Missing in Action_The Individual Part II

LWPAC’s Roar_one development of stacked homes in Vancouver is a vision of dense urban living. Situated above a shopping district on West 10th Street and resembling a converted warehouse, the complex is designed with an open living concept. Fitted with ten residential units, the model utilizes maximum space efficiency and features natural light and airflow. Roar_one architect Oliver Lang is optimistic about future projects: “We need more flexibility in bylaws to create more height. This [Roar_one] is a worthwhile model, but would be more successful with another set of units built on top.”

www.vancouver.ca/ecodensity

In Vancouver, the attempt to make large numbers of single-family houses cohere by stacking them on top of each other has resulted in the vertical embodiment of the suburban phenomenon – an endless sea of towers upon townhouses in which the desire for individual expression has been perverted into a need to be indistinguishable. For the most part, the complexities that converge in the North American dwelling have been reiterated and exacerbated rather than resolved by strategies that have indeed produced architectural and social order. Once established, this order is visibly and inherently problematic.

A profound issue confronting contemporary architecture is the fact that the cultural importance of the discipline that enabled architecture to take meaningful action was historically derived from a faith in a building’s capacity to produce order – in itself and society. Today, however, the very concept of order has become suspect. The denaturalization of language, context, time, and the human associated with the postmodern condition is increasingly revealing the ideological basis of order in efforts not to equalize but to eradicate difference. Order is rapidly retreating as a means of insuring personal liberty and emerging as a source of social repression and control. This graduation project attempts to demonstrate in different ways the impact on architecture being made by this new understanding of “order” as a social construct with only contingent value.

The traditional solution to growth – densification – is increasingly resisted by community groups because dense buildings are perceived to generate choking traffic and curbside parking problems, packed apartment houses and overburdened sewer lines and street infrastructure are considered physically inappropriate when juxtaposed against existing smaller scale neighbourhoods, and, though rarely articulated, because denser housing types symbolically stand for the rapid intrusion of people of different colours and languages who are perceived to represent a challenge to the hegemony of homeowner values (Unfortunately, the slower growth ascribed by those in opposition to density, ultimately means too few houses and apartments, which lead to the inevitable jump in housing prices. Paradoxically, proponents of density see High-rise living actually reversing the negative effects of automobile traffic such as road congestion, air pollution and gasoline consumption) This latter paranoia is only fed when the newcomers are people of low income and the spectre of dropping land values is raised in anguish-filled community halls and public forums. In order to convince voters that density is vital to sustainability and future prosperity, mayor Sam Sullivan and Director of Planning Brent Toderian have repackaged densification in the form of “EcoDensity”…more on this later.