Presencing Architecture as Home in Unity with Nature
Presencing Architecture as Home in Unity with Nature
CS–01 Housing Presencing Architecture and P-1 as a project.
The importance of housing is profound. The roots of architecture are often understood to be the home. The problem of housing is now profound. It is not just a Canadian problem. Housing is becoming inaccessible or burdensome at an epidemic rate. It is happening across Europe, and in the United States; anywhere that there’s a high quality of living, where the cost of housing is being defined by capital, rather than earnings. That is in addition to the proportion of housing that is deeply inadequate and harmful to its inhabitants, and unsustainable, not to mention that architects can too often not be involved. OPA is going to write about presencing architecture through a contribution to recreating a culture that includes a full ecosystem of housing for everyone.
The simple way to look at it is that the component of the ecosystem of housing, where people can start with income from work, and make their way to owning a home, or pay rent at a level that allows them to build their family and personal future, is inadequate. There has been a kind of fake, Band-Aid, type of means-tested affordable housing that has done nothing. This will do nothing to help us because it is always based on the profit structure of the builder and 'market value'. If market value is not based on a living wage, then it cannot be just and it cannot be a solution. As we can see in Vienna, a healthy, robust housing culture no longer needs means testing for social housing because the cultural space of housing is no longer about individual wealth, but social wealth. It is a base that the community provides itself, or not. The science that a less stressed community is a healthier community and less prone to sickness is in. Housing people properly is a community activity that supports everyone, saves tax dollars and provides a healthier population that can do more.
It seems that the capital and other wealth, including knowledge, should be spent on solving the structural issue, rather than building more mid-level and luxury housing, or token, means tested, housing. With a need for housing that vastly outstrips the capacity of the industry to build it, builders will naturally construct the housing with a bigger upside, a greater profit margin, and easier builds in general. There is a force from people who can pay taxes against helping people and to take away as much of that support as possible. The 'price' for a house is not directly related to the cost to build it and profit, since the buyers are dominated by holders of capital, rather than earnings. These have deepened the downward spiral removing the social wealth of housing. Until there is a culture that allows all of us to find housing within our means, extra support is needed and we waste the life time of our brothers and sisters. Everyone pays for the damage one way or another. In Canada that community support remains better in many places, but any program becomes vulnerable in the cyclic system of political give-and-take that we have. Providing care and security creates a spiral of growth and wellbeing, and a wealthy community.
The Housing Minister Sean Fraser recently announced of the recreation of a catalogue of home designs or 'pattern books' program1 that was created by Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. (CMHC) after WWII. There was unity and good managers who had been tested on a war time footing, and there was a sense of unity of purpose that we do not have now. This effort will need to go against some of the anachronistic assumptions that give preferential conditions to corporate efforts (and government hand-outs to them) and are orientated to mass production facilities. Increasing the capacity of the construction industry has many paths.
From my view as an architect, the structural issue is that there is a wide gap of affordable housing on a spectrum from utterly minimal survival housing, through lower middle-income housing. That is not a matter of spiffy housing plans, pre-approved and efficient. Housing's entire context needs re-development. Housing need not be of miserly quality, unless we build in the prejudice that life for people with no capital to invest or less income needs to be ugly. Housing affordability is not just building 'less expensive' houses. It is a supply of housing that fulfills human and family needs in a sustainable way. It would seem to be low hanging fruit for architects because that space has been poorly developed for a long time.
Challenge
We drop our son at a school in Parksville. Across the road is a big field. Looking over the field, the namesake of the Mount Arrowsmith Biosphere Region (MABR) stands like a sentinel beautiful, dramatic. It is different every day. The forested hills leading up to it are badly scarred by logging, with many patches cut only a couple years apart leaving large patches that show up strongly, especially with a little snow on the ground. Given the power of Kath Ka Ch'oolth, its real name, the patchy forest seems like a temporary aberration. We are in the Mount Arrowsmith Biosphere Region, which gives us great cultural motivation to harmonize with the biosphere and the bizarre rules of forestry seem more vulnerable.2
Image: Michael Karassowitsch
Going up the road a bit, there is a new development. The image below is taken less than 150 meters up the road looking the same direction. This development was recently part of that same field. It is easy to see that the rest of the field could be converted to housing in the same way. Although the field remains outside of the Parksville Urban Containment Boundary, the people I speak to have no doubt that there is no local authority with the ability to withstand developers' tireless efforts to build on (agricultural) flat land.
