Architecture
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Browsing Architecture by Author "Blackwell, Adrian"
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Item Arguments in the Streets Became More Frequent(University of Waterloo, 2016-09-23) Bednarek, Pawel; Blackwell, AdrianOur contemporary societal condition is comprised of an involuntary association of humans to a system which prioritizes Authoritarianism, hierarchy, and capitalism. In other words this system supports a systemic or enforced inequality which favours and rewards the privileged few and disenfranchises and criminalizes the marginalized many. Architecture is complicit in this condition. This being said, I am motivated to change the way architecture operates. The best way to change the praxis of architecture to better address this negative condition is through the development of an anarchist architectural/spatial practice. This anarchist architecture is intended to be revolutionary as well as constructive and pragmatic. Anarchist architecture seeks to subvert the complicity of architecture to the above condition and strives to affect positive social change through a multiplicity of tactics. Using Toronto as a subject, this thesis is an experiment in a constructive anarchist architectural praxis which manifests itself through the craft of archiving, critical détournement, and the development of new spatial conditions.Item bicycle factory » a post-post-Fordist urban intervention(University of Waterloo, 2016-05-24) Yuan, Yajun; Blackwell, AdrianCities were once filled with bicycles and factories—urban typologies now regarded as anachronistic elements of the landscape, as their relationship to the built environment evolved throughout the Industrial Revolution, Fordism, and post-Fordism. The 20-century city was largely shaped by the automobile, which quickly displaced the human-powered mode of transportation. Meanwhile, spaces of production once spatially situated within their local markets were pushed further and further from the urban core, until offshored entirely to the developing world. These transformations have also left scars in the cities of advance economies, as 19th-century railways and other industrial remnants now impede on the human scale of urban life. Today, after decades of aggressive industrialization, environmental sustainability has reached a point of global crisis. The bicycle and the factory, as artifacts that have endured the test of time, are summoned to help foster a sustainable, contemporary city. The thesis seeks to re-establish their relevance in the built environment, by reintegrating light manufacturing activity back into the urban fabric, and proliferating the bicycle as a self-mobility machine for everyday transportation. An ideal ‘post-post-Fordist’ society is thus proposed, defined as [good] Fordism + [good] post-Fordism + counter-culture trends + novel ideas. The post-post-Fordist city is envisioned as a dense, heterogeneous construct, while its post-post-Fordist urban intervention is presented as a bicycle factory in the city of Toronto. The architectural design acts as a catalyst to proliferate the bicycle and its infrastructure across the urban landscape, in the same way Ford’s mass production of automobiles sculpted the modern city. It also spatially reconnects producers, workers, and consumers within a more cyclical, local economy. As a microcosm of the post-post-Fordist metropolis, the building is a complex, interweaving, layered assembly, consisting of a hybrid typology of factory, pedestrian & cycling bridge, urban park, velodrome, and bike park. The bridges physically re-connect portions of Toronto’s urban fabric torn apart by railways, while the architecture figuratively bridges between the project’s urban scale (cycling masterplan), and its object scale (commuter bicycle commodity). The factory’s transparent manufacturing process and democratic organization of labour are also composite systems, consisting of Fordist mass production and post-Fordist mass customization, while employing skilled and semi-skilled labour as a worker & consumer co-operative. The intervention embodies the bicycle’s construction, movement, and social qualities in its tectonics, while enabling cycling infrastructure to permeate into the building. In this way, the proposal endeavours to lift us out of the industrial exploitation of the last century, while providing a relief from contemporary society’s over-saturation of digital technology, to return the machine to its rightful place as an intuitive extension of our bodies.Item Care as Architectural Practice(University of Waterloo, 2021-04-30) Reid, Brenda Mabel; Blackwell, Adrian; Andrighetti, RickThe thesis explores the concept of care and its implications in public wellbeing through architectural practice. The Waterloo Region of Ontario, during the coronavirus pandemic, provides the setting of this investigation. The site's specificity and the pandemic's global condition revealed conditions of care on a spectrum that the thesis may have otherwise overlooked. First, through language, we examine care as a series of definitions and its evolution of meaning. Historically, its use in Western society exposes its role in upholding white supremacy and provides the contextual background for this contemporary investigation. Feminist Care Ethics then illustrates the non-sequential structure of care and how we experience it in our lives at both micro and macro scales. Following the discussion on care complexity, the research narrows to look closely at care through one artifact, the quilt. We can observe care within its making process, its community and its lifespan. The quilt and its relationship with architecture further discuss care's controversial position in North American culture. The majority of the thesis work has comprised of a series of projects and exercises attempting to find the architect's place in care. Presenting the work within than intersectional care ethics provides a structure for discussion. The four categories, attention, action, communication and maintenance, look individually at aspects of care and are tested through the thesis work. Spanning all of these chapters, the thesis' primary project, "From Behind the Mask: A Community Quilt of COVID-19 