In 2016 MBAC was invited to participate in a lecture series, publication, and exhibition organized my Media Architecture and Design in Edmonton (MADE) called ‘Sheltered and Exposed: Design for Alberta’s Winter Life. The text that follows and the images in this project profile are excerpted from MBAC’s essay ‘Full Disclosure: Operating in a Winter City’. In addition to giving a lecture and contributing this essay, MBAC also participated in a gallery exhibition in Edmonton, which highlighted a few of our Winter City public realm projects.
‘Full Disclosure: Operating in a Winter City’
Marc Boutin, Richard Cotter, Fatima Rehman
Most of Canada’s major cities are subject to the extremes of living in a northern climate. While this is not their sole characteristic, it is a prominent one. And yet, only relatively recently has an attempt been made to embrace the reality of this climatological context as an asset, rather than a liability. For too long, our cultural response to living in winter cities has been to turn inwards: cultivating places and spaces that quite literally insulate us from the reality of where we live.
This unfortunate legacy of denying fundamental aspects of our cities’ identities is, of course, symptomatic of broader and equally problematic trajectories in which we plan, create, and occupy urban spaces. More than a half century of development predicated on unlimited exurban expansion, has created vast expanses of low density, single function landscapes isolated not just by distance, but by climate as well.
The shortcomings of prevailing city building principles have been amplified by the increasingly intense technological mediation of communication and social habits. Receding into our digital lives, we limit our capacity to experience and appreciate not only the subtleties of seasonal change, but the serendipitous potential of face-to-face interaction.
By virtue of geography, MBAC practices architecture mostly in northern climates. By choice, we pursue design opportunities that foreground the importance winter city design. For us, that phrase refers to a broad range of principles and practices that embrace our climate and landscapes as fundamentally constitutive elements of the identities of our cities.
As a collaborative, our office depends on a plurality of voices and perspectives that together form ongoing lines of inquiry that are explored through projects and other forms of design research. We come from diverse backgrounds (cultural, academic, and otherwise) and we hold diverse opinions about the nuances of architecture and design. While there are many things that differentiate us as individuals, there are many others that bind us together.
One of the common threads that runs through the office is the experience of living and working in places radically different from the context in which our practice is based. Every member of the office has, for various amounts of time, lived and studied or worked in Barcelona, Rome, Melbourne, Lisbon, and a host of other cities around the world.
Another trait shared by members of the firm is an enduring fascination with public realm design. We have been fortunate to explore this interest through academic research (including the 2002 Prix de Rome) and through a myriad of projects closer to home.
For us, winter city design is indivisible from public realm design, and from urban design more broadly. Designing for a better future in the context of winter cities is about more than infusing our existing urban fabric with light and colour. It is about incrementally reshaping our cities to better support economic, social, and political life that operates in step with – rather than in spite of – the peculiarities and nuances of place.
The degree to which our experiences living and working abroad have informed (and continue to inform) the firm’s work cannot be overstated. This is not to say that we support or believe in the wholesale transplanting of design strategies from elsewhere into our cities. Rather, we believe in the value of learning from and unpacking the lessons learned from living in cities with rich histories of gregarious, resilient public spaces.
Memories of spaces and situations come to inform our understanding of and approach to winter city design.
The Apartment at Piazza di Santa Maria, Roma
In an unconscious manner, but drawn inexorably towards light and warmth, a family migrates across an apartment’s social spaces throughout the day as each of the rooms catches sunlight in a different way and at different times.
An architecture tailored to climatic cycles. The capacity to migrate across spaces in order to embrace diurnal and seasonal shifts; the precondition to this ability is the flexibility of space to facilitate functional and experiential transformation.
Mercat de La Boqueria, Barcelona
Narrow and congested, bustling and hustling, characters hawking tomatoes, oranges, mató, fletan, gossip about the neighbor, the politician, the economy. All forms of knowledge are legitimized and exchanged, discussed and debated. I thought I was next in line? Sorry, I’m Canadian.
