People per Hectare (E.R.A. Architects - image via harbourfrontcentre.com)
Inside the City
Part of Harbourfront’s View Points Series
Moderated by Ian Chodikoff
By Tina Chu
When the snow blew me in to Harbourfront’s Inside the City lecture, Helena Grdadolnik of Public Workshop was already presenting her works and was just beginning to delve into explanations of the reactivist and activist approaches to architecture.
Essentially, the difference between the two is a difference between being a problem-solver and a problem-identifier. In other words, instead of waiting for clients to present their needs, the activist architect is someone who actively seeks improvement by identifying setbacks in design, and then engages community collaborators and financial partners to devise a solution together.
Not a right approaches, it is more simply one Grdadolnik prefers when designing Public Workshop’s installations and interactions to examine the use of public space and to help people to reconsider and repurpose public spaces that are conventionally overlooked and/or negatively perceived.
Operating with the same approach, Michael McClelland and Graeme Stewart of E.R.A. Architects focuses the process on conducting research.
In the instance of Community Centered and Inside the City, McClelland and Stewart are specifically concerned with what this scientific metric, which measures how many people per hectare inhabit a city, can teach about the values embedded in the various types of urban planning.
In a similar spectrum, Joe Lobko of du Toit Architects Limited, specializes in how these connections to built-forms and physical surroundings shape interaction and build communities.
Drawing from his experience in working with non-profit groups, Lobko in particular recalls his 17-year relationship with L’Arche Daybreak, a community for people with disabilities and those livings with them and how he helped the Daybreak community transition from its previously rural settings to its current suburban community without compromising the natural and physical elements of its property.
After having presented their unique experiences, moderator Ian Chodikoff prompted the panelists to discuss the commonalities he found underlying their specializations, that of activism, politics, and stewardship in architecture.
When it comes to activism, Grdadolnik advises the importance of public dialogue and in correlation, the value in being able to unlearn the language and baggage of architecture in that dialogue. Echoing Grdadolnik, Chodikoff suggests that perhaps what activist architecture requires is for its professionals to be facilitators and not purveyors.
“The city is the greatest collective design project,” says Lobko, and Grdadolnik is quick to point out that the city is also never finished, where perfect solutions are impossible. Of course, this doesn’t suggest good solutions aren’t achievable and what helps, identifies Lobko, is the ability to balance values and circumstance.
“Many of the issues in design are political problems,” says McClelland and to grasp and balance these problems, McClelland suggests, an architect should consider architecture in all scales, from the small and personal to the broader picture and keep switching between these scales.
One can only make trajectories into the future, says Stewart, and knowledge will change while practices will become obsolete. What’s most important then, is to ensure current design processes are as well-rooted as they can be.
“There are no shortcuts and no bad questions,” says Lobko.
Even if architects begin acting politically on a small scale with manageable collaborations, encourages Grdadolnik, though he/she may not change attitudes or policies, he/she could no doubt catalyze the process.
After all, reflects Lobko, “Decision-makers will listen to us collectively if we come up with something intelligent to say.”