Stories," is both analyzed and informed by each of the selected definitions of care. The work concludes with a reflection on the research, lessons learned, and a perspective for the architectural profession's future.Item Changing Lanes: Taking Vancouver’s laneway housing from feeding speculation to an affordable ownership model under a Community Land Trust(University of Waterloo, 2019-05-24) Hexan, Marius Florin; Blackwell, AdrianTowards the end of 2017, after consultation with a series of reports, studies, and advisory groups, the Vancouver City Council has published the Housing Vancouver Strategy (2018-2027) and 3-Year Action Plan (2018-2020) policy report. This latest ten year plan, set out by the city, highlights a series of strategies in addressing the so called worsening housing affordability crisis. The report mentions Vancouver’s wishes of promoting a healthy, diverse, and vibrant city that endorses affordability for all of its diverse population. However, in general Canadian housing programs have been plagued by policy favoring not the improvement of living standards for marginalized households but largely unrelated goals such as private profitability. The report explicitly mentions an engagement with housing policymakers and experts from around the world, yet what it fails to mention is that Housing Crisis is not a result of the economic system breaking down, but of it working exactly as intended. What needs to be said is that the ever widening gap between the wealthiest and most vulnerable households of cities across the world is built into the capitalist system - more specifically the concepts and laws related to private property. As it stands, housing trends within Vancouver seem to be driven by developers towards higher density housing options that are affordable to less and less of the bottom half earners within the city. As such, the housing created is then quickly transformed by higher income individuals into financial assets upheld by the less wealthy as they are given no other choice but rent. This in turn creates hostility within the city towards the housing system and the individuals inflating the speculative appreciation of property. What I would like to ask is if the least dense and hence toughest typology that the City has identified in its Housing Vancouver Strategy report (laneway homes) can be turned into a truly innovative and affordable housing option? Could Vancouver laneway housing be conceived as a tool used to build towards long term affordable housing rather than just another speculative option? Furthermore, could the bottom half earning households be provided with an ownership option that allows them to build equity over time while promoting housing use value? What I would like to investigate is whether a re-evaluation of the concepts of private property and value of housing would then allow the least dense & affordable housing typology within Vancouver become a powerful means of providing marginalized households with the opportunity to change the city more after their heart’s desire.Item Claiming a Piece of Sky(University of Waterloo, 2023-01-11) Wang, Shiying(Sylvie); Blackwell, AdrianWhen you wander into a workers’ village on the outskirts of Shanghai, China, you would see a very unique type of urban vernacular: suspended additions hanging on the façade. They are the inhabitants’ attempt to transform the adverse spatial situations of the socialist-style workers’ village and to create a viable form of life in contemporary Shanghai by privatizing the public space, even the one in the sky. Through texts, maps, photographs and illustrations, this thesis explores, documents and develops an understanding of both the mechanisms and physical characteristics of those urban vernacular spaces, to showcase inhabitants’ ingenuity in creating innovative spatial praxes as well as their political agenda in seeking a voice within the state-controlled renewal process. It is in this context that this thesis seeks opportunities to re-imagine a inhabitants-led renewal in Tianlin second villages and asks: how can architects turn the political and spatial agency of inhabitants into constructive catalysts and to empower the inhabitants to design, construct and modify their unique extension to suit their current and future spatial needs. In addition, how can the design build upon the existing innovative spatial praxes and further encourage corridor social interaction to dissolve social barriers between different groups. This thesis proposes to modify the existing two-stage consultation renewal process into a two-stage co-governance renewal model, influenced by the open building theories of the Dutch architect John Harbraken. As a first stage, “the support” entails establishing a regulatory framework that is negotiated and communicated between residents and authority. In the second stage, “the infill”, each inhabitant can fully engage in the design and construction of their own addition within the framework established in the first stage. There are two systems that facilitate the infill process: the “we-design” toolkit and the “we-build” kit-of-parts. The “we-design” toolkit is an assemblage of physical modular blocks designed to unlock the fine-grain spatial agency of autonomous individuals. Similar to an Ikea furniture, the “we-build” kit-of-part features an easy assembly and disassembly process that allows the inhabitants to claim a piece of sky by themselves.Item Coffee Houses and Arcades: A Forensic Inquiry into the Myths of Modernity(University of Waterloo, 2018-05-16) Mullan, Levi; Correa, David; Blackwell, AdrianTwo founding myths of modernity, British coffee houses and Parisian arcades, have both been described as stages for the public display of private persons. The former was a “micro-stage where visitors could enact their chosen personalities”[1] and the latter, a promenade for the bourgeoisie to “display itself to the world.”