practice
changing skins
These are explored by using Québec’s social housing stock as a testing bed - with a focus on the retrofit of its HLMs (‘habitations à loyer modiques’ or low-rent housing.)
A sample building represented at different stages of its life. (original construction, concrete superstructure, retrofit, etc.)
Abstract
Most of the spaces we will be occupying in 2030 are those already built, and yet much of our existing housing stock was not designed to support the changing user needs of our diversely-abled population or our changing climate.
How can we work towards making our built environment more accessible and sustainable, while acknowledging the material and financial costs of construction? The solution is to develop strategies for retrofit that will preserve the ‘good bones’ or structures of our buildings while facilitating the changing of their ‘skins’ so they can better adapt to our evolving world.
This project will explore the opportunities inherent in the process of renovation and retrofit of our existing housing stock with a focus on optimizing it for current and future accessibility and sustainability needs.
Continued ︎︎︎
Typology of Study
The focus of this design experiment is a multi-unit residential building typology of concrete superstructure towers, built in the 1970s by the Service de l’habitation de Montreal during the first Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) funded non-market housing boom.
Drawing from a data set which included all HLMs in Québec, the scope of the initial building stock survey was reduced to provincially managed social housing in the region of Montreal, above 5 storeys and built before 1980.
These buildings are not only found in Québec, this multi-unit residential building typology was common accross Canada between 1960 and 1980. A Toronto based group known as the Tower Renewal Partnership has already identified the need to rehabilitate them and is actively working on initiatives to preserve and upgrade this section of our housing stock.
“A critical feature possessed by most post-war multi-unit residential buildings constructed across Canada is that the existing building enclosure is an ideal substrate for retrofit overcladding systems. [...]
Assuming a 50-year service life for skins, and a minimum 250-year service life for the armature, existing tower buildings will be re-clad at least 4 times before they are no longer fit for their intended purpose.”
Tower Renewal Guidelines: For the Comprehensive Retrofit of Multi-Unit Residential Buildings in Cold Climates
Ted Kesik and Ivan Saleff (University of Toronto)
Ted Kesik and Ivan Saleff (University of Toronto)
Pilot Building Selection
By cross referencing archival Service de l’habitation de la Ville de Montréal pamphlets with a dataset of the social housing buildings in Québec I was able to form a long list of potential pilot building candidates.
Sample of Service de l’habitaion - Ville de Montréal documents
for of the long-listed buildings, from the McGill Library.
for of the long-listed buildings, from the McGill Library.
Long List Pilot Selection continued ︎︎︎
By studying their drawings and identifying patterns in plan, I formed a shortlist of potential pilot building candidates.
Shortlist Pilot Selection Continued ︎︎︎
Selected: Habitation Rosemont
Built: Avril 1971
Occupants: Families, couples, people living alone Seniors
Floors: 6
Dwellings: 82 units
Average Disrepair: IVP – B, 9%
Recent Renovations:
- Travaux de chaufferie 2018
- Travaux de mieux isoler (2016) $300 000
(Link to OMHM Directory Page)
A New Skin Approach
Following the Tower Renewal Group and ReCONstruct’s logic, my first experiments explored the opportunities inherent in changing the skin of the building. Could simply extending the floor plate be a simple tool used to create more accessible housing?
Habitation Rosemont’s “bones” and potential new skin boundary.
Focusing on a typical one-bedroom unit, I performed an ad-hoc access audit and tested whether extending the exisiting units could facilitate the integration of accessible and universal design principals.
It also made it clear that working within the confines of the existing unit organization and structural bays was counterproductive so, as I continued to experiment I shifted away from a preservationist mindset.
Seeking Alternative Models
Instead of working within the framework of the existing unit types, I consulted more contemporary and innovative models.
Considering the Building as a System
Zooming out from the unit scale, I chose to focus on the more holistic implications of changing a building’s skin. If the existing units were too restrictive to meet most contemporary needs, why not use the transformation of the building as an opportunity to update the way the building can house a more diverse range of inhabitants?
