In the years since he moved from Tehran to Toronto and set up a practice here, architect Reza Aliabadi has written and published a journal of his thoughts on the building art, curated about 20 art shows in his space at Bayview Village Shopping Centre, painted and drawn, crafted furniture, and found time in the midst of it all to design and see through to completion a number of detached homes.
These houses, to my mind, are his most notable accomplishments, and I've reviewed several of them in this column. Each has marked an engaging new stage in Mr. Aliabadi's meditation on architectural modernism – not merely the stylistics of the movement, but also its logic and legacy of ideas.
Bringing in light
His envelopes, for instance, offer clean-lined, minimal counterpoints to the humdrum, sentimental fabric typical of the suburban neighbourhoods he has often worked in. The interiors of his houses are usually subtle, sensuous plays with space that occasionally surprise, yet never jar. Certainly at the scale of the stand-alone, single-family dwelling – where ceiling heights can be varied, where ingenious itineraries and openings and shuttings can be orchestrated – Mr. Aliabadi has shown himself to be a high-order poet of volumes and voids.
But not every design job that has recently come this architect’s way has offered an opportunity for bold spatial thinking. What can be done, for example, with a high-rise condominium, where the ceilings can’t be raised, exterior glazing is unchangeable and the apartment is divvied up by load-bearing walls?
Mr. Aliabadi decided to answer this question when an elderly Thornhill couple asked him to overhaul the 1,500-square-foot condo they had lived in for 20 years. She “longed for light and brightness,” the designer said. Her husband wanted “modernity and minimalism,” and a studio in which he could make his abstract paintings. Both wished to say good riddance to the clutter and stuff they had accumulated during a marriage that began upward of 60 years ago.
Bringing down walls
The $100,000 renovation started with the tear-down of every wall that didn’t hold the building up, which opened the dark, narrow central corridor to daylight and created straight sight-lines from one end of the suite to the other. Part is connected to part, and they add up to a scheme that, even though the area is not large, has breadth and breathing room.
Formerly closed off, for instance, the kitchen has been linked to the open-plan living and dining area, and the old kitchen cupboards have been replaced by shelving within easier reach. The corridor was considerably widened to accommodate the wife’s walker, and other changes, including the removal of all barriers, were made to the apartment’s original layout and outfitting to ensure ease of movement.
Mr. Aliabadi has spoken of “treating the emptiness, not filling it up.” Once he had refashioned the formerly generic, diced-up interior of the condo into a free, flowing “emptiness,” he set about “treating” it with carefully selected furnishings and colours. Every item, one senses, had to swear under oath that it was completely necessary, and not merely brought on board to “fill up” the void.
Bold, bright colours
At the owners’ request, two old-fashioned wingback chairs were allowed to survive from the furniture ensemble in the unrevised apartment – although they have been reupholstered to fit in with the prevailing palette of strong red, deep black and stark white.
Apart from these chairs, the furnishings – from couch to pillows to the handsome dining table Mr. Aliabadi designed himself, and the seating by Charles and Ray Eames – are modern in the classical sense: impatient with overstuffed traditionalism, eager to be functional (as opposed to being bric-à-brac), and bright with industrial-strength colour. (The red accents that the architect has deployed in the kitchen, the living-room area and elsewhere, by the way, are meant to rhyme with the chemical red the owner uses in his paintings, which decorate the walls of the apartment.)
Visual intelligence
A series of photographs Mr. Aliabadi showed me document the suite as it was before he gutted and reconfigured it. The place was the worst nightmare of every early architectural modernist (and many interior decorators since): crowded with furnishings that ranged in style from Victorian kitsch to La-Z-Boy “traditional,” sagging under the weight of curlicues, chintz and general awfulness.
No wonder the owners were tired of it.
All that (apart from the pair of wingback chairs) has been swept away, displaced by a scheme with simple clarity and straightforward visual intelligence, and as much flair as you can reasonably expect to find in a condo renovation, in suburbia or anywhere else.