[2] Central to these two spaces of appearance are two objects of inquiry: fashion and architecture. By forensically reconstructing these objects, the myths are put to the test. In the first, the egalitarian ideal claimed by the coffee house is pitted against reality, where architecture and fashion conspire to produce new lines of exclusion. In the second, the aesthetic character of the Arcade as phantasmagoria is dissected, and again architecture and fashion are charged as conspirators in producing the politically debilitating dream state. Coffee house interiors dissolved social hierarchies, leaving space for fashion to emerge as a primary vehicle of power. A study of 17th C. British interiors crossed with a forensic reconstruction of coincident fashions reveals the transfer of power from space to fashion. This transfer of power led to fashion-based forms of exclusion. Literal lines of exclusion are identified in the silhouette of a cuff or an overcoat. It is in these “trivial” sartorial nuances that power embedded itself. Arcade architecture and its coincident fashions both framed modernity in the images of earlier epochs. Arcades cited early eastern and classical architecture, while coincident fashions cited the Elizabethan age. At the same time, a number of technological innovations were emerging in architecture and fashion. These include gas lighting, iron construction, mechanical looms, and new sartorial forms. This coupling, of citation and innovation, past and future, represents the principal aesthetic quality of the phantasmagoria. The phantasmagoria created a false sense of progress and consequentially hindered concerted political action. A forensic reconstruction of arcade architecture and fashion unearths the material properties of these time-transcendent citations, premature innovations, and the phantasmagoria produced by their coupling. While centering on the problematic, this thesis recognizes these relationships are dialectical and exist as problem and potential. In the coffee house, potential laid in the new opportunity to make oneself uniquely visible in the public realm. In the arcades, the potential laid in their ability to reveal the inefficacies of the capitalist system, and paradoxically, provided the necessary shock to spark concerted political action. [1] Christoph Grafe, Cafés and Bars: The Architecture of Public Display (New York: Routledge, 2007), 28. [2] Johann Friedrich Geist, Arcades, The History of a Building Type, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), 114.Item Collective Form Infill housing and new domestic spaces in Toronto's residential neighbourhoods(University of Waterloo, 2017-01-25) Lawson, Matthew; Blackwell, AdrianToronto is facing a housing crisis, the symptoms of which are apparent across the city; property values are increasing at a dizzying rate, rental vacancy rates are at historic lows, poverty and displacement are being made more visible by waves of gentrification. And yet, Toronto is undergoing a boom of residential construction, with high rise condominiums changing the fabric of large parts of the city. Housing in this climate is conceived as a speculative commodity, rather than as a space of dwelling; this is a crisis not only of affordability and access to housing, but also the quality of domestic space. This condition is not simply an issue of the current supply of housing, but inherent to its production and form. The thesis proposes an alternative to the contemporary production of housing, as a critical response to the housing crisis and contemporary domestic space. The historical evolution of residential typologies in the city makes legible policy and planning tools as well as socio-economic tendencies. The initial subdivision of large scale properties in the early city into individual residential lots and accompanying commodification of property led to the large-scale production of semi and detached single family homes as the dominant historic type in the city, creating a perceived image of Toronto as a ‘City of Homes’ that persists into the present. Post war development expanded this production of single family homes to the suburbs, while displacing substantial urban communities through Urban Renewal schemes and the construction of high rise towers. While larger social and economic institutions have undergone rapid changes characterised by the current tendency towards neoliberalization, domestic space is still structured around the institution of the nuclear family, and the type of the single-family home. The thesis positions itself in the tradition of urban analysis and infill typologies proposed by architects like Diamond and Myers and George Baird, and associated reform planning movements that emerged in response to these patterns in the 1970’s, while imagining the possibilities of new domestic spaces that reflect contemporary living conditions. Building upon this precedent of infill housing, the proposal contextualizes low-rise high density development within Toronto’s residential Neighbourhoods; large geographic areas of single family homes currently protected from any densification. The design proposal acts as a synthesis to these ideas about the form of contemporary domestic space and the contextual nature of infill, creating increased density for reasons of affordability for residents, but also to respond to both social and ecological sustainability made possible by increased density and more efficient land use. The logic of the building form is contextually responsive, establishing a series of setbacks based on the existing structure of the neighbourhoods, as well as manipulating the forms based on subtractive planes. A resident led development model is proposed to resist the commodification of housing, while creating spaces that are more suitable for a diverse range of contemporary domestic realities with reference both to international models, as well as a long history of cooperative housing in Toronto. The internal organization of the building reinforces these social organizational structures through the provision of common spaces and the collectivization of domestic labour. The replication of these typological experiments across the urban fabric allows us to envision the production of new forms of collective dwelling as a radical proposal for transforming the city and domestic space as a right to the city.Item Collectivizing the Platform: Re-Imagining Hotel Living as an Affordable Housing Strategy in San Francisco(University of Waterloo, 2021-06-01) Lin, Steven; Blackwell, AdrianThis thesis proposes to re-evaluate the role of the Single Room Occupancy Hotel (SRO) typology to aid affordable