There has been a lot of talk on this podcast about housing, missing middle and the current challenges that much of the western world, and particularly Canada is experiencing when it comes to housing, its affordability and availability.
Enter Tura Cousins Wilson, co-founder of SOCA,, with partner Shane Laptiste, who have caught the public’s attention over the last couple of years with daring and innovative proposals, often centred around preservation of existing buildings.
I invited Tura to join me on the podcast to talk about the preservation of social housing as a way to increase the housing supply without throwing the modernist baby with the bathwater and demolish buildings that, in spite of not being loved at the present moment, present architectural qualities that Cousins-Wilson think are worth preserving.
Listen in to see what Tura has to say on the topic.
{Recorded in April 2022 during IDS Toronto}
About the podcast: Single Serves is a podcast where we interview experts on single issues of interest to architects and designers. The thought-provoking ideas shared here are intended to inspire our listeners to become well-rounded entrepreneurs who are the leaders of their field.
Credits: ©2022 Produced by Révélateur Studio & edited by Chris Rodd
RVLTR (00:04):
Tura Cousins Wilson is the co-founder of the Studio of Contemporary Architecture, where he and partner Shane lapis are involved in both speculative and real projects that aim at creating a positive impact through innovative high-quality designs. Their designs and ideas have been extensively published and acknowledged. Tura, thank you very much for being on the show and indulging in my city-building obsession. It's a real pleasure to welcome you as a guest.
Tura Cousins Wilson (TCW) (01:17):
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
RVLTR (01:19):
So today we're discussing yet another time Toronto's chronically undersupplied housing stock, but this time we're looking at the idea of reviving social housing through conservation and what it means for a city like Toronto. So before we jump right into the topic, can you tell us who you are and what you do in your own words, in three sentences or less?
TCW (01:38):
Yes. Simply I'm an architect born and raised in Toronto, Ontario, currently working at the Studio of Contemporary Architecture [SOCA] which I co-founded as with Shane Laptiste, as you mentioned, and we're doing work that spans a variety scales including private residential renovations and additions to community work to sports and recreation facilities, as well as urban design, master planning and speculative work. And the speculative work spans a broad range of scales and our interest the in speculative work is about the creative process. It's about asking questions, exploring ideas that we can't always explore in built work. So with professional projects or with real clients, for example.
RVLTR (02:29):
And some of those projects are actually very interesting. I'm thinking about the the renovation of that brutalist theatre. I forget the name.
TCW (02:37):
Yeah, the St. Lawrence Center for the Performing Arts.
RVLTR (02:40):
So I understand you do those as speculative projects, but do they actually lead to work or have they led to like interesting conversations?
TCW (02:48):
Some have led to work. They definitely, in my opinion, lead to conversations, that was part of a Globe and Mail article questioning what we see as heritage. Particularly, do we see brutalist architecture as heritage? There was a current proposal that was looking at demolishing that, and ours was a counter-proposal that said: "Hey, we see value in this building". We think you could do something bold here that has its own identity while also, , acknowledging the 50 years of the site.
RVLTR (03:28):
I understand this may not have been the primary purpose of that counter-proposal but has that changed the goals of the building owners at all?
TCW (03:39):
It actually, I think it has I just recently saw they're gonna be looking at doing a feasibility study and one of the things identified was working with the existing building. And I think largely that's partially from a budgetary perspective, but I also think it's a greater acknowledgement of the value and the history of the site and the culture of that site.
RVLTR (04:05):
That's very interesting. So let's go back to the topic of social housing in in the context of Toronto. So Toronto has a housing problem. That's undeniable and I have my own ideas is why that is, but what is it in your opinion?
TCW (04:22):
That's a challenging question. I think there's no one answer. Simply put, we're not building enough housing for the amount of people coming to the city and that's all different types of housing. So that's: market housing, It's missing middle, so duplexes, triplexes, small walk-up apartments. It's even Highrise residential, even though it seems like we're building a lot, we could be building a lot more. And most importantly, when it comes to super deep affordable housing is social housing. So that's government funded housing. We're not nearly building enough, a drop in the bucket. If that can answer the question a bit it's, challenging, it's more than just supply. It's a market, so interest rates, supply and demand, cost of construction materials, cost of labor, the shortage of labor, all those things contribute to the inflated housing market.
