Canadian architects bring campaign to address housing crisis from the street to world stage
Pavilion at renowned Venice Architecture Biennale revamped to highlight 10 demands
The Canadian exhibit at this year's Venice Architecture Biennale in Italy, the most prestigious architecture showcase in the world, opened like many others have just outside Canada's teepee-inspired wood and glass pavilion on the Venetian Lagoon: speeches, thank yous, an Indigenous land acknowledgement and applause.
Then the six architects behind the Not for Sale! show took the stage on Friday, at the six-month-long event's inauguration, and made the real purpose of the exhibit loud and clear.
"We demand land back!" shouted Adrian Blackwell, an associate professor at the University of Waterloo's School of Architecture in Waterloo, Ont., launching a call and response from the crowd for the 10 housing demands at the core of their show.
They include designing and building in situ First Nations housing with community involvement; intentional communities for homeless people; collective ownership; mutual aid housing; ambient urban ecosystems; and "reparative architecture" for Black residents of Toronto's Little Jamaica, who say they have been racially displaced from their own neighhourhood.
The collective behind the exhibit calls itself Architects Against Housing Alienation (AAHA). It includes architects Adrian Blackwell, David Fortin, Matthew Soules, Sara Stevens, Patrick Stewart and Tijana Vujosevic, as well as dozens of housing activists, experts and students from across the country.
Selected by the Canada Council for the Arts to address one of the most urgent issues of our times, the group has created less an exhibit and more a political, social and creative campaign. Its goal? To challenge the dominant present-day paradigm of housing as a financial commodity.
"We thought very early on that in a generous, optimistic way, kind of misuse all of the generous funding that comes with this opportunity [to show at the Biennale]," said Soules, who helped launch the project. "To do something meaningful back in Canada, as opposed to directing all of that money to the specifics of the Venice Biennale."
Gentrification tax among demands
To that end, the collective has transformed the Canadian pavilion in the Venice Giardini into a campaign headquarters.
Hanging from the walls of the semi-circular building are huge banners with housing-reform slogans and easy-to-understand diagrams of proposed solutions. All of the ideas and materials are the fruit of months of meetings and Zoom calls among the architects and local housing activists and advocates.
One involves the fully insulated, fireproof cabins designed by Toronto carpenter Khaleel Seivwright, called Toronto Tiny Shelters. The one-person dwellings provide an alternative to tents or the shelter system for homeless people before they're able to access permanent housing.
In Toronto, about 100 cabins were built and housed people during the COVID-19 pandemic, while a cluster of 50 were situated on an empty plot provided free by a landowner in Kitchener, Ont. Now, a Toronto collective is working on a design for a cluster of 25 cabins that could go on empty parking lots — and with the help of architects, designing bathrooms and a kitchen that the residents can share.
Another demand is a gentrification tax to reduce the profit people make off housing, often as lucky bystanders — when, for instance, a new subway or LRT line goes into their neighbourhood or hard-working restaurateurs create a buzz — and investing it back into the creation of local affordable housing.
"One of the requirements we wanted for each team was that the project had to be achievable," said Patrick Stewart (Luugigyoo), a member of the Killerwhale House of Daaxan of the Nisga'a Nation and Indigenous architect trailblazer who is working on the Land Back demand. "If it was too pie in the sky, we didn't want to talk about it."
The first demand of the collective, Land Back! includes the goal of redesignating 95 per cent of what is now Crown land to Indigenous. While that degree of decolonization may indeed seem pie in the sky, Stewart said, smaller, but life-improving, steps are still doable.
One demand focuses on the real property surplus of federal and provincial governments, such as unused military bases, RCMP facilities and old post offices, which are regularly auctioned off. The group is demanding it be put back in the hands of the Indigenous community for education, health or other uses and coming up with workable proposals.
"And we're not looking for co-management, we're looking for co-ownership," Stewart said.
'A laboratory for new ideas'
Included in the exhibit is a short video that chronicles the history of Canadian housing — from pre-settler Turtle Island times, when women in the community designed and built shelter, to the present day, when speculative finance capitalism has transformed housing into a commodity, forcing millions of people into inadequate or no housing.
A beautifully constructed mezzanine of two-by-fours and plywood wraps around the windows on the inside of the Canadian pavilion, creating an airy, lively working space. (The wood, along with banners, will be reused to reduce the carbon footprint.)
There, overlooking the exhibition space, 15 students from the architecture programs at the University of British Columbia and University of Waterloo will each spend three months developing the projects, creating social media and engaging with whoever drops by.
"My big concern was how do we translate very conceptual ideas, rhetoric and explanations of the crisis and solutions," said Simon Brault, CEO of the Canada Council for the Arts. "And I think they succeeded in creating a space where you can mingle and learn and with the students, a laboratory for new ideas."
It's also one in line with the theme of this year's Biennale: The Laboratory of the Future.
"What's great about the installation is the way it works with the building and doesn't fight it, as so many shows in the past have," said renowned Toronto architect Bruce Kuwabara, who chairs the board of trustees at the Canadian Centre for Architecture and has been to many past Biennales. "They've made it feel like a domestic environment ... and turned into a school."
Housing crisis affects everyone
For the students, the chance to work in the Venice pavilion and talk with visitors about issues that are urgent to not only Canadians has breathed life into the project.
"It's helped me realize just how powerful learning about the law and policy and different steps to approach government, how important an architect's work can be in that," said Kara Crabb, one of the 15 students from UBC.
"This is a project that is going to push past the Biennale," said UBC student Emma Garm-Straker. "Once we go back to Vancouver, it can't stop there. These are issues people have been working on for years, but this has provided a greater stage for it."
That's the hope of the more than 100 people involved in the show — and now movement: It will provide not just one solution, but many, to a crisis that affects everyone.
"The fact is, we can only conceptualize housing as connected to that bottom line," said AAHA member Sara Stevens, an architectural historian and associate professor at the University of British Columbia.
"There's no way to exist in Canada right now without being part of those markets, and if they can't respond to what you're able or not able to afford, then you can't access your basic rights to housing."
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