The intensive field of commodities and space in the market is extrapolated across a network of paths and nodes, folding amenity and space into an interconnected whole. The network is human-scaled to make legible the metric of space and exchange: the social body. The journey is the destination and each destination is an amplification of the journey.
The Courtyard off of Herregasse, Graz, Austria
A right turn through an urban threshold, away from the persistent wind, and towards an illuminated space beyond is the beginning of the experience of coming face-to-face with a world within a world; an intimate space of exchange, animated conversation, lights, festive smells and sounds.
Scales of urban spaces means choice and the capacity to tune city experiences to varied climatic conditions. In a gridded city, where the dominant spatial form is the ceaseless extension of streets and avenues, contained spaces introduce finite urban rooms that recalibrate space to the scale of the human body while providing protection from the harsher elements of winter.
Carrer de Sant Pau, El Raval, Barcelona
Walking along a narrow sidewalk, a group of boisterous men is heard discussing the last football match, crowded on the sidewalk. Closer examination suggests the wall adjacent to the sidewalk has disappeared; a roll-down shutter is open and behind it is revealed a tiny bar offering drinks to its customers on the sidewalk. The sidewalk is a bar, the bar is a sidewalk.
Collapsing spatial territories in order to cultivate a dense superimposition of uses, activities, and conversations generates an animated urban experience. Two formal properties are at play; an intense porosity of the urban edge that erodes the boundary between inside and outside, and the cultivation of density that necessitates that each space has multiple lives.
Le Plateau, Montreal
Strolling up Boulevard St. Laurent, a canopy of light hovering above the sidewalk and street illuminates pedestrians as they negotiate the busy thoroughfare. A short detour down a side street yields a respite from the cold in the form of a bagel shop, whose wood fired oven and gregarious staff provide a source of literal and figurative warmth 24 hours a day. A few streets down, a bottle of wine from the dépanneur downstairs fuels an animated conversation between friends in a three storey walk up.
The compact layering of programmatic amenities, essential services, and generous amounts of both housing and commercial spaces creates a ‘city within a city’: a vibrant urban ecology that eschews a stark divide between core and periphery in favour of a dense network of neighbourhoods that are both highly legible entities in their own right and part of a larger urban continuum.
Praia da Ribeira das Naus, Lisboa
Strolling along Avenida Ribeira das Naus, ocean sights and smells confront senses and entice reflection. To fully embrace who we are is to connect and engage with our physical landscape. The thread cast between ourselves and those afar is deeply felt where solid ground meets its ephemeral counterpart. Memories of arrival and departure, of industry and enterprise, and shared moments of joy are embodied in these particular convergences.
Extending the constructed urban edge to actively interface a body of water recalibrates the public domain to engage ecological processes. In colder climates, dramatic seasonal change presents itself most vividly at the water’s edge. A moving landscape is temporarily transformed into a frozen one – an opportunity to hold on to a fleeting moment. A formal articulation of terrain that maps seasonal change creates places and spaces that amplify these transitions and in turn strengthens the bond between people and place.
In examining the narrative fragments above, what common themes appear? By what metrics should we assess what constitutes successful winter city design? While we cannot claim a singular, definitive answer to the latter question (indeed, we do not believe one exists), we do believe strongly that ‘good’ winter city design has some of the following hallmarks:
- It depends greatly on the public realm. This quality is not exclusive to successful winter city design, but its importance is magnified in the context of a landscape otherwise largely devoid of meaningful public spaces that can be appropriated for a variety of uses (both programmed and unsanctioned). For us, a vibrant, free, public realm is a crucial characteristic of any healthy city. Consequently, good winter city design is in many respects indistinguishable from good urban design.
- It celebrates (rather than shrinks from) the fact that we live in particular regions with particularly harsh climates. While the ubiquity of technology and media may render ‘every place like every other place’, the nuances of environment can be leveraged as powerful reminders that our cities are still very much unique. This celebration of difference (between places and across seasons) is critical to the development of spaces and places that internalize physical and cultural context as constitutive elements of urban identity.