Image: Michael Karassowitsch
The ecotone between the agricultural land and the housing development is telling. The image shows that an enormous amount of fill was used, even if we assume that all the houses have full basements. The development does not respect the view to Kath Ka Ch'oolth nor is it designed around the sun. The south facing side of the houses nor the development itself have not been designed for the sun either, nor the view. There is no sign of solar panels nor of passive temperature control. The rear yards are compromised for a trophy front yard. The whole development has no trees and with the high percentage of ground given over to roads and sidewalk, along with the asphalt roofing, this becomes a heat island. I could go on. And perhaps I will elsewhere.
Images: Michael Karassowitsch
This series of writing will work through a proposition:
A development in this pasture can model a model the fills the gap in the housing spectrum (i.e. smaller, with low rent or purchase requirements), be more valuable to the community and to the individual residents or owners, more sustainable, more future proof and still be more beautiful and in better harmony with this land than it is as pasture.
Can a development actually be more valuable both to the homeowner and the biosphere than the pasture?
Whatever is built can be sold at a higher price than its build and profit cost actually justifies. With such demand as we have, a fine development of high quality, even just a two bedroom with one bath will draw high offers from investors or property management companies if it is within a high value context. The architecture can be unavailable to such buyers.
Qualicum Beach Heritage Forest. Image: Michael Karassowitsch
The current status of the land as a pasture for grazing is of course not its original condition. It was a forest. The nearby Qualicum Beach Heritage Forest can stand as the datum for another way to value the land than as pasture. Nevertheless, the pasture still retains a lot of the area's character.
The adjacent mode of settlement building, which is common in this area, is most often thoughtlessly assumed. Or, it is simply expected that a housing settlement has to erase the natural environment. The neighbouring settlement signals a threat to nature's further annihilation, as we can see. Changing the form and character of the land is, however, not definitively 'bad'. The change becomes 'bad' if it also means devastation like the example; of the biosphere (e.g. with elements like piping all the rainwater away and sealing the ground with excessive pavement), and climate (i.e. the heat island, light pollution, heavy use of fill and concrete), as well as absorbing all the experiential value of the land, for people and animals, at a very low rate of return for the inhabitants (e.g. no views, poor handling of solar issues, very poor use of land as useless back yards and side yards and ornamental front yards, no parkland, no public transit, etc).
Practice for Presencing Architecture
Canada is already profoundly citified. Bu the countryside is not free. It is urbanized in the service of the city and its economy. The non-urban life of the countryside is ignored and abused, out of sight and out of mind. Care and stewardship of the land can be better with lives lived there in a caring way. Given that the economic and housing reality of the cities has begun to chase people out of cities, expanding housing outside cities will add to the impulse to reconsider that we trample nature.
Developing a model that serves access for first time home buyers and the strata of people with little capital, community building, and just housing, stewardship of the biosphere, care to be climate positive, and the many other points will have many data points. The original inhabitants' culture and knowledge needs to be rebuilt, and the connectivity with the world that they had inspire new forms for just relationships.
It is not be possible to go through the myriad individual points. Yes, the AIA, and to some degree the RAIC, promote a process for 'zeroing' out carbon and energy that begins upfront as the creation of the design team and concept that are preloaded with these factors. But large offices cannot do that even for larger developments, leave alone for individual homes; it would break the budget.
If you believe that, then I fooled you. Of course it is possible! We are going to work like architects toward 'how it needs to be'. This means using our experience and intuition, and feeling the right way to go. The measure of proper choices is that they expand or not obstruct the widest possible field of opportunities. We will focus on some key points that need to be addressed concretely, scientifically and otherwise factually. This would cascade down to each necessary component through a project and its development.
This is a written project. It is minimally technical. We are speculating, we are experimenting. We have a lot to gain. The industry example shows little improvement over half a century, other than that there are new technical components such as electronics and finish materials that are more advanced, many of which are not securely climate and physiologically healthy for us, amounting to the kind of poverty that costs a lot.
Architecture is dependent on all the attributes that fill into a place. Our goal is to support that everyone may presence architecture at that places that are inclusive of anyone.
Alan Teramura refutes that such a housing catalogue would be at all helpful or safe for the environment without some serious process that demands research and innovation. 'The revival of pattern home designs will do little to solve the housing crisis', The Globe and Mail.
See these items referencing the local biosphere and its forests. Feel free to take a peep into these entities and the report. Mount Arrowsmith Biosphere Region Research Institute (MABRRI). Esquimalt & Nanaimo Land Grant. The Forest Resources of British Columbia (1956), Gordon Sloan. Mosaic Forest Management. Draft B.C. Biodiversity and Ecosystem Health Framework.