Canadian architects bring campaign to address housing crisis from the street to world stage

Canada’s exhibit at this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale in Italy, the world’s most prestigious architecture exhibition, opened like many others outside a Canadian teepee-inspired wood and glass pavilion in the Venetian Lagoon: a speech, a thank you, an acknowledgment of Indigenous land. and applause.

Then the six architects behind Ora for Sale! show took the stage there, in the inauguration of the six-month-long event, and made the real purpose of the exhibition loud and clear.

“We want the land back!” shouted Adrian Blackwell, associate professor at the University of Waterloo’s School of Architecture in Waterloo, Ont., open the phone and respond from the crowd to 10 requests for housing in the core of their show.

This includes designing and building housing on First Nations sites with community involvement; intentional communities for the homeless; joint ownership; cooperative 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 neighborhoods.

The collective behind the exhibit is called 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 other countries.

Chosen by the Canada Council for the Arts to tackle one of the most pressing issues of our time, the group creates less of an exhibition and more of a political, social and creative campaign. The purpose? To challenge the current dominant paradigm of housing as a financial commodity.

“We are thinking very early in a generous, optimistic way, abusing all the funds provided by this opportunity. [to show at the Biennale]”Said Soules, who helped start the project. “To do something useful back in Canada, instead of directing all the money to the specifics of the Venice Biennale.”

Gentrification tax between demands

To that end, the collective turned the Canadian pavilion at Venice’s Giardini into a campaign headquarters.

Hanging from the walls of the semi-circular building were large banners with housing reform slogans and easy-to-understand diagrams of proposed solutions. All of these ideas and materials are the result of months of meetings and Zoom calls between architects and local housing activists and advocates.

One includes an insulated fireproof cabin designed by Toronto carpenter Khaleel Seivwright, called Toronto Tiny Shelters. Single housing offers an alternative to tents or shelter systems for homeless people before they can access permanent housing.

In Toronto, about 100 cabins were built and housed people during the COVID-19 pandemic, while a group of 50 are on empty plots provided for free by landowners in Kitchener, Ont. Now, the Toronto collective is working on a design for a cluster of 25 cabins that could open up an empty parking lot — and with the help of an architect, design a bathroom and kitchen that residents can share.

Another demand is a gentrification tax to reduce the profits made from housing, often as people like it – when, for example, a new subway or LRT line to a neighborhood or a hard-working restaurant creates a buzz – and reinvest it into creating local affordable housing.

“One of the requirements that we want for each team is that the project must be feasible,” said Patrick Stewart (Luugigyoo), a member of the Killerwhale House of Daaxan from the Nisga’a Nation and a trailblazer of Indigenous architects working in the Back Lands. “If it’s pie in the sky, we don’t want to talk about it.”

The first request from the collective, Land Back! including the goal of redesignating 95 per cent of the current Crown land for Indigenous people. While that level of decolonization may seem pie-in-the-sky, Stewart says, smaller, but life-enhancing, steps are still possible.

One demand focuses on surplus real property from the federal and provincial governments, such as disused military bases, RCMP facilities and old post offices, which are regularly auctioned off. The group demanded that it be put back into the hands of Indigenous peoples for education, health or other uses and made proposals that could be implemented.

“And we’re not looking for co-management, we’re looking for co-ownership,” Stewart said.

‘Laboratory for new ideas’

Included in the exhibition is a short video that chronicles the history of Canadian housing – from the pre-settler times of Turtle Island, when women in the community designed and built shelters, to today, when speculative finance capitalism has transformed housing into a commodity, forcing millions of people to inadequate or nonexistent housing.

A beautiful mezzanine constructed of two-by-fours and plywood surrounds the windows inside the Canadian pavilion, creating an airy, inviting workspace. (The wood, along with the banner, will be reused to reduce the carbon footprint.)

There, with a view of the exhibition space, 15 students from the architecture programs at the University of British Columbia and the University of Waterloo will spend three months developing the project, creating social media and engaging with anyone who stops by.

“My main concern is how to translate ideas, rhetoric and explanations of crises and highly conceptual solutions,” said Simon Brault, CEO of the Canada Council for the Arts. “And I think I succeeded in creating a place where you can mix and learn and with the students, a laboratory for new ideas.”

It also fits 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 not against it, as many shows have done in the past,” said renowned Toronto architect Bruce Kuwabara, who chairs the board of trustees at the Canadian Center for Architecture. and there have been many Biennales in the past. “They’ve made it like a domestic environment … and it’s a school.”

The housing crisis affects everyone

For the students, the chance to work in the Venice pavilion and talk to visitors about issues important to not only Canadians created the project.

“It helped me understand how to learn about laws and policies and different measures to approach the government, how important the work of architects is,” said Kara Crabb, one of the 15 students from UBC.

“This is a project that will be at the Biennale,” said UBC student Emma Garm-Straker. “Once I got back to Vancouver, I couldn’t stop. It’s an issue that people have been fighting for years, but this has given me a bigger stage.”

This is the hope of more than 100 people who participated in the show – and now a movement: Not just one solution, but many, to the crisis that affects everyone.

“The truth is, we can only conceptualize a house that is connected to that foundation,” says AAHA member Sara Stevens, an architectural historian and associate professor at the University of British Columbia.

“There is no way to be in Canada today without being part of that market, and if you can’t respond to what you can or can’t do, you can’t access the basic right to housing.”