Fellow Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente recently wrote that the murder of 18-year-old Nicholas Yombo at his family’s townhouse in Toronto’s Regent Park – Canada’s biggest and oldest public-housing project, now undergoing a billion-dollar revitalization – was proof enough that “swell” new architecture cannot cure a dysfunctional and violent neighbourhood. But it isn’t really fair to question the validity of a massive, complex redevelopment because of the tragic death of a teenager. Architects are not crime-stoppers.
That said, they do play a crucial role in shaping our cities, and not just in the physical sense. I’m talking about architects who understand that “ghettos of the mind,” as Wente rightly calls them, are not transformed overnight by an exercise in rebuilding, and ultimately rebranding. Such citizen architects are fully engaged as agents of change, along with developers, politicians and community activists. They can work magic with space, designing grace and humanity into buildings.
There was a time, back in the 1950s, when Le Corbusier laboured by himself in a wooden hut overlooking the Mediterranean, sketching monumental ways to remake cities in India and Latin America. Until the 1970s, modern architects deluded themselves – as did a lot of planners and politicians – by recommending that cheek-by-jowl, apparently chaotic communities should be cleansed by busting apart historic city blocks and putting up high-rises.
These days, no architect in her right mind believes society can be instantly enlightened by computer-generated lines. Architecture, they know, is a frame for humanity, one that can return isolated neighbourhoods into the embrace of a city – even if it cannot predict what will unfold inside that frame.
A rendering of the Regent Park development, with the Sobey's grocery story that has created 80 jobs
Once designed as an island of impoverishment, Regent Park is being dramatically recast as a mix of subsidized and market-value housing, with small blocks and frequent streets so that taxis and pizza deliverers can find residents. Creating spontaneous connections between people is critical to the idea of its seamless, class-crossing design. The transformation will be both swift and slow, but over time, I believe, there will be fewer bullets.
The late American architect Samuel Mockbee, who designed houses for the chronically poor in Alabama, set out three parameters at his highly acclaimed Rural Studio: moral sense; ability to observe (truth); and sense of wonder (beauty).
I see the Mockbee ethos at work all the time in Canadian architecture: innovation with material, the capturing of light, and meaningful alignment to a site. Somebody may live in a dark, mouldy apartment, or one where violence rules. Still, give them a light-filled library or community centre – with a sense not just of refuge but of the relief found in a monumental skylight or the beauty of natural stone – and their minds have, at least, a place for meditation and relief from domestic chaos.
Of course, to those in crippling pain, the delights of architecture will barely register. It matters not at all that the Main Street Library in Toronto’s upper Beaches is a comfortable brick retrofit of a 1921 Tudor Revival building: Last week, it became simply a convenient destination for a man to have, allegedly, aimed his crossbow and killed his father. That’s the product of infinite, unknowable complexity, not the failure of architecture.
“Architecture is expected to carry too much weight in many cases,” Patricia Patkau, principal of Patkau Architects in Vancouver, told me this week. “At the same time, it’s a very social art. How you group people might encourage them to interact in positive ways.”
