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Quality in apartment building design is often not what first meets the eye. One would presume that perpetually under-funded social housing in Canada is built as cheaply as possible with the lowest-priced materials, and that luxury housing is built to last with the finest features built-in.

Not so, and not so surprisingly often.

I learned this surprising reality as an architecture student working one summer for an Alberta design firm.

While my own contributions to the project were the truly junior tasks of drawing up doors and crafting meticulous lists of hardware, I did enjoy spending the first half of the summer working on a mid-rise tower for seniors, sponsored under a social housing program.

Round about Canada Day, the program got cancelled, and we spent the second half of the summer adapting the design for new life as luxury housing.

I was amazed to find out that this meant cheapening the finishes, down-grading the quality of the doors and windows, and changing the exterior cladding from low-maintenance brick to stucco that would have to be regularly patched and painted.

Oh yes, we did add mirrors and a schmaltzy fountain to the lobby, to increase its 'curb appeal' to prospective buyers. In changing the same basic building from social to luxury housing, we had "spec'd it down." In architect's lingo, this refers to the specifications--written lists of chosen materials that come together in their floor-plans and building elevations.

The simple fact is that social housing is designed to last--because it is usually owned in perpetuity by a public or quasi-public organization, and complete life cycle costs are what matters -- while luxury housing is designed to sell. British Columbia's multiple-family housing is an extreme example of the latter, with triple the money spent on marketing here, on average, as designing it. We will reside in the results of this imbalance for a century and more.

This is the context for one of the best-designed Vancouver apartment buildings of any kind constructed this decade, Belkin House on Homer Street between Dunsmuir and Pender. The client here is one that might not seem at first inclined to support leading edge design: The Salvation Army.

Au contraire, the organization that combines the Social Gospel with housing and feeding the poorest in our society has, surprisingly, been a regular patron of leading edge architectural design for a century, and has always built to last.

It all began with a temporary shelter for the homeless of Paris, helping out residents sleeping on the streets in the housing crunch that intensified through the 1920s. Sound eerily familiar?

Though he had only constructed a few villas for the wealthy, the Salvation Army trusted a young Swiss-French architect--who had just re-named himself Le Corbusier--to adapt barges moored at the Quai d'Austerlitz into emergency housing. Five years later in 1934, Le Corbusier completed the brightly-coloured, cast concrete Cité de Refuge, still in use today as the Salvation Army's main Parisian hostel.

The very same spirit came to Canada with the Canadian Headquarters for the Salvation Army, completed in 1956 by the Parkin Partnership, and a crucial piece of Toronto modernism that was sadly demolished a decade ago.

Today, as one strolls from London's Tate Modern across Norman Foster's Millennium bridge, the second building on the right on the sloping walk up to St. Paul's cathedral is the brand-new, high-tech world headquarters of the Salvation Army, completed last year.

This context of investment in design explains why the Salvation Army's Vancouver Division (these Christian soliders still use military terminology) invested in top drawer architecture for their $23-million downtown hostel and free meal facility.

The Sally Ann had grown out of their former downtown premises, Dunsmuir House. True to the class-confounding theme of this column, Dunsmuir House was first constructed as luxury housing just before the First World War, but had been used by the Salvation Army since 1950.

Having used them for several earlier suburban group homes, the Vancouver officers of the Salvation Army engaged Neale Staniskis Doll Adams, a top mid-sized design firms. This firm designed the innovative 2002 Dr. Peter Centre for AIDS treatment in the West End, plus 1994's Central City Lodge.

With a donation of $1-million from the City of Vancouver, plus land concessions from BC Hydro and a major grant from the Morris and Helen Belkin Foundation, funding was put in place early this decade, and Belkin House opened two years ago.

The architecture of Belkin House builds on traditional early 20th century apartment layouts like that of Dunsmuir House -- the former hostel, now a backpacker's hotel, forms a 'E'-shape in plan, while the Neale Staniskis Doll Adams layout is one big 'U.' Most floors feature double-loaded runs of single rooms averaging 18 square meters (190 square feet), most with private bathrooms, and all with a window offering either city views or a glimpse into its artful courtyard.

Unlike most of Vancouver's supposedly luxury apartment blocks, Belkin House's residential corridors are terminated with sheets of floor-to-ceiling glass, counter-acting the claustrophobia of lines of small rooms, and trimming operating costs with free natural light.

By way of comparison, councillor Kim Capri called last week for construction of 10-square-meter transitional housing for the homeless, too small to include a toilet or shower and bordering on the edge of livability, even for emergency accommodation.

What is most apparent about Belkin House is the sense of dignity it imparts to the down-on-their-luck residents of the building, most of them disturbingly young, and including many women and families in an emergency shelter on two of the top stories.

Senior partner Jerry Doll and project architect Brian Dust have crafted a paradigm project that demonstrates the power of architecture to brighten the lives of the poor While durability and cost necessitated a concrete structure and interior surfaces, the greyness of these are warmed visually with use of a red brick outside, and caramel-stained particle board panels lining classroom, corridor and lobby walls inside.

The main floor is given over to a large kitchen and expandable rooms for dining, appointed with custom-commissioned visual art and the equal--in pure design terms--of some of this city's finest large restaurants.

Flanked by an austere but dignified cross, a stair to second floor classrooms and support staff offices is boldly bare in cast-in-place concrete--linking to similar details in Le Corbusier's Paris hostel.

The most spectacular architectural design flourish here is also in cast concrete, an ovoid drum that starts on the ground floor as the portal through which staff hand over the free meals, the same form rising up to form a second floor oval-shaped resident's chapel lined with birch panels, then exploding up onto the third floor's courtyard, forming a sculptural planter and fountain framed with poplars and birchs, the focus of one of Vancouver's the best urban landscapes.

I hope that someday soon the Salvation Army gets out its brass band and donation kettles, then invites our luxury condominium developers over for a free meal and tour of their daring and very practical building. Belkin House just might inspire them.

tboddy@globeandmail.com