RVLTR (05:30):
I personally think that a large part of the blame is on politicians refusing to change the regulatory environment, make it easier to build more dense environments. How much do you think that impacts the whole situation?
TCW (05:46):
I think that's, that's a big part of the question of missing middle, small walkups in similar scale to a single family home, but that have multiple units in roughly the same size you've probably heard. And I think maybe a lot of listeners may have heard of the yellow belt. Particularly, that's a large region of residential neighbourhoods in Toronto that where you can't build anything else other than a single family home. And when the largest area of land can only be put to one use that limits the amount of housing that you can build.
RVLTR (06:25):
Yeah. That's simple arithmetic, right? So how do that, those broad ranging societal issues relate to social housing and its preservation,
TCW (06:38):
They do, and they don't. The missing middle in general doesn't necessarily have to relate to social housing, although you can have social housing that is missing middle or at a smaller scale and TCHC, Toronto Community Housing, they have part of their portfolio is missing middle houses. So duplexes, in addition to their larger buildings.
RVLTR (07:10):
Yeah, that makes sense. So let's talk about heritage, because that's that's what was the topic. What is what is your definition of heritage, because you just had a talk at IDS [Interior Design Show]. You were talking about reviving social housing as heritage buildings instead of demolishing them. So what is, what has been the extent of your work? What are you advocating for? And more importantly, what are the roadblocks that you're up against that maybe prevent you from doing that or prevent your proposals from becoming reality?
TCW (07:47):
Yeah, it's an interesting question. The question of heritage has been an interest of our studio for some time now and, asking what makes the city a city and in the case of Toronto, what makes Toronto "Toronto" that is what defines us. And I think in a lot of cases Victorian era, neoclassical architecture, early 20th century, industrial architecture is considered, part of the ethos and character of the city. It is changing. I would argue that mid-century architecture whether it be just modernism, brutalism, high-tech architecture, doesn't have that same broader [perceived] value. And I think there are niches of architects who appreciate it, but less so from a broader cultural perspective. I'd say the interesting thing is so much of our city is made up of those post-war years. In a lot of ways, I would say Toronto came of age after the second world war demographically, definitely in the way the city boomed and culturally, it's transitioned from a very White Anglo-Saxon Protestant city to a much more diverse diverse city. The question then becomes "Does that era's architecture have value?" And I would suggest that it does. And then the talk at IDs was looking at specifically at Alexandra Park, an 18-acre site, just west of the downtown core
RVLTR (09:39):
That Spadina and Dundas [a neighbourhood of Toronto]?
TCW (09:40):
Yes, Spadina and Dundas. So just west of Chinatown, south of Kensington market, and then north of queen and east of Bathurst street. It's Undergoing large-scale redevelopment master plan. Very much similar to Regent Park [a local urban renewal project], it's well underway. It started in 2014 that is seeing the existing site that was designed by Jerome Markson, a really interesting Toronto architect, demolished to make way for a new development, in a mix of use. The idea being that you have market units that finance the replacement of social housing units, as well as below market units. And it started within article that I wrote in Azure questioning the approach to tabula rasa of tearing it down to create a clean slate. Is that the best approach? From a cultural sense, a cultural memory of our identity to place, from an environmental standpoint of there's a lot of embodied carbon and energy in existing buildings. Why landfill them unnecessarily?
RVLTR (10:54):
The most sustainable building is the one you don't build, right?
TCW (10:56):
Exactly. And additionally, from an environmental perspective and, not even architecture was the destruction of trees. So there was quite an extensive canopy of mature trees that are 60 + years old. Replacing them, which is what they'll do, will take another 60 years. Another two generations of children, really not having mature trees. So it was questioning that approach. And it's a similar approach that was taken in phase one of Regent Park and there's new developments happening elsewhere in the city and across the country "What do we do?" How do we restore and regenerate these sites? And not to say at all that there aren't design shortcomings with them, but to say maybe there's a more nuanced approach.
RVLTR (11:50):
And I believe you had a speculative proposal for that site too. What conclusion did you come to, by designing this speculative project?
