cul-de-sac: a dialogue on suburbia

Rumination
Much has been said and written in criticism of the North American suburb. It has been seen as the antithesis of design, a banal cartoon facsimile of some dreamed of sylvan ideal. To some, the suburb represents all that is wrong with modern life: rampant consumerism; the commodification of place; the homogenizing tendencies of global capitalism; a lack of community (and a lack of appreciation for community); the destruction of the environment (both in the invasion of the suburban accretions into the rural, and in the unsustainable nature of the suburb itself, what James Howard Kunstler has called the ‘greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world’); the ferocious pursuit of greed by developers, as well as the ostentatious and misdirected displays of wealth by the nouveau riche in the form of monster ‘McMansions’; the erosion of street life and the disappearance of the pedestrian (not to mention the corresponding degradation of the health and quality of life amongst suburban dwellers); and on and on…

There is, at least amongst designers and cosmopolitan urban dwellers, simply no question that the suburbs are inherently WRONG; that we need to in some way convince the inhabitants of the suburb that the quality of their lives are tremendously degraded by the very circumstances in which they choose to live. From the point of view of the architect or urban designer, the phenomenon of the suburbs can be seen within the larger context of the continuing evolution of the North American city as a kind of utopia out of control. The history of suburban development is a history of failure on the part of architects and designers to co-opt the collective imagination towards a more vital vision of the city.

Many of the criticisms that have been leveled at suburban sprawl focus on functional issues. The New Urbanist polemic, for example, focuses upon the idea that the inherent sense of placelessness arises from morphology. Vital community life does not exist in the suburb because there is no street life; there is no street life because suburban places are designed not around accommodating pedestrians, but around the needs of the automobile. Many of the strategies that have arisen out of the explorations of the New Urbanist polemic revolve around issues of injecting meaningfulness into the non-place of the suburban realm. There is a sense that by changing the morphology of the suburb so that it functions more like a vital urban place, it will acquire a greater sense of meaningfulness for its inhabitants. It has the power, in fact, to change the behavior of its inhabitants. But is this true? Many of the New Urbanist developments which have come to fruition have been criticized precisely for their inability to change peoples’ behaviour. Places like Celebration, Poundsbury, Seaside, or (closer to home) Markham, have proven to be successful as a marketing model for developers but ineffectual in terms of really changing the behaviour of their inhabitants. These are still ‘greenfield’ developments; they are by and large still homogeneous residential enclaves that rely heavily on the automobile; they have not successfully incorporated a diverse mixture of income levels; the quality of community in these places is questionable. I see in this polemic not a solution but re-branding of the same anti-urban cult of the individual that created this situation in the first place. The ideal of a house in the country of a traditional suburb has been replaced with a new ideal of the small town. Either way, the sentiment is in opposition to true urban life, and relies on a set of morphological and visual signifiers which remain skin deep. Does a simulacrum of the campo in Siena really acquire some value simply by virtue of its form? Perhaps this can be justified with the argument that New Urbanist communities are a step in the right direction, a kind of half-way house for the rehabilitation of the suburban dweller; but if that is the case, what is the next step?

Directions
It seems to me that what is really at issue when speaking about meaningfulness – about making meaningful places – is the question of how cities accrete history. It is [possibly] demonstrable that the suburb does not develop meaning in the same way that a truly urban place does - it is not built for evolution; it is a temporal place that exists as a snapshot of the ideal as it manifested itself at the time of its construction. However I do not believe that truly diverse and vital cities that exist in North America today have any monopoly on meaning. One of the themes I would like to explore in this thesis is the idea that ‘meaningfulness’ is divorced from vitality when we are speaking about places. I believe, and I would like to demonstrate, that on the one hand the cultural wasteland of the suburb is not as empty as it is often believed or assumed to be; and on the other that the vital landscape of the city is equally capable of becoming commodified, of having its meaningfulness co-opted... I would like to explore the basic assumptions about the suburbs in order to understand the undeniable success with which this mode of life has occupied and consumed the collective imagination, in order to seek avenues for entry into that collective imagination.

In order to approach this, I will begin by asking the following questions (and many more, no doubt!)…

Who are the people that inhabit the suburbs? What are the common links (beliefs, backgrounds, economic situations, tendencies, fears) that cause us to choose this way of life? Of what do our / their hopes and dreams consist?

What forms of community exist within the sprawling periphery? What are the networks, dialogues, identities, organizations and connections of these places and how are these influenced or generated by the mode of living defined by the morphology of the suburban city? To what do we look for self-identification when our situation in the world becomes so non-specific as to exist anywhere and nowhere at once?