- It should draw on historical precedent even as it relies on technological innovation. We believe that there is value in blending pre-modern adaptations to living in extreme climates with advanced approaches to dealing with these same challenges. This is most true where scale and distance are concerned. Weaving urban fabric whose texture is suited to the scale of the body is an important prerequisite for winter city design.
- It should celebrate the paradigm of overlapped time-based programming. In young western cities that grew up with misguided planning principles that optimized vehicular mobility and zoned functional considerations, we offer a reverse optimization: that of spaces with the capacity to transform through time to offer greater amenity.
- It should present inhabitable thresholds that offer choice for the user through the migration across a spectrum of spaces between inside and outside: a veritable tuning of place to more fully connect to differing climatic conditions.
With these five characteristics as guiding principles, we look for opportunities – in all of the work that we pursue – to leverage site, program, form, and materiality to enhance and animate the experience of living in a northern climate and to make that proposition more sustainable in the context of dwindling global resources.
For instance, embedded in the design for Eau Claire Plaza is the provision of microclimates that emerge from an intense mapping exercise, revealing sunny areas, which, through the application of design strategies, evolve into spaces that bring amenity throughout the year: shade, warmth, light, and seating; the creation of an inhabitable threshold between inside and outside.
As another example, the Bluff House is carved and tuned to the movement of the sun in order to become a receptacle for light, warmth, and the shifting, ephemeral patterns of diurnal and seasonal cycles. A material palette of zinc cladding that is animated by natural light and wood louvres that condition light with an intimate warmth, are instrumental in creating spaces that are in continuous dialogue with the natural world outside.
Every project has latent potential for some sort of response to (or provocation of) context. Even small instances of experimentation and exploration are of value because together they begin to create a critical mass of inquiry and innovation that offer alternatives to the status quo.
In 2016 MBAC was invited to participate in a lecture series, publication, and exhibition organized my Media Architecture and Design in Edmonton (MADE) called ‘Sheltered and Exposed: Design for Alberta’s Winter Life. The text that follows and the images in this project profile are excerpted from MBAC’s essay ‘Full Disclosure: Operating in a Winter City’. In addition to giving a lecture and contributing this essay, MBAC also participated in a gallery exhibition in Edmonton, which highlighted a few of our Winter City public realm projects.
‘Full Disclosure: Operating in a Winter City’
Marc Boutin, Richard Cotter, Fatima Rehman
Most of Canada’s major cities are subject to the extremes of living in a northern climate. While this is not their sole characteristic, it is a prominent one. And yet, only relatively recently has an attempt been made to embrace the reality of this climatological context as an asset, rather than a liability. For too long, our cultural response to living in winter cities has been to turn inwards: cultivating places and spaces that quite literally insulate us from the reality of where we live.
This unfortunate legacy of denying fundamental aspects of our cities’ identities is, of course, symptomatic of broader and equally problematic trajectories in which we plan, create, and occupy urban spaces. More than a half century of development predicated on unlimited exurban expansion, has created vast expanses of low density, single function landscapes isolated not just by distance, but by climate as well.
The shortcomings of prevailing city building principles have been amplified by the increasingly intense technological mediation of communication and social habits. Receding into our digital lives, we limit our capacity to experience and appreciate not only the subtleties of seasonal change, but the serendipitous potential of face-to-face interaction.
By virtue of geography, MBAC practices architecture mostly in northern climates. By choice, we pursue design opportunities that foreground the importance winter city design. For us, that phrase refers to a broad range of principles and practices that embrace our climate and landscapes as fundamentally constitutive elements of the identities of our cities.
As a collaborative, our office depends on a plurality of voices and perspectives that together form ongoing lines of inquiry that are explored through projects and other forms of design research. We come from diverse backgrounds (cultural, academic, and otherwise) and we hold diverse opinions about the nuances of architecture and design. While there are many things that differentiate us as individuals, there are many others that bind us together.
