With concrete walls and metal siding, the Prix de Rome-winning architect Susan Fitzgerald’s Live/Work/Grow home mirrors its industrious neighbours on King Street in north-end Halifax. And that’s just the way she wants it.
There are the service bays of a car dealership, from which the whir of the pneumatic tools punch into the street. There is a tire shop and car-detailing centre, a café and coffee roaster, a crematorium and recycling depot. Dotted between the concrete buildings and dirt lots, enclosed by chain-linked fences, are a few remaining examples of the north end Halifax row house.
Unlike other parts of Halifax, Ms. Fitzgerald could build this house in the north end because zoning allows for residential and commercial mix.
“You don’t really want gentrification. You want the rich [character] … you want the mix,” says Fitzgerald, a lithe blonde who speaks softly but quickly as she rushes to the point she wants to make.
The self-commissioned project is an amalgam of zoning bylaws and motivations that inspire Ms. Fitzgerald’s work, including increasing density, the coupling of commercial and residential, changing family dynamics and urban agriculture. It’s this last point that Fitzgerald speaks of with passion and that was the focus of her Prix de Rome application in 2011.
She, and her husband and builder, Brainard Fitzgerald, wanted to see how urban agriculture was accomplished in countries where the practice was a necessity. Their rare partnership harkens back to the roots of the profession when architects combined the talents of designer and craftsman.
She proposed to visit countries in Central and South America and Cuba, a place to which Ms. Fitzgerald now takes her students from Dalhousie University School of Architecture.
Suggesting that there was something to learn in countries not usually on any architectural map made Ms. Fitzgerald’s proposal stand out for Toronto architect Janna Levitt, a member of the 2011 peer assessment committee.
“I thought the underlying proposition that these issues, these countries, these considerations are worthy of something as elevated as a Prix de Rome, is something I really felt should be rewarded,” said Ms. Levitt, who is also an adjunct professor at Dalhousie and knows Halifax well.
She also draws a connection between north end Halifax and the places the couple visited on their Prix de Rome tour.
The roof top garden beds on their King Street home, in which the Fitzgeralds plant vegetables and herbs, resemble what they witnessed on their journey. Urban agriculture isn’t the only way that the Grow theme is embraced – the house is also intended to grow with their family as it transitions through stages.
Two units stand on the long and narrow Victorian property lot, measuring 25 by 100 feet, common in Halifax. The building consists of a front portion and a back portion connected by a long hallway. The hallway is open – no door.
Mr. Fitzgerald, however, points out that the shared wall is framed for a door, meaning that their son, who is 17, could live in the other unit, or a portion of it as a university student. Or it could be converted to a “granny flat” for an aging parent.
The hallway, with a glass wall to the north overlooking the inner courtyard and car park, contains two train-berth-like rooms for their children. Open the sliding door and there is a bed, with bookshelves at the head and foot. The roof of the hallway provides an outdoor sitting area, available to both units, as well as the access to the roof-top deck of the back unit.
The Fitzgeralds concede that the current layout of the house would challenge a younger family. The berths would be less practical as a nursery. Ms. Fitzgerald suggests that the third floor could be reconfigured to incorporate a baby’s room.
The Work/Live aspects of the house are obvious and entwined. The ground floor is the office, but it’s not uncommon to return to the office to find their children’s friends seated around the harvest-style table at the centre of the room.
A harvest table is centred in the kitchen space on the second floor as well, which flows into a sitting area looking out on to King Street. The floor is cantilevered, allowing for more space than the narrower first floor, which accommodates the driveway.
Cupboards along the north and south concrete walls conceal the washer, dryer, refrigerator and the hot water boiler, which also supplies the in-floor heating system. That leaves only 11 feet of floor space. And yet it feels larger than its dimensions because of the efficient use of space, the Fitzgerald’s minimalist preferences and largely because of the opposing glass walls that look onto King Street and courtyard. They face east and west, capturing the morning and afternoon sun, which further adds to heating the polished concrete floors.
Windows in the glass walls, two on each side with one high and one low, allow for the venting of hot air and cold air return, respectively. Because of the house’s width, just shy of 23 feet, and proximity to property lines, no windows are allowed in the concrete walls.
It is from the third floor bedroom, which is slightly smaller than the floor below but has double the height, that access to the roof-top deck is gained on that unit. Again the neighbourhood is brought into perspective.
Ms. Levitt calls the Fitzgeralds’ choice of location a “provocation” to the city, which is considered architecturally conservative, but she also considers the house and location very much Fitzgerald.
“I think that the house is an authentic outcome of the issues that she is really interested in and has really staked a claim that those are important issues to be pursuing as an architect,” Ms. Levitt said.
The house is provocative in another way. A mosque, a medicinal grow-op and a microbrewery also call the neighbourhood home. If intensifying urban density is what’s required, then it’s going to require us to accept our neighbours.