Is there beauty here? Is there a future for us in this landscape?

RECONSIDERING UTOPIA- The inverted grid city

In the context of global climate change and an escalating energy crisis, leading to further desertification of arid zones among them the Negev desert in Israel, this region, as many other drylands, is faced with prospects of a bleak future. A state of crisis brings about a need to re-examine and inform a re-organization of social and urban structures, as a pre-requisite for prosperous survival within this complex ecosystem. At the dawn of a renewed and urgent search for alternative global sources of energy, the Negev is presented with the opportunity to utilize and capitalize on its most abundant resource: solar radiation.

This thesis will explore how communal ideologies and urban texture co-evolve dependently on one another. It will suggest new paradigms for a post carbon world, mainly in the planning of community infrastructural patterns. In the particular case of desert communities, it will propose the inversion of the electrical grid to a multi-directional system. Energy production is envisioned as a viable source of livelihood for such remote communities, enabling them to shift from a consumer to a producer role. Such shift will inevitably destabilize the existing urban grid and with it an outdated social structure in need of reconsideration.

This context represents an opportunity, embedded within the obvious crisis, to re-envision desert communities. Inspired by a critical look at a rich array of earlier visions for this area, from the biblical profits to David Ben-Gurion’s ideas of a flourishing Negev, this work wishes to establish a contemporary vision of a sustainable, diverse and productive desert society.

Architecte Acadien

This thesis is about a special place in time and memory. The place is now known as Caribou Harbour, Nova Scotia. This thesis will attempt to create a place to honour the memories that have an attachment to this place and allow a certain awareness to occur through the act of creating space and designing a way to see and understand this place. The act of making this place through the use of a variety of tools is an attempt to bring out the greatest awareness and most comprehensive understanding of this place.

That said; in creating this thesis it is admitted that it in no way can this one body of work compensate for the overwhelming magnitude of shared memories and collective space it occupies within the greater Canadian social imagination. What this thesis will do is strive for an authentic and pluralistic approach to synthesize the essence of this place through the means available to an architect.

The overarching theme of this thesis is the condition of Acadian Diaspora and becoming more aware of what it is. Questions on the subjects of place, time and memory will be examined through the polarized lens of an architect’s perspective as a striving of understanding through science and art will bring with it an academic bilingualism appropriate to Acadian cultural tradition.

Caribou Harbour is a special place that anchors the discourse related to Acadian Diaspora, it offers to all Acadians (in the most inclusive use of this term) a place to rest and contemplate. It allows Acadians a connection with the past as well as presenting them with a bright future and an outlook on the possible changes that can occur for them and the generations to come. The very name Acadia has with it the strong connection to the greek name “Arcadia” meaning “refuge” or “idyllic place” . It is in this spirit that this thesis will attempt to construct a contemporary space at Caribou Harbour.

Slow Food for Thought

A Food and Architecture Blog

Western society is experiencing an unprecedented food revolution. A heightened awareness of globalized food production, local sustainability and loss of arable land to urban centers has become the catalyst to transform the current way of thinking. Currently, more than 50% of the food consumed in the city of Toronto is imported from Florida, California and Mexico, and travels an average of 1300 km . At the neighbourhood level, the emergence of farmers markets and community shared agriculture programs, as well as the voices of local celebrity chefs intoning the importance of local food sources are creating greater awareness of what we eat and where our food comes from.

This thesis strives, for better or for worse, to reconnect the inhabitants of Toronto with the land.

The One Minute Theatre: Allan Wes Wilson

The following is an abstract of my intentions...What began as an ipod on the roof of St. Peter's has thusly evolved.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the correlative qualities between architecture and theatre. For millennia, drama has been used as a dominant vehicle for the investigation of those ethereal qualities which comprise daily life; operating as a framework for the deeper understanding of incredibly dynamic social, political and temporal relationships. To parallel an analogy by the English poet Ted Hughes; the classical dramas of the Greek poets have been conceived as quantitative elements which illustrate- which make accessible- the most intangible of human conceptions. However, episodes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century have evolved the dramatic arts into to something more critical. As such they may actually provide the richest interface for the registration and projection of colliding ideologies, capitalist motivations and cultural histories. What this thesis supposes is that drama has the capacity to express a more fundamental understanding of the affects of contemporary architectures. The proposition is made for an architectural device which may chronicle the dynamic tensions embedded in a neighbourhood in crisis.