New Unit Types
Recognizing the existing structural bay as too narrow to house an apartment with properly upgraded clearances, storage, bedroom, bathroom and kitchen - I instead introduced ‘partial’ or ‘supported’ units in their place.
Modelled on units in long term care and retirement homes, apartments with partial kitchens but generous storage, bedrooms and bathrooms are integrated into this otherwise typical apartment building.
Reconfiguring the whole plan thus created opporunities to develop new typical and atypical unit types that could embody the space and slack necessary for the giving and receiving of care that happens in all households.
Using Architectural Slack to Facilitate Care
Creating intentional space within our standard housing stock for people with a diverse and changing range of care needs is an act of recognizing and trying to facilitate the diverse ways that people already live and care for each other in community.
As explored in the theory tab, this is built on the assumption that each housing unit does not and cannot function in isolation. Instead, we use our homes as assistive technologies, our households working in dialog with external systems and each other to meet our diverse and changing needs.
This can be understood as households supporting each other, creating access, adaptability and community through relationships between units.
A Narrative Design Proposal
The final output of this project is a series of narrative vignettes illustrating the adaptive potential of the proposed design to facilitate evolving, accessible and inclusive homes.
Continued ︎︎︎
Project progress: milestones
This topic is being investigated during the 8 month period between September 2023 and April 2024. Throughout that time, its progress will be presented and reviewed in four milestones. Here is the record of evolution of the project at each of those milestones.
OCTOBER 2023
Mid Review
Mid Review
DECEMBER 2023
Term 1 Review
Term 1 Review
FEBRUARY 2024
Term 2 Midreview
Term 2 Midreview
APRIL 2024
Final
Final
Madeleine Lachance
Advisor - Michael Jemtrud, Associate Professor
theory
‘good bones’
This project is born from the desire to challenge the modernist practice of designing ideal spaces for ideal bodies that has resulted in a built environment that is fundamentally exclusionary.
Diverse vector figures from the work of vector_vault, an ongoing project focused on drawing non-conforming bodies.
My name is Maddie Lachance, I am a queer woman of French Canadian descent who lives and works in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal, unceded indigenous lands that is historically known as a gathering place for many First Nations including the Haudenosaunee and Anishinabeg peoples.
To preface my work, I’d also like to state that I don’t pretend to be an expert in the disabled experience, and the conclusions I’ve come to were directly informed by the work and writing of many disabled activists and scholars.
This project hopes to promote a retrofit strategy for our housing infrastructure that emulates the changing bodies that occupy it, one with ‘good bones’ and changing skins
This exploration is rooted in the paradigm shift that is at the foundation of critical disability studies, the idea that we should be starting from disability.
I aim to subvert the assumption that there is an ideal body or ability-level for which our built environment should be designed. Instead, I subscribe to the belief that we should start from the assumption that all those who occupy space are individual, distinct, and deserve the agency to adapt their spaces to their diverse and evolving needs.
I aim to subvert the assumption that there is an ideal body or ability-level for which our built environment should be designed. Instead, I subscribe to the belief that we should start from the assumption that all those who occupy space are individual, distinct, and deserve the agency to adapt their spaces to their diverse and evolving needs.
This is not a shift from centering the ‘ideal body’ to centering a specific ‘disabled body’, but instead by moving away from normative thinking - I aim to ask:
How can we design the slack needed to meet the diverse needs of the diverse bodies in our population?
This approach is informed by the Disability Justice framework, a movement founded and led by QTBIPOC activists that was built to advocate for people with disabilities of marginalized and/or intersectional identities.
“A Disability Justice framework understands that all bodies are unique and essential, that all bodies have strengths and needs that must be met. We know that we are powerful not despite the complexities of our bodies, but because of them.”
Patty Berne, “Skin, Tooth, and Bone – The Basis of Our Movement Is People: A Disability Justice Primer,” Reproductive Health Matters 25, no. 50 (May 2017): 149-50.