housing production in San Francisco within the context of Californian techno-dominance. In our platform economy, prop-tech platforms enable the accelerated financialization of rental housing leading to gentrification, unaffordability, and eviction while the conditions of SRO hotels, a historically affordable type of housing, declines. The approach explores theoretical Platform Cooperativist ideas as a method of collectivizing the production of housing, drawing from cooperative construction methods on various sites. By collectivizing the platform and factors of housing production: labour, land, and capital, digital platforms are re-tooled to improve maintenance efforts, mitigate vacancy, and densify existing SRO hotel sites. Through a theoretical un-making of platform technologies and a vernacular study of hotel typologies, drawing, mapping, and urban analysis become tools to explore hotel living as a viable alternative for today’s affordability crisis. The proposal intends to increase the availability of affordable units by offering more equitable, socially responsible, living options for the most vulnerable tenants in the city.Item A Commons For Resistance(University of Waterloo, 2018-05-17) Dai, Meng Yi; Blackwell, AdrianOakland’s housing crisis is starkly visible. In recent years, the tech boom in Silicon Valley has drastically increased costs of living in the Bay Area. Many workers from San Francisco and the peninsula have relocated across the Bay to Oakland, in search of more affordable rent, spurring a wave of gentrification and displacement in the city. Since 2000, Oakland has lost 29% of its Black population. The Bay Area is gradually being re-segregated, as gentrification forces lower-income residents, often people of colour, to relocate to peripheral cities. A Commons for Resistance examines the current crisis through a dialectic of commons space and enclosures. Commons spaces are spaces a social group deems necessary to be shared by all its members, while enclosures are spaces controlled by an exclusive group, that produce benefits for that group to the exclusion of all others. The thesis posits that Oakland’s current crisis is made possible by- and perpetuates- a history of enclosure in the city’s urban landscape, which has created the inequality necessary for the current trend of displacement. Using a theoretical framework of commons and enclosures, the thesis also surveys current state, market and individual tactics addressing the crisis, revealing that most measures accept a default association between housing and private profit, and have limited effectiveness in adequately addressing the shortage of affordable housing. The thesis argues that, to be truly affordable, housing must be detached from motives of profit. The design response draws upon Oakland’s deep history of social justice activism, and the radical practices for living together that have emerged in its communities’ struggles to reclaim the commons. It advocates for a vision of housing embedded within the urban commons, kept perpetually affordable through a community land trust, a model of housing provision that is gaining clout in Oakland and in cities across the world facing gentrification pressures. An architecture of scaffolding is proposed for this model and applied in the design of three sites in Deep East Oakland. The scaffold refers a guiding framework for community involvement in the design and construction processes for these interventions. As well, the scaffold is an exploration of how architectural forms (surfaces, structures and landscapes) could contribute to the collective stewardship of space. It is not the place of this thesis, written from an outsider’s perspective, to offer a definitive set of steps to solve the housing crisis. Instead, by learning from the crisis in Oakland and the collective efforts to combat it, A Commons for Resistance adds a voice to the growing, global call to see housing as a collective responsibility, offering a set of suggestions and provocations that illustrate the potentials of dwelling in the commons.Item Condominium Towers: Habitus and alienation in the new urban framework(University of Waterloo, 2021-10-26) Van Weerden, Levi Herman; Blackwell, AdrianSince 2002, over 180000 new dwellings have been built in Toronto through condominium ownership, filling the downtown core with towers and locking much of the city’s society into a relatively new model of property ownership – the condominium. The social, political, and economic structures necessary to make condominium ownership possible as a strategic form of high-density space production in the downtown, will have a profound impact on how this new residential fabric evolves as an extension of the city. The urban dwelling has traditionally been the starting point for the individual’s belonging and agency within the city. Habitus, as the patterns and banal practices of everyday life, allow people to create places of significance, comfort, and security in dynamic material and political landscapes. Critiques of the condominium as a product of neoliberal private-property narratives, and extreme urban densification as the result of economic, rather than social forces, however, frame the condominium dwelling as a structure that alienates habitus from within the city. As the towers are going to stand within the urban fabric of Toronto for the next fifty to one-hundred years throughout changing social, economic, and political contexts, this condition of alienation will be a key factor in how each tower ages, decays, and is maintained in the urban society. To understand the futures of agency and alienation, each condominium must be considered as a microcosm of the city; first as a fabric of individual dwellings, then as an economic geography, next as a self-contained polity, and finally as a real and dynamic infrastructure. As the product of these four frameworks, we find that the organizational structure of the condominium operates against the human and civic functions of dwelling, and will produce an urban society paralyzed by economics, rather than activated by its own urban condition. While the condominium towers of downtown Toronto are built on economic strategies that alienate habitus from the urban dwelling, this vital dimension can be