stitching together the urban infrastructure:
the collective commons as the urban campus
individuality and scales of community in downtown Montreal
The concept of social housing immediately implies both structure and issue, physical reality and ephemeral ideal. It is impossible to consider dwelling at the intimate scale of personal physical and mental space without also considering its connective, environmental, and sociological impact in a broader urban and cultural context. Thriving neighbourhoods emerge from numerous symbiotic relationships involving residents, visitors, businesses, and local services; we therefore propose a unique mixed-use affordable-housing-based community as a central node of collective activity and learning in downtown Montreal.
Our proposal recognizes that buildings alone rarely improve cities, but that introducing a network of site-specific, programmatically diverse structures whose users and inhabitants have specific and essential relationships with one another helps ensure long-term growth and sustainability. We look to build upon the archetype of the academic campus - a dense mini-community united through overarching formal schemes with a focus on connections (both internal + external), gathering hubs, and programmatic diversity – which has repeatedly proven to be a successful model of an integrated community in modern downtown cores. We propose an expansion of this concept in the form of a mixed-age, mixed-use community providing a full spectrum of urban amenities that both benefits from and enriches its inhabitants, while acting as a vibrant civic centre for the larger urban area.
Incorporating our ideas about community with specific site observations, we propose that communities are effectively formed by establishing relationships while encouraging individuality. Our objective is to foster a sense of personal identity at the dwelling scale and generate multiple communities at a range of public and private scales. This 2-pronged focus is mutually reinforcing; individuals who feel proud, safe, and empowered are more prone to participate as active community members, while diverse, united, hospitable, proactive mini-communities help individuals feel a sense of belonging.
We propose to accomplish this through a reshuffling of low-density parking into higher-density buried + stacked structures which free up prime civic space, the creation of affordable residential units via vertical densification with a commitment to individuality and community, a focus on communal gathering spaces at a variety of scales, and the encouragement of 24 hr use of the site by providing a wide variety of civic services, from educational to institutional, residential to recreational, and cultural to commercial. All of these services feed off of and into a common green room, created through a re-organization of the existing urban grid – which forms a pedestrian-scaled urban campus that is the cornerstone of a cohesive and activated downtown.
The vertical residential communities provide a new model for dense urban living, overcoming preconceptions about cramped and faceless downtown apartments as unsuitable living options for families. While sharing a common formal aesthetic and modular construction grid, each residential tower is unique in terms of its number of floors, colour schemes, and diversity of units (size and configuration), all catering to a wide-range of users. Individual expression - fostering pride of place and a solid sense of home - is facilitated through such elements as strongly defined ‘deep' thresholds between realms of privacy, a low unit-to-core ratio, and multiple operable tectonic elements such as a balcony/winter garden stepped façade system. A series of common rooms and gathering spaces at a variety of scales encourages multiple scales of bonding and community, from unique public gathering points to open lobbies to communal rooms at the end of each hall that act as extensions of the individual units and semi-private gathering spaces – all of which form a series of mini-communities both within the residential communities and the encompassing neighbourhood, ensuring that residents feel neither anonymous nor alienated.
The proposed buildings are grafted into voids in the existing urban infrastructure and are scaled to be sensitive to the surrounding context. Sustainable environmental practices are celebrated in both building siting and systems of energy generation. The large open space to the south of each residential community ensures direct solar exposure to all living units, which defy the existing grid with their due-south orientation to maximize passive heat gain and daylight exposure. The depth of the units is minimal to facilitate solar penetration and passive ventilation, and circulation spaces to the north act as a thermal buffer during Montreal's lengthy winter. Façade elements integrate photovoltaic panels, and wind turbines on the roof generate electricity for residents.
Beyond the series of residential communities, our urban campus includes two new schools, an extension to the Concordia fine arts building and galleries, a series of restaurants, a market, a sheltered arcade system, and a variety of other retail and commercial opportunities – all united about the central collective commons and all sharing a spirit of playfulness, openess and vibrancy.
Significantly increasing density and ensuring proximity of services and amenities for all family members and all generations within the community both decreases individual land costs and the need for vehicular transportation, thus further decreasing costs and contributing to environmental sustainability. Ensuring the variable and configurable separation of the public and private realms as well as opportunities for congregation and self-expression fosters crucial socially and economically supportive relationships between demographic groups that would not be possible in sparser suburban or traditional, dense downtown models of living - and transforms a previous urban blight into an inclusive urban campus.
Our proposal offers a new variety of activated public commons that provides opportunities for inclusion and communal gathering at the scales of the family, the neighbourhood block, and the community as a whole. We embrace social housing, and the civic amenities it supports, as both a catalyst and a cornerstone for infusing downtown Montreal with new and diverse life bred from tactical interventions into the existing urban fabric.
(Competitor's text)
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