Typology of Study
Pilot Building Selection:
Longlist
10–2023
︎ Québec Social Housing Data
︎ Building Identification Tool
︎ Service de l’habitation - Ville de Montréal
︎ McGill Library Archives
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 the provincially managed social housing in the region of Montreal, above 5 storeys and built before 1980.
Crossreferencing a publicly requested data set from the Société d’habitation du Québec (SHQ), I was able to output a list of all the publicly owned social housing buildings:
- in Montreal,
- above five storeys,
- and built before 1980.
Using their addresses and ReCONstruct’s Building Identification Tool (BIT), I was able to do an initial visual assessment of the buildings to create a longlist of 20 potential buildings to retrofit.
After identifying the names of the long-listed buildings, I was able to search the McGill Library’s archive of the Service de l’habitaion - Ville de Montréal documents published for the construction each of their HLM developments. These booklets include:
- Architectural drawings (plans, elevations, sometimes sections)
- Financial breakdown of the development
- Other information