restored through the telling of alternative narratives of their possible futures that disrupt the preconceptions of the people, space, and future of the towers in the city.Item Contemplating a New Danwei Urbanism(University of Waterloo, 2016-09-26) Xue, Wei; Blackwell, AdrianMarket-driven Capitalist urbanization is no longer a viable option for China as it has produced increasingly monotonous and segregated cities that deny culture, history, ecology, and human connection. Cultural efficiencies generated from the interconnection and proximity of distinct entities found in traditional and Socialist-Era Chinese urbanisms have been overlooked in favor of market-oriented efficiencies from Western urbanization patterns. The thesis argues that China needs to develop a post-Capitalist Socialist urbanism in which efficiency is based on a shift in orientation from formulaic compositional systems to open-ended layered systems that encompass the dialectical complexity of the city. Socialist- Era Danwei Urbanism is revisited for its potential to facilitate efficiencies from the sharing of resources between various parts of daily life existing in the same urban block. The danwei (work unit) is a walled community containing the workplace, subsidized employee housing, and social amenities within an urban block. Many danwei, however, have moved some housing and amenities into areas far from the workplace rather than densifying the existing site. A New Danwei Urbanism builds density in a process of disintegration and formation, gives presence to absent ecologies, and establishes collectivity with a network of covered spaces while respecting autonomy at the local level. It embraces a dialectical reading of the city as a unity of contradictory yet interdependent systems. These layers present an alternative approach in which the danwei facilitates informal social and intellectual exchanges in the urban block.Item Designing an Architecture of Labour Affirmation, Harm Reduction and Community Development for Vancouver's Sex Worker Population(University of Waterloo, 2022-08-26) O'Neill, Emilie; Blackwell, AdrianWithin the current political, social, and legal landscape of Canada, sex workers face a considerable number of barriers to labour recognition that would afford them labour rights, dignity, and safety. The refusal to accept this labour as legitimate work augments the precarity of sex work; when it is treated as inherently criminogenic and exploitative, it is pushed into sociospatial zones that breed crime and exploitation in a cycle that reinforces the “common sense” knowledge that is responsible for marginalizing this community. One critical factor in this reproduction of precarity is the nonexistence of a place of indoor sex work created with the input of sex workers. How can rethinking the architectural design process to emphasize the expert knowledge of sex workers create a new commercial typology of adult entertainment that prioritizes health, safety, and dignity for sex workers? Sex workers themselves have speculated about a new typology of commercial sex workplaces for decades but have lacked the cooperation with a designer who could feasibly produce this as an architectural project through drawings, models, and renderings. My work uses a participatory methodology to generate architectural design as a diagram for “sex industry best practice” knowledge to provided context for, and disseminate, information that exists within expert communities but has not become mainstream due to the social and political challenges sex workers face today.Item Domestic Insurgency - Towards Affordable Housing in Vancouver(University of Waterloo, 2018-04-24) Banks, James; Blackwell, AdrianVancouver’s persisting housing crisis has decoupled dwelling prices from local income through persistent capital investment oriented dwelling typologies and restrictions on land availability. Vancouver, as one of the first North American cities to reach a post-sprawl condition, must correct policy and land use to acknowledge changes in dwelling preferences, demographics, and land value to provide a new mass housing strategy. Once contradictory policy is aligned to affordable housing values, the thesis proposes a housing framework for the private sector to profitably build dwellings suitable for a range of local incomes. The framework targets Vancouver’s most prominent, repetitive, and artificially underused land, its low density house neighbourhoods, to resurrect a middle density housing typology to respectfully transition neighbourhoods to affordable dwellings. Using a three pronged approach of neighbourhood improvement, flexible design for occupant control, and a focus on sharing, dwellings are drastically reduced in cost due to efficient space and material planning while simultaneously increasing living benefits to building inhabitants and its existing neighbours. Traditional thresholds at the dwelling and building scales are reimagined to support smaller living spaces and urban development in established neighbourhoods that create new co-dependent beneficial relationships and dynamically mitigate frictions, rather than eliminate them altogether. Ultimately, the framework provokes a wave of disruption in the housing market in response to current crisis conditions by making living more communal, shifting the focus from investment to human capital and by reinstating affordability as a key facet in the living standard formula governing housing design. The framework is an insurgent force that provides affordable housing through the private sector despite distorted high property costs, using existing property and economic mechanisms to create an alternative competitive affordable housing type. It is also an insurgency within the built fabric of the city, inserting itself within established neighbourhoods currently fortified against change and in progressing ideas of co-living and participatory design. Overtime, efforts to improve neighbourhoods for existing residents, putting people first, and creating a sustainable growth strategy capable of housing new residents for the long term, it is the ambition of this proposal to eventually reach a critical mass to reduce housing prices for all dwellings to restore affordability within the entire city.Item Echoes of