TCW (12:02):
The conclusion was simply that, and I'm gonna back up a bit there, we treated it almost as a lab research project of questioning: "Why not? Why do we tear this down? Can there be a more nuanced approach?" And was testing, whether there could be a more nuanced approach through a design exercise, that literally looked at the site and said, these are the existing buildings, what is the value to them? So it was identifying value. It was identifying buildings that, were very easy to keep. And then there was certain buildings that were challenging to keep and, how could we keep them? And then where would we say: "Add new density?" So the idea was to follow the model. And I think it's a debate on our approach to social housing that we require the private sector to finance it. I think that's a separate debate. But we did follow that model to keep [buildings] in relation to the existing master plan and [we were] finding areas to add new density that wouldn't impact the existing structures as much as possible. So largely, looking at parking empty parking lots and adding a lot of density. And it was, I think, challenging the idea that Toronto can't have high amounts of density. So if we kept a two-story townhouse to have a consistent density might mean that we need a 30-storey point tower, right beside it. And I think in this city, if we are gonna have a conversation about heritage it's about the duality, it's not about preserving something, some archaic vision or notion of the past, but allowing the city to renew itself while at the same time, still being respectful of the past. And I think building from the past, that adds value. One of the critiques of so much residential architecture is that it's generic and soulless. And part of the argument was [finding] an easy way of creating character through working with existing buildings. I think even good architecture requires time to develop its own sense of identity and character and broader meaning.
RVLTR (14:28):
Yeah. And I think this brings up a couple of interesting points. One is that not all architecture is worth preserving. And I remember Alexandra Park because I used to live in Kensington market. So I would go through that area quite often. And just from a purely empirical observation from going through at the street level, there seemed to have been a lot of architectural quality there in the way the buildings related to the streets and the pedestrian pathways, even though I realized those buildings may have been quite derelict after decades of mm- being in use. So how does one determine what's worth preserving? And what's not because, in my opinion, smart heritage would be about preserving the things that make sense to preserve or architecturally, significant, whatever that means, in some way. So how, how do you go about that and how do you say: "Well, we can demolish that cause it doesn't really have any value or it impedes the adaptive reuse too much, but we need to preserve that one because it's architecturally significant and it's easier to renovate and reuse?"
TCW (15:39):
It's a very challenging question. And it's the question that's constantly evolving. I think a good example would be Victorian houses. There was an era in this city. Regent Park is a good example. What predated Alexandra Park was an old street grid of Victorian houses, an older suburb in the inner part of the city. And there was a point where those houses weren't valued, which resulted in the creation of, Regent Park. That being that they're also in many cases in disrepair. The irony is that today Cabbagetown, which is really the north portion of Regent Park is valued. You ou can't get a house for under 2 million, if you're lucky, in that, that part of the city. So I think it's acknowledging that our values constantly change and part of our interest is questioning what are our values today. So I think it's challenging. I'd also like to push beyond heritage as purely being physical architecture, using the Cabbagetown example again today. I think it's a beautiful neighborhood. They've done a great job at preserving many of the built form qualities. However, if you look at the perspective of heritage from a "people perspective", it's fundamentally different. Family sizes have changed, they're much smaller and people are much richer. They're living in bigger houses with smaller space. The density is different. Cabbage town in, say the 1920s, was fundamentally different from the perspective of people.
RVLTR (17:30):
It was blue collar, right?
TCW (17:31):
Right. I think it's questioning what heritage means from different perspectives from built architectural form, because ultimately my opinion is heritage is meaningless to a large degree if it's not used well.
RVLTR (17:56):
It's about the culture as well and how it fits into the culture. And it's interesting, you mentioned the Victorian homes because there's literally thousands of them across the city. So the one question that I've asked over the years is: "Is it worth preserving all of them or should you selectively as the population pressure increases in the city?" Should you allow for maybe the demolition of the least significant of them and to build maybe higher density? Because we need to put those people somewhere too. You have to be realistic. Or is it about preserving all of them because they're old enough to trigger some kind of nostalgia in the culture? I think that's an interesting question. What are your thoughts on that?
