climate is often frowned upon. But with COVID, we realized that people are more comfortable being in an outdoor space when they're in public. It's a place where you have a visual and audial connection to the street and still have a sort of communal space and relationship to the activities on the ground.
It also deploys skip-stop corridors, which allow us to improve the overall efficiency of the project. And the exterior passageway does the same. So we're not building indoor space that the owner cannot rent or sell. That affects the bottom line, and then we have more money within the budget to invest in architecture. Also, because of the exterior and passageways, we have several through-units – meaning that you have windows on both sides of the suite. Again, this is very atypical for the North American context, but it offers far superior ventilation and access to light. In addition, we're using nail-laminated-timber to span across the width of each unit, which is only a six to eight-inch depth, quite a bit less than a typical floor assembly would be. We think the exposed wood ceilings humanize the interior, while at the same time optimizing the structure, reducing building height, and hence the amount of the required exterior envelope. There's all these layers of learning in there that make the project more feasible, but also then make it better for the residents.
Can you elaborate on the idea of an architectural practice ecosystem introduced in your book?
The practice ecosystem is an idea where we look at architecture practice holistically so that it isn't just about the commissioned work, but also about all of the things that we consider our responsibility for the community. It includes self-initiated work that we just take on ourselves to try to improve architecture culture within our city and within our context and country. All of that has an impact on the kind of work and culture that we can create locally and the way that we can promote the value of architecture and design to others and reach out to communities that wouldn't otherwise get in touch with the discipline at all.
What also falls under our definition of practice ecosystem is things like running a smart business. That’s nothing to be ashamed of. We typically think that if you're business-minded, you somehow diminish the art of architecture. But, by doing that, we can afford to do the extracurricular initiatives and provide better opportunities for the people who work with us. We are able to expand their quality of life in a way. Things like getting involved in politics also count – I think that an architect’s traditional lane is pretty limiting and what we can do and what we can affect is hindered by us staying in that lane. So it's really important to get involved in politics, policy-making, and the business community, or anywhere where important decisions are being made – just generally being involved in a broader spectrum of influence than architects traditionally are.
What are you hoping to achieve by putting these ideas out into the world?
We hope to continue learning and share our findings with the student community, young practitioners or anyone first entering into housing design by providing examples of how one might carve more room for architecture in their own projects. But at the same time, it is a call to action for all of us to try to affect the things that are not in that architectural micro-book, but in the macro-book in a positive way and in service of quality – policy, regulation, and finance.
Perhaps you've been getting involved in politics or in your local chamber of commerce, or an architectural body of some sort that can lobby governments and decision-makers to do better. We believe that an architect's role is a strategist more than a designer. The act of practicing architecture is a strategic act. We think that the architectural profession has a lot to offer, and to have more impact, we can do better than just sketching design solutions in the corner.