Exploitation: Tracing the Impact of Racial Capitalism in Birmingham’s Titusville Neighbourhood(University of Waterloo, 2024-12-18) Brown, Brianna Nicole St Clair; Blackwell, AdrianThis thesis examines the exclusionary planning practices that shaped the urban fabric of the United States through segregation, focusing on the Titusville neighbourhood of Birmingham, Alabama, as an illustrative example. The work highlights how cycles of capitalist oppression adapt and persist, perpetuating socioeconomic disparities among African American residents in pursuit of excess wealth. It investigates how exploitative mechanisms – such as organized abandonment, predatory inclusion, and organized violence – are reiterated and reinforced by municipal and federal policies, continuously restructuring regimes of accumulation to enshrine inequality. Through this theoretical framework, the research examines the history of Birmingham from its incorporation during the 19th century to its current state in the 21st century. The transformative theory of reparative planning provides parameters for dismantling exploitative capitalist structures. While the city’s efforts through the Titusville Community Framework Plan are a start, a lack of accountability and implementation has shifted the burden onto nonprofit community groups in the area. Insights gathered from interviews with leaders of two contrasting nonprofit organizations, the Titusville Development Corporation and the Dynamite Hill-Smithfield Community Land Trust, highlight the need for a multi-faceted approach to reparative planning. In the pursuit of anti-racist futures, combining pragmatic and transformative strategies is essential for dismantling the legacy of exclusionary planning. This study seeks to uncover the historical and ongoing impacts of these oppressive structures and advocate for reparative planning that genuinely addresses the needs of the Titusville community and, consequently, the larger American context.Item Embracing or Not Enclosing(University of Waterloo, 2017-05-18) Schneider, Caelin; Blackwell, Adrian"The simultaneously archaic and hypermodern “archetypal fact” of twenty first century architecture and urbanism will be the enclosure, the wall, the barrier, the gate, the fence, the fortress." -Lieven De Cauter, The Capsular Civilization. "I no longer know what there is behind the wall, I no longer know there is a wall, I no longer know this wall is a wall, I no longer know what a wall is. I no longer know that in my apartment there are walls, and that if there weren’t any walls, there would be no apartment." -Georges Perec, “The Apartment.” Reflecting on the parallel between displaced towns in France during World War II and the cultural condition of an average Westerner today, Nicolas Bourriaud states: “Culture today essentially constitutes a mobile entity, unconnected to any soil.” Through the processes of ‘Modernism’ and then ‘Postmodernism,’ globalization has brought the world ‘closer’ together through an expansion of capitalism, often under the guise of democracy and equality. The ceaseless progress of neoliberal globalization and its parallel of Postmodernism promised a horizontality and a recognition of the other that had been conventionally repressed and pushed away by Modernism. Yet the shimmer of those promises has long faded away. From globalization’s subsumption of uniform interiors to contemporary society’s evolution into what Lieven De Cauter calls a “Capsular Civilization.” Here the everyday reality clearly aligns with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s prescription of an illusion of continuous, uniform space, which is in fact densely crossed by divisions. Emerging out of this context, this thesis investigates architecture’s role in the production of new inside-outsides which therefore entangles it in the processes of control, regulation, division and connection that result from the contemporary multiplication of boundaries. The partitioning of the world that is so often delegated to architects to act out is never neutral, and the regulation of the transmission between the exterior and interior of these partitioned capsules can be seen as manifestations of Hardt and Negri’s ‘New Segmentations,’ wherein architecture acts to reproduce these contiguous centers and peripheries among the interactions of daily life. The work of this thesis takes the inherited site of the Waterloo School of Architecture as an area for questioning the structures that reduce our relations to what is outside. The research investigates the found technologies used to support and structure the conditions of access: the locked door, the camera, the window and the wall, and looks to provide a text and a series of artifacts which subvert these identified forces, in a desire to think something other than the division of inside/outside, self/other; to search for new stories of the interior.Item Empowering Immigrants’ Environmental Engagement: Intersectional Community Building in Richmond, B.C.(University of Waterloo, 2024-10-17) Cheng, Lok Ching Nadia; Blackwell, AdrianMy thesis explores the dynamics between ecological challenges, spaces inhabited by immigrants, and cultural identity. Given Canada’s current ambitious immigration policies, the project takes an empathetic stance, drawing from local ecological conditions to support immigrants’ integration in Canada by proposing spatial conditions to foster social integration. Ethnic Chinese immigration to Canada has been common since the country’s establishment for diverse reasons including labour migration, family reunification, business immigration, and political tensions. Many have relocated to Metro Vancouver in British Columbia (B.C.), especially Richmond, where many cite their ethnic origin as China, Hong Kong, or Taiwan. There is a complex amalgamation of issues here. Segregation between immigrants and English-speaking locals is visible through the tension regarding Chinese-only signage in the city. The city is also prone to flooding. The city provides various environmental stewardship programs, yet they often rarely target immigrants. There is a stereotype that immigrants care less about environmental issues, given their priority of economic stability. However, flooding can hinder financial stability. Hence, this