TCW (18:37):
It is. I think it's constantly evolving. I don't think there's a broad brush approach. I think in certain areas that might make sense and others less. So there's certain Victorian houses where they weren't built that well, there's many houses in the city that are built cheaply. They were essentially workers' houses. They're stick-frame houses with a brick veneer facade at the front with some interesting architectural detailing beyond that. There's not that much special, at least from an architectural perspective from a standalone building, obviously. There's [also] the scale of the street and there's the potentially maybe the coherence. I think coherence is another one. So there's certain areas where I think in a coherent district you might make sense to keep the heritage. There's many areas in the city where much of the original architectural detailing has been erased. And there might be one standalone building. Do you prevent any change in a whole district because there's a few buildings that still maintain that character? I would say probably not. That's why I say, I think it's something that you can't address entirely holistically. I think it does come down to neighborhood-specific approaches, but also identifying that we are in a housing crisis and we can't just remain the same.
RVLTR (20:12):
In your opinion and maybe you can tie that back a little bit to your work on preserving social housing, but maybe broaden the answer to a larger architectural context. What would you do if you had a magic wand? What would be your fix to the housing crisis?
TCW (20:35):
I think simply it would be investing more money in public housing. Is probably the first thing that I would do. I don't mean 1 or 2 billion, I mean a lot of money across the country for the next 10 to 20 years. It's a crisis that's we're not gonna get out of in the short term. In large part, it's a generational approach. The next thing is, and I think this gets to heritage, is we are generally okay with upending, large social housing communities, but we wouldn't do that, say, for Rosedale
RVLTR (21:29):
Or the Annex. And they wouldn't let you do that. Because every time there's a condo [proposal] "at the end of the street", they go up in arms and say: "We don't want to destroy the character of the neighbourhood", whatever that means. I guess there is a point to be made about your level of wealth determining how much your housing is protected, so to speak.
TCW (21:51):
In an ideal world we could build housing everywhere and it gets back to kind of the question of the yellow belt, the question of missing middle, the question of scale. As I mentioned previously, the ability to say: "Hey, it's okay to have, say a 20 story building that backs onto a much smaller building, because you want to keep that smaller building."
RVLTR (22:25):
And there's cities elsewhere where it happens all the time, definitely in every neighbourhood. To me, what's baffling about Toronto and to an extent maybe other Canadian cities is that there's this fear that more density will destroy the "character of the neighbourhood". Again, whatever the hell that means. Because I don't think it's a valid argument, but people fail to look at other successful cities that are way denser than Toronto and still managing to be very livable. But I think our idea of livability in Canada or North America, I guess you could say is that you have to have a single family home with a two-car parking pad and maybe even a garage because that's, that's what you "should have" if you make it in life. I guess that's a bit of an overly broad generalization, but I think there's, that kind of desire to show that you've made it by owning a piece of single family property instead of in Paris, [where] wealthy people live in apartments, right? And there's many other cities where that's the case. So it's also, I think there's a bit of a cultural shift that needs to happen.
TCW (23:36):
Definitely. And it is happening it's so I think, , the suburban house Canadian dream, if you will, still exists at the same time, the majority of residents in Toronto live in apartment buildings.
RVLTR (23:54):
Is that the case?
TCW (23:54):
Yes. And I think, and it's gonna continue to be the case.
RVLTR (23:59):
It' interesting because looking at the city, like walking or driving through it, you'd think there's more single family units than there are apartment units. So it's interesting to see that statistically there's more people living in apartments.
TCW (24:13):
When you think of the space that a single family home can take up. There's, there's lots that are, a 100 feet by 200 feet wide with maybe four people living in them, in a lot like that. That's the size of a point tower in downtown Toronto.
RVLTR (24:31):
So you could literally have hundreds of units in the same space. So we talked about conservation heritage and more of the cultural aspect. What are the environmental benefits of preserving any architecture, but specifically social housing?
TCW (24:50):
One being the embodied energy in a building, if you don't have to tear down a building. And really when you think about what tearing down a building, you're throwing it into a landfill. There is a huge debate and a push to remove plastic bags. I'd say: "How many billions of plastic bags does a building make up?" And if you think of it from that perspective, if you're demolishing a building, you're throwing out quite a few plastic bags.
RVLTR (25:26):
Yeah.