Furthermore, this work wouldnt be possible without the past and present work of activists such as the members of the artist collective Sins Invalid and scholars such as Aimi Hamraie, Susan Stryker, Sarah Hendron and Jos Bois to name a few.
At the scale of architecture, subverting the norm(ate) can look like designing slack.
Building-in free space or specifically generic space that assumes and embraces imperfection. Space that can evolve with and be affected by the bodies that occupy it. Through this approach, I hope to develop a strategy for changing/transforming/upgrading the buildings of our past that acknowledges the evolving needs of diverse changing bodies.
Defining ‘Architectural Slack’
If the solution lies in desiging slack or adaptability, my first excercise was to define ‘architectural slack’ for myself. This concept of ‘slack’ at its core, is an opposition to optimization. The principals of Universal Design all revolve around building in the slack necessary to accomodate an expanded view of household needs and ablities.
We need to be building in slack because all individuals embody intersectional identities, and their ability can also be understood as intersectional. No two people, and no two households have the same needs, so there is no single housing solution that could accomodate all people. Instead, the focus should be on desiging and building spaces that have the capacity to change and adapt in response to us.
Universal Design involves
designing for resilience, in other words: integrating ‘architectural slack’
As opposed to Accessible Design which involves standards that are minimal, conformant, prescriptive and incremental, a Universal Design approach assumes a diversity of solutions upfront. It is designing for resilience, or treating architecture and space as an assistive technology.
Sarah Hendron, in her book What Can a Body Do? works to push the boundaries of what should be considered an assistive technology, arguing that most designed objects and even architecture serve in some way as tools that assist our bodies in meeting the built world around us.
In my research phase, I studied guides by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Administration (CMHC), the Canadian Standards Organization (CSA), the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB) and more to develop an initial understanding of contemporary universal design and accessibility standards and clearances.
As a result, I created the drawings below as tools to illustrate some of the ways these guidelines and clearances serve to create architectural slack. How architectural moves can serve as assistive technologies at the scale of a room.
Looking Beyond the Standards
While the housing crisis is dire for most people, it is especially acute for people with more restrictive spatial needs. As a result, people with disabilities live in homes that are not ‘fully accessible’ all the time.
Both new and old buildings are more often than not restrictive to people with disabilities, but many people still find ways of living in spaces that do not fully meet their needs by relying on community supports and social systems. Someone’s home is not only accessible if it meets all the current spatial standards, it is accessible if its spatial characteristics, in dialog with community support and social systems, can come together to meet their needs.
Whether formal (e.g. home care, long term care, etc.) or informal (e.g. community care webs, elderly family members living with younger family members, etc.), systems of care and support are essential to the true ‘accessibility’ of a given home.
Insipired by their work and that of other disability justice activists, I have come to believe that transforming existing housing to become more adaptable and inclusive is less a question of upgrading all spaces to meet the most generous standards, and more a question of upgrading spaces so that they can better accomodate evolving systems of care.
It comes down to introducing ‘architectural slack’ that can facilitate the giving and receiving of care.
Slack Through Collective Infrastructure
Research Basis
While I will continue to explore the theories and practices of disability studies, my work is also building from a summer of research with ReCONstruct; McGill’s Chair in Architecture, Energy and Environment held by professor Michael Jemtrud.
My team within the research group has a focus on the Québec social and affordable housing ecosystem. Our summer’s work covered an overview of the history of housing policy in the province, a mapping of key actors and relationships in Québec’s housing sector and an overview of the existing maintenance and renovation systems for the province’s HLMs (‘habitation à loyer modique’.)
I intend to use this research basis to ground my explorations in the specific social and cultural context of social housing.
Lunch & Learn: “Introduction to Quebec's Affordable Housing Ecosystem”, July 17th 2023. Gabrielle Goldman, Madeleine Lachance, Ella Fortney.
Slides prepared by ReCONstruct’s MURB team to share at a table at the Société d’habitation du Québec’s “Rendez-vous de l’habitation”.
November 28th 2023.
November 28th 2023.
Continued ︎︎︎