thesis asks how architecture can facilitate environmental stewardship initiatives by engaging immigrants in the context of Richmond’s immigrant-dominated demographic. To address the research question, I analyze existing literature. However, limited materials provide insight into this niche and ever-changing subject encompassing social, political, and ecological considerations. Instead, scholars offer insights into various disaggregated aspects of the topic and highlight the importance of redefining the relationship between ethnic minority groups and environmental movements. Moreover, I explore Richmond’s environmental and anti-racism initiatives, analyzing their successes and shortcomings. The goal is to understand the barriers to implementing community-building or environmental programs for Canada’s immigrants. This research will materialize in the latter part of the project in the form of a housing cooperative (co-op) design. In response to the critical reading of Richmond’s existing initiatives and policies, I advocate for designing smaller interventions that are well-integrated with daily life in place of massive-scaled projects to address a community’s intersectional issues. Moreover, I aim to address Richmond’s intersectional environmental issues by designing a housing cooperative as a response to B.C.’s housing crisis, a critical issue in the province. The design process will involve site planning, context analysis, program analysis, and photographic analysis. Overall, the design aims to acknowledge the financial benefits of living with environmentalism, and the importance of collective participation to create a sustainable project over the long term. Ultimately, as a child of immigrants from Hong Kong, this topic is not just a professional interest but a deeply personal one. This research aims to inform forthcoming design projects, enabling diverse immigrant groups to engage in a spectrum of environmental stewardship initiatives.Item The Generic Spectacle(University of Waterloo, 2016-01-13) Kraler, Kurt; Blackwell, AdrianThe completion of the CityCenter resort on the Las Vegas Strip in 2009 by MGM Resorts marks the single largest privately funded development in American history. It also marks a departure from all-encompassing themes of kitsch, masquerading as a self-sustaining city with condominium towers, an extensive public art program and a fire station. However, the development ultimately fails to deliver on its touted claims of a “pedestrian focused urban plan”, devoid of the essential public amenities that allow cities to meet the needs of its citizens. French theorist Guy Debord prefigures this subsequent downgrading of ‘having’ into merely ‘appearing’ within contemporary capitalist society with the release of The Society of the Spectacle in 1967. During the same time period, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour would release Learning from Las Vegas, identifying the increased prominence of the sign within the emerging “American commercial vernacular”. Rem Koolhaas followed with ‘Relearning from Las Vegas’ in 2001, a study of the Las Vegas Strip comparing then-and-now along with an accompanying text in which he credits Learning from Las Vegas as the first in a trend of books about cities. In the accompanying text, Koolhaas also states that the seminal study was “a manifesto for the shift from substance to sign...decipher[ing] the impact of substance on culture”. This culminates in what I am proposing as “The Generic Spectacle”, a hypothesis that describes the widespread proliferation of Las Vegas Strip-style urbanism in countless contemporary city centres. The writings of Guy Debord and Rem Koolhaas will comprise a framework in which the development of the region will be theorized, supported with contributions from the fields of economics, sociology, and geography. Subsequently, the history of development in the Las Vegas region will be divided into three distinct parts in order to define the pre-existing conditions that generate The Generic Spectacle. The first includes the foundations of the spectacle as defined by Debord, with the aligning of State and economic interests alongside incessant technological renewal. It will be argued that the modernist concept of ‘tabula rasa’ would underscore these two foundations. Secondly, the widespread liberalization that occurred in postwar America would reinforce Las Vegas as the centre of resurgent capitalism with a service-based leisure economy as its primary vehicle. A powerful convergence of capital would give rise to increasing monopolization and result in an all-encompassing resort campus building typology. Finally, the manufacturing of fantasy inherent in the themed environments of the Strip serve to obscure a troubling duality of freedom, one that is reinforced by the close proximity of Las Vegas and the United States Air Force. A prevailing sense of destruction is apparent throughout the history of the region with the constant razing of buildings for larger resorts and the systematic dismantling of a collective public under the ongoing processes of neoliberalism. Through a review of the development of the Las Vegas Strip, this thesis will theorize convergence, the erasure of labour and historical context along with the broader implications of The Generic Spectacle as it pertains to the fields of architecture and urbanism.Item Greater Toronto Chinese Downtown(University of Waterloo, 2023-01-13) Ip, Pui Yue Iris; Blackwell, AdrianGreater Toronto Chinese Downtown (GTCD) is the largest Chinese Canadian community in the Greater Toronto Area and one of the world’s most unique Chinese diasporic cities outside of Asia. Created by the sudden influx of Hong Kong and Chinese immigrants since the early 1980s, Toronto’s suburbs have become the center of the Chinese Canadian community, hence our downtown, outside of downtown Toronto. What appears to be a random and incohesive social space has turned my attention to the ways this cultural network has formed in a suburban context. In this thesis, I begin with a theoretical description of architectural innovation and the typological development of Chinese malls. With archival research, on-site observation, mapping, and family stories, this thesis produces a catalogue of cultural