One of the common threads that runs through the office is the experience of living and working in places radically different from the context in which our practice is based. Every member of the office has, for various amounts of time, lived and studied or worked in Barcelona, Rome, Melbourne, Lisbon, and a host of other cities around the world.
Another trait shared by members of the firm is an enduring fascination with public realm design. We have been fortunate to explore this interest through academic research (including the 2002 Prix de Rome) and through a myriad of projects closer to home.
For us, winter city design is indivisible from public realm design, and from urban design more broadly. Designing for a better future in the context of winter cities is about more than infusing our existing urban fabric with light and colour. It is about incrementally reshaping our cities to better support economic, social, and political life that operates in step with – rather than in spite of – the peculiarities and nuances of place.
The degree to which our experiences living and working abroad have informed (and continue to inform) the firm’s work cannot be overstated. This is not to say that we support or believe in the wholesale transplanting of design strategies from elsewhere into our cities. Rather, we believe in the value of learning from and unpacking the lessons learned from living in cities with rich histories of gregarious, resilient public spaces.
Memories of spaces and situations come to inform our understanding of and approach to winter city design.
The Apartment at Piazza di Santa Maria, Roma
In an unconscious manner, but drawn inexorably towards light and warmth, a family migrates across an apartment’s social spaces throughout the day as each of the rooms catches sunlight in a different way and at different times.
An architecture tailored to climatic cycles. The capacity to migrate across spaces in order to embrace diurnal and seasonal shifts; the precondition to this ability is the flexibility of space to facilitate functional and experiential transformation.
Mercat de La Boqueria, Barcelona
Narrow and congested, bustling and hustling, characters hawking tomatoes, oranges, mató, fletan, gossip about the neighbor, the politician, the economy. All forms of knowledge are legitimized and exchanged, discussed and debated. I thought I was next in line? Sorry, I’m Canadian.
The intensive field of commodities and space in the market is extrapolated across a network of paths and nodes, folding amenity and space into an interconnected whole. The network is human-scaled to make legible the metric of space and exchange: the social body. The journey is the destination and each destination is an amplification of the journey.
The Courtyard off of Herregasse, Graz, Austria
A right turn through an urban threshold, away from the persistent wind, and towards an illuminated space beyond is the beginning of the experience of coming face-to-face with a world within a world; an intimate space of exchange, animated conversation, lights, festive smells and sounds.
Scales of urban spaces means choice and the capacity to tune city experiences to varied climatic conditions. In a gridded city, where the dominant spatial form is the ceaseless extension of streets and avenues, contained spaces introduce finite urban rooms that recalibrate space to the scale of the human body while providing protection from the harsher elements of winter.
Carrer de Sant Pau, El Raval, Barcelona
Walking along a narrow sidewalk, a group of boisterous men is heard discussing the last football match, crowded on the sidewalk. Closer examination suggests the wall adjacent to the sidewalk has disappeared; a roll-down shutter is open and behind it is revealed a tiny bar offering drinks to its customers on the sidewalk. The sidewalk is a bar, the bar is a sidewalk.
Collapsing spatial territories in order to cultivate a dense superimposition of uses, activities, and conversations generates an animated urban experience. Two formal properties are at play; an intense porosity of the urban edge that erodes the boundary between inside and outside, and the cultivation of density that necessitates that each space has multiple lives.
Le Plateau, Montreal
Strolling up Boulevard St. Laurent, a canopy of light hovering above the sidewalk and street illuminates pedestrians as they negotiate the busy thoroughfare. A short detour down a side street yields a respite from the cold in the form of a bagel shop, whose wood fired oven and gregarious staff provide a source of literal and figurative warmth 24 hours a day. A few streets down, a bottle of wine from the dépanneur downstairs fuels an animated conversation between friends in a three storey walk up.