TCW (25:27):
So there's that perspective. There's also the perspective, as I mentioned, of existing trees, so we're not talking often that we're just demolishing buildings. We're demolishing the landscape and trees again, have an embodied energy. They also provide shading. Some of the poorest neighbourhoods in our city don't have enough trees. And as a result, some of the poorest neighbourhoods are also some of the hottest neighbourhoods in the summer. So the there's that environmental perspective, in the perspective of human health from trees cleaning the environment and things like that.
RVLTR (26:08):
I think we've covered most of the questions I had, but there's one that I'm fascinated by cause I've come across this idea in various forms recently. There's this idea out there that architecture has become disposable in large part, I'm not gonna say the only reason that's the only reason, but in large part because of the way it's financed and the access to easy credit, it's easy to borrow money. So most buildings have an amortization period of like 30 years or so which is one generation. So after that they've been paid off and, and the owners have made their money back and so economically speaking their a write-off, right? They have no book value, so to speak. And so they're easily demolished because then you can rinse and repeat and do the same thing for the next 30 years. How much do you think that has an actual impact on the durability of architecture? Because I've heard one economist specifically make the argument that even 120 years ago, we generally speaking built buildings that were designed to last generations and generations and then with the kind of new financing model and the access to easy credit that has gone by the wayside. What's your take on that? And is there something that can be done in the way buildings are financed to incentivize owners, architects, and users to design buildings that last longer?
TCW (27:54):
That's a very good question and a question I'm not sure I can give you a complete answer to. I would add that it's how we finance architecture and how technology has changed architecture. And I think that the two tied in together with globalization [...] It's changed architecture [compared to] a hundred years ago. From where we source our building materials, to the types of laborers and craft people that are required to build. You can have large panels go up on a building where you need very few trades people, or you don't need brick layers at all. You can ship products from anywhere around the world. So you're not necessarily sourcing materials from that region or materials that are very durable in a certain region. I think that is a big, big perspective. The question of capital is huge. Mortgage rates shape the city, access to money can shape the size of the house. People build generally, in my perspective working with clients is, people always want more.
RVLTR (29:41):
But they're not always ready to pay for it, right?
TCW (29:44):
The system of borrowing before you can afford to pay it kind of entices that even more.
RVLTR (29:55):
So if you pictured like any given project in your head and you would design it, say for minimum 30 years lifespan, and then you design the exact same project to last a 150 years. How much more do you think it would cost? I know it's hard to throw numbers numbers like that, but would it be significantly more expensive?
TCW (30:17):
I would say in all our projects, we aim to go beyond 30 years but even 50 or 100 years is short in the grand scheme of things. When you think of the history of the world, I think one thing that's changing that is the environmental performance perspective, energy costs, and certain standards, like the Toronto green standards, net zero things like passive house as more municipalities and authorities having jurisdiction require higher standards, the more likely we're gonna see better, higher quality architecture from an energy perspective. But I also think from a detailing perspective, and I think even from an aesthetic perspective.
RVLTR (31:17):
So you do, you do think those standards are actually pushing the quality of the architecture itself beyond just the energy performance?
TCW (31:27):
It has the potential to, to clarify. There's certainly bad green buildings from both a beauty perspective, but also in how they make people feel. So it can perform well, but it's ugly or can perform well and it's not comfortable.
RVLTR (31:49):
Yeah. That makes sense.
TCW (31:53):
I like to hope.
RVLTR (31:55):
I mean, hope is what drives humanity and drives progress. So I'm with you. It's good to hope, but it's also important to keep in mind what are the incentives and rules you have to [abide] by, to accomplish that, because it's, it's gonna help move things forward. I think we've covered quite a bit of ground and I don't have any more questions for you, but are there any final thoughts you'd like to share with the audience with regards to all the things we've discussed today?
TCW (32:28):
It was fun. I don't have any specific questions. I just would like to say, thanks for having me, this has been really great.
RVLTR (32:36):
It's been a pleasure to have you, and hopefully this is just the first of many conversations.
TCW (32:40):
It's not all that often I get to spend additional time talking about architectural ideas like this.
RVLTR (32:46):
Well, you're welcome to do it anytime. As long as there's an interesting topic to talk about, I'm always happy to do those.
TCW (32:53):
All right.
RVLTR (32:53):
Well, thanks a lot. It's it's been great.
TCW (32:55):
Okay. Thanks a lot.