Oliver Lang and Cynthia Wilson have seen their share of bad architecture. From Germany to New York City, the primaries behind Lang Wilson Practice in Architecture Culture (LWPAC) — who are also married, with two children — have lived in plenty of lousy apartments. "I'm so used to the deficiencies of apartment living, in Hamburg and elsewhere," says Mr. Lang, who grew up in Germany, earned a Masters in Advanced Architectural Design at Columbia University and is now an Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University of British Columbia. "You spend all your time making those spaces bearable. From that perspective, this project is sort of a critique of my whole life."
The project is Roar_one, a development of stacked homes in Point Grey that Mr. Lang and Ms. Wilson hope will spur a paradigm shift in urban architecture. Designed in association with Hotson Bakker Boniface Haden Architects, Roar_one was one of three winners of the 2005 Design Exchange awards for residential projects, and synthesizes two decades of lessons for the young architects.
"Oliver and I have lived many different ways, both culturally and experientially," says Ms. Wilson, a UBC School of Architecture graduate who has worked in design firms in Barcelona, Berlin and New York City. "This was a process of gathering them together, taking the best, criticizing the worst."
Paradigm shifts are apparent before you even ring the buzzer. The building's front face of glass and slotted patios is partially obscured by 15-foot-high rectangles of aluminum mesh, which can be moved around horizontally by residents like giant shoji screens. Designed at a precise depth-to-height ratio, they can be positioned to completely block late-spring and summer sunlight, effectively eliminating the need for air-conditioning while retaining outside views.
Entering the building is also a surprise: the angled entryway doesn't lead inside but outside, to a bright courtyard set between two four-storey buildings. The parallel walls are painted a brilliant lime green, a concrete planter of basalt stones and Castillon bamboo on the north side. The space feels calm, not quite an oasis, but definitely a world apart from the usual condominium lobby. Trapezoids of sunlight and shadow fall through the exposed stairwells and the sounds of urban living drift in from the vicinity — a clatter of dishes from the restaurant next door, muted 10th Avenue traffic, children singing somewhere upstairs.
The brilliant green walls themselves are made of concrete blocks, perforated both by scatterings of glass bricks and by view corridors that pass all the way through the stacked double-storey homes, from front to back. These corridors, or "slots" as Ms. Wilson and Mr. Lang call them, are a central design feature of Roar_one, part of a vision of dense urban living that remains full of light and fresh air.
"Our approach is to build the maximum volume possible, then use filters and perforation to mediate and alleviate the mass. The challenge is how to manage density in such a way that it is efficient and maximizes livability." Mr. Lang cites the glassy downtown condo towers as an example of inefficient design. "They all overheat, or have to have the blinds down all day so they are completely opaque. Here in every unit there's cool air, a controlled environment with lots of cross-ventilation."
The stacked homes feature abundant glass, windows that open at opposing ends, and spacious exposed patios. Each of the ten units are 800 to 2,000 sq. ft., with loft-style mezzanines and ceilings of up to 16 feet.