The compact layering of programmatic amenities, essential services, and generous amounts of both housing and commercial spaces creates a ‘city within a city’: a vibrant urban ecology that eschews a stark divide between core and periphery in favour of a dense network of neighbourhoods that are both highly legible entities in their own right and part of a larger urban continuum.
Praia da Ribeira das Naus, Lisboa
Strolling along Avenida Ribeira das Naus, ocean sights and smells confront senses and entice reflection. To fully embrace who we are is to connect and engage with our physical landscape. The thread cast between ourselves and those afar is deeply felt where solid ground meets its ephemeral counterpart. Memories of arrival and departure, of industry and enterprise, and shared moments of joy are embodied in these particular convergences.
Extending the constructed urban edge to actively interface a body of water recalibrates the public domain to engage ecological processes. In colder climates, dramatic seasonal change presents itself most vividly at the water’s edge. A moving landscape is temporarily transformed into a frozen one – an opportunity to hold on to a fleeting moment. A formal articulation of terrain that maps seasonal change creates places and spaces that amplify these transitions and in turn strengthens the bond between people and place.
In examining the narrative fragments above, what common themes appear? By what metrics should we assess what constitutes successful winter city design? While we cannot claim a singular, definitive answer to the latter question (indeed, we do not believe one exists), we do believe strongly that ‘good’ winter city design has some of the following hallmarks:
- It depends greatly on the public realm. This quality is not exclusive to successful winter city design, but its importance is magnified in the context of a landscape otherwise largely devoid of meaningful public spaces that can be appropriated for a variety of uses (both programmed and unsanctioned). For us, a vibrant, free, public realm is a crucial characteristic of any healthy city. Consequently, good winter city design is in many respects indistinguishable from good urban design.
- It celebrates (rather than shrinks from) the fact that we live in particular regions with particularly harsh climates. While the ubiquity of technology and media may render ‘every place like every other place’, the nuances of environment can be leveraged as powerful reminders that our cities are still very much unique. This celebration of difference (between places and across seasons) is critical to the development of spaces and places that internalize physical and cultural context as constitutive elements of urban identity.
- It should draw on historical precedent even as it relies on technological innovation. We believe that there is value in blending pre-modern adaptations to living in extreme climates with advanced approaches to dealing with these same challenges. This is most true where scale and distance are concerned. Weaving urban fabric whose texture is suited to the scale of the body is an important prerequisite for winter city design.
- It should celebrate the paradigm of overlapped time-based programming. In young western cities that grew up with misguided planning principles that optimized vehicular mobility and zoned functional considerations, we offer a reverse optimization: that of spaces with the capacity to transform through time to offer greater amenity.
- It should present inhabitable thresholds that offer choice for the user through the migration across a spectrum of spaces between inside and outside: a veritable tuning of place to more fully connect to differing climatic conditions.
With these five characteristics as guiding principles, we look for opportunities – in all of the work that we pursue – to leverage site, program, form, and materiality to enhance and animate the experience of living in a northern climate and to make that proposition more sustainable in the context of dwindling global resources.
For instance, embedded in the design for Eau Claire Plaza is the provision of microclimates that emerge from an intense mapping exercise, revealing sunny areas, which, through the application of design strategies, evolve into spaces that bring amenity throughout the year: shade, warmth, light, and seating; the creation of an inhabitable threshold between inside and outside.
As another example, the Bluff House is carved and tuned to the movement of the sun in order to become a receptacle for light, warmth, and the shifting, ephemeral patterns of diurnal and seasonal cycles. A material palette of zinc cladding that is animated by natural light and wood louvres that condition light with an intimate warmth, are instrumental in creating spaces that are in continuous dialogue with the natural world outside.
Every project has latent potential for some sort of response to (or provocation of) context. Even small instances of experimentation and exploration are of value because together they begin to create a critical mass of inquiry and innovation that offer alternatives to the status quo.