production and hybridization based on ten architectural mall typologies, which have never been studied before. However, the catalogue is not enough to fully understand the difficult development and transformation of the Greater Toronto Chinese Downtown. Seven Urban Figures are studied through a series of historical narratives, illustrated through mapping and archival material, to uncover the struggles and celebrations of the Chinese Canadian community. This work expands the theory and methodology of urban morphology. Previous academic research has dismissed Toronto’s suburbs as a static context for individual building achievements. Ultimately, this thesis is dedicated to recognizing the informal GTCD and its malls as a significant cultural space, over the last forty years. It asks, what urban strategies and architectural innovations were used in the suburban context to make the Chinese Canadian community unique?Item Housing Urbanism_Living With Neighbours(University of Waterloo, 2016-09-28) Wang, Meng; Blackwell, AdrianMy thesis explores how new social relationships can be reinforced by architectural spaces in residential projects in today’s complex, cross-cultural, political, and economic urban conditions. In Toronto, some newer types of construction often lack the same potential for people to connect and feel accepted within a community. Especially in newly constructed condo projects and suburban houses, Toronto is losing much of its social heritage. Corresponding with the City of Toronto’s appeal for better community housing, this proposal presents a new type of lifestyle, hybrid and vital living in a social-dynamic community. My hypothesis is that the degree of social cohesiveness in a residential project is impacted by its spatial forms. In this regard, the research is conducted on both spatial and social aspects so that a conclusion can be drawn from a cross-projects analysis. Hutong life in Beijing, presented as an ideal urban living precedent has a similar social bond. Based on the spatial form in Hutong, space regulation becomes the original strategy in the proposal. John Holland proposed a methodology of constrained generating procedures. Two models comprise this modeling system: the static model stands for physical forms, such as maps and architecture; the dynamic model discovers the “rules of the game” that allow systems to change their forms. By importing the concept cohort as the basic living cluster, the spatial hierarchy has been set up as the static model, which becomes the bottom-up architectural form for generating a community. The dynamic model that represents the emergence of bottom-up social interaction is approached by setting up the rules, which include social programs, such as social activities for different scenarios, autonomous clans, or commercial behaviours. Spontaneously, the new social network within this community forms. This generating process abstracts residences from cities as an independent self-organizing system that implies in a residential community.Item Ideologies of Medellín's Miracle: A critique of architecture's new utopia(University of Waterloo, 2016-04-22) Davey, Taylor; Blackwell, AdrianOnce considered the most violent city in the world, the city of Medellín, Colombia has more recently received global notoriety as a model of architecture and urban planning for social development. This notoriety originates with the city’s Social Urbanism programme (2004–2011): a developmental model positioned on ideas of social inclusion through territorial, aesthetic, and symbolic strategies of transformation. During the administrative terms of Sergio Fajardo and Alonso Salazar (both members of the new Left party Compromiso Ciudadana) an impressive number of aesthetic buildings and public spaces were built in informal communities across the urban periphery, in a political climate praised for its inclusive strategies of development. “The most beautiful for the most humble,” was Fajardo’s famous adage. Since this period, Medellín has continued to receive significant notoriety. Medellín was named “Innovative City of the Year” by the Wall Street Journal and CitiBank in 2013, and was host to UN- Habitat’s World Urban Forum 7 (2014) entitled “Urban Equity in Development.” However, development in the city has recently departed from the Social Urbanism model, transitioning from small scale architecture and public space as points of community intervention, to the implementation of large-scale urban development projects that bear significant resemblance to more conventional, 21st century models of urban restructuring. At the same time, evidence of chronic violence and forced displacement are raising questions about what current development might hide about everyday realities in its production of a new “Global” city. Many critics concerned with this new direction identify a break in priorities and strategies between the administrative era of the Compromiso Ciudadana and the current administration; however, a more critical investigation into the actors and stakeholders involved in Medellín’s recovery process reveal the way by which today’s development might actually be a logical and intended outcome of the success of Social Urbanism. This analysis requires a broadening of the political and historical analysis, to investigate the dynamics of local power that extend through the 20th century. It also requires a critical investigation of Social Urbanism as a program that, while perhaps possessing some transformative and dignifying agency at the local scale, was treated as an iconic spatial “object” that produced a very specific meaning for the city both locally and globally through aesthetic strategies. Founded on Henri Lefebvre’s idea of social space as being actively produced, the thesis investigates to what degree Social Urbanism could be seen as a socially-transformative and political project based on the actors involved and the distribution (or centralization) of power in its recovery process. By framing the city’s urban development as the product of a much longer transformation – articulated by underlying social, political, and economic conditions of production – it seeks a more critical understanding of the way Social Urbanism’s urban spaces have actually affected everyday life in the city.