What is Being Subverted
1 Parking lots
2 Architectural renovation/addition strategies
3 Perceived vs. real local culture
4 Children’s attention spans
5 Library’s design/role
6 Urban furniture/materials
Fictional Case Study Questions
How can an addition seem inevitable and possibly original?
How can large parking lots be turned into an asset?
How can the culture of local employment be expressed in a building?
Can libraries become around-the-clock civic spaces?
What parts of suburbia have meaningful value, or are overlooked?
Dictation
This project came from a public tender to add a library to an existing library and recreational center. It has sporty gyms, a pool, and various other community functions. It’s in a very suburban part of Ontario, on the edge of Toronto. It is surrounded by two busy highways, tract housing that looks the same, curving streets and cul-de-sacs, and light industry. The industry is the support network for Ontario’s auto industry. Many businesses in the area are parts manufacturers.
Vaughan is a bedroom community in Toronto but a decent and complete area, so you could live and work here without needing to leave.
This project started with a criticism of tender calls that always envision some sizeable new addition or renovation to the existing project when the original building might be primarily fine and have good integrity. There may even be enough space to fit new programs inside the wasted space of the current building.
The original building was the best or most authentic, albeit a bit Pomo. Since 1985, it has been added onto in somewhat awkward ways.
This case study became the first site of our investigations as an office. I planned to design something, and everyone else would, too, but not in a shared way. Everyone in the studio would work independently, like a class in university where no one sees your final work until it is revealed at the end. No sharing was allowed along the way. Discretion was necessary so no one was inspired or prejudiced by anyone else.
I introduced the site to our studio by showing pictures of the charming parts of car culture. A&W drive-in restaurants, tailgate parties, parking lots as social spaces for free and easy civic movement, mechanisms in auto factories and sushi restaurants where the movement was celebrated, to make cars more accessible to build, or to make selecting sushi more fun. Buffets were discussed, too.
Experimental Text
This case study was about the text as a drawing. Unlike other case studies where the text created, paralleled, or summarized the design at the end, it was the design for this fictional case study.
To avoid coming up with a design that might be unfairly or unequally compared to my studio’s work, I chose to take a non-committal stance. I used this project to explore ‘writing’ a building versus drawing or designing it. The power of thinking about the best idea without sketching, drawing, or looking at architectural images allowed me to think about what something could be. It was only imagined in my mind.
I’m interested in and concerned about the death of architectural criticism. This interest formed part of my DDes application. I like honest criticism, not cheerleading, and not reporting. Opinions should have substance and take a stance. The profession needs more criticism that is not scared to offend or tell it like it is. I want to revive it or be part of it somehow.
I ended up doing one Pro and one Con Building Review. I tried to be very positive and very negative, almost cartoonishly so. I wrote the reviews at the same time, jumping back and forth. I only wrote about things that could be mentioned in both texts. The components of my fictional building ended up being supercharged. Materials and details are just not controversial. This approach allowed me to consider a fictional design that could fall simultaneously into both sides. If something can only be talked about in negative terms, I wouldn’t want to write about it or see it in person, except as a curiosity, like a train wreck. And if a building is only described positively, I am suspicious that the author is not objective or impartial. If any project’s concepts and portions cause strong reactions, does that mean the ideas are irreverent, contrarian, or provocative?
There is real-world applicability to this technique. It seems simplistic, but it might be the glue that binds pragmatic and ideological ideas. Combining the critic and the maker might be a rich way to change a studio’s designs. Writing about how people might negatively experience a project might be a correcting design tool to edit ideas or parts of a project to be complex enough to be perceived in two ways. Many things considered good, like jazz, rap, certain foods, and art, are polarizing, acquired tastes, and misunderstood. Many things start negative, evolving as tastes change. These things don’t enter society as foreign objects; they grow from things that are not considered harmful, controversial, or weird. For example, jazz’s improvisational qualities made it seem immoral and coarse. It comes from other music, but its lack of formal structure was maddening to people who had never heard it.
In the end, everyone in the studio enjoyed the negative review more, feeling they could picture the building better as they read the text. Does this speak to humanity’s attraction to bad news? If it bleeds, it leads, etc.?
I noticed something else when I looked at the Pro and Con texts. Writing all kinds of texts, summaries, or descriptions for this DDes has been hard for three years because I wanted to be formal. I imagined academic writing was supposed to sound a certain way, but it felt unnatural.
All these case study texts were dictated out loud and then only lightly edited for flow and errors. Texts created by talking best represent my intentions. Interestingly, the negative building review captures my design’s strengths better than the positive review.
My Design
Everyone’s been to a library at some point, whether it is a multistory version in a big city or a tiny single-room version in a small town. Every library is organized roughly the same way. You walk in, and you check out your books near the door. A kids’ section is furthest from the main door for safety, and the adult section and newspapers have reading tables or comfortable chairs to encourage lingering.
This is nothing new. Remember, the first experiment I was doing was thinking about the building, which sounds flaky, but this worked out. I looked at pictures of the original 1980s front façade. We modelled the building, too, to examine it from every angle. The front had a pediment on it. It was Pomo, but a lot of the grammar from the 1980s is making a comeback. It had a generous arch and a triangular top. The whole silhouette of this part of the building looked like those toys where kids fit round, triangular, and square blocks into matching holes. It felt elemental. I wanted to stretch this part of the existing building into the parking lot. Instead of the parking being invisible, a shameful reminder of suburbia, or a bland and forgettable part of arriving at the community center, what if the parking lot itself was the site for an unconventional new library with a long, skinny shape? It would bring the impact of the community centre and library right up to the busy road. The building would be its new billboard.
I wondered: What if the cars, people, moms, dads, and teens were all celebrated not just once I got in this building but even in the parking lot? What if the building was so skinny that its length could be very impactful because light would enter it from both sides if it were transparent across its width and section so cars could pull up? Patrons could sit and read a book but also look out at the tailgate or trunk of your excellent car or truck since they could pull them right up to where you roll up a glass door like a muffler shop. Then, in the evening, the books could be rotated out of the way like a conveyor belt at an auto parts factory, so it becomes a spot selling food and drinks. It would be a social space, unlike most libraries, because they close early and typically don’t tolerate mixing books with sticky food and beverages, which makes sense. Still, we need to rethink things to make new things.
If you live in Vaughan, Ontario, you will have two degrees of separation from someone who works in the auto industry. Someone you know likely makes car panels, dashboards, steering wheels, or seats. Why not put that in people’s faces? Remind them of their unfolding cultural heritage in real time. What if when you sat in a library chair reading a book or the newspaper, it was a car seat on a neat pivot? Can we call that contemporary history? Economic history that’s worth knowing about. It tells kids what they could do for a living and what industries they could work in. If you work in that industry, you’d feel like what you did was meaningful. It would bring that industry into the book section, the serious facts section. It would be fun. This idea can be and should be widespread. It applies to many people in any city or town. If significant employers from various industries like fishing, logging, or call centres pump up their staff’s realities in the built environment, it can’t hurt. Very often, how people spend their waking hours is never mentioned in polite company or day-to-day life. It is a specific kind of elephant in the room. The local hockey team might be mentioned. Local pastimes like fishing or skiing might be mentioned or put on signs and brochures. But what people do for money and survival defines them, even if they live for quitting time. It affects their emotions and their private lives. It determines where and how cities grow. It affects relationships. Local divorces skyrocketed when a lumber mill closed in Gibsons, British Columbia. This was caused by the stress of too many people being out of work. People meet like-minded people at work. Factory or industrial work is an institution of sorts with positive and negative qualities.
Parking lots are a great untapped resource for celebrating local culture and jobs. My extruded parking lot library in Vaughan celebrates locals from the auto industry because the fruits of their specific labour surround them in any parking lot they find themselves in.
Parking lots are overwhelmingly defined by the curbs, light standards, and painted lines they corral. I was inspired by the artist and architect James Wines who turned asphalt parking lots into conceptual and practical art. His attitude about ordinary and everyday buildings and building materials made poetry from the unspectacular. His designs for the Best Product Company chain transformed their boring white brick retail boxes. They look like they are crumbling apart, sliding open, blown up, damaged by an earthquake, or peeling apart. They were delightful in ways children probably appreciated most. They had a sense of decay and reality but in a lighthearted way. They appeal similarly to a lively cross-section illustration by Richard Scary or Steven Beisty.
Wines’ designs help you understand how his projects are built. The trickle-down from this kind of artful architecture is that anyone who experiences it will appreciate and notice how any other standard building that is not “falling apart” was built. It elevates the kinds of buildings people use daily because it treats people like they are intelligent. There is some initial shock, but users quickly get into the joke. Wines’ ideas reward the inner child while stimulating the adult intellect.
I hoped to achieve the same kind of reaction with my speculative case study by proposing to yank the building’s pediment out into the parking lot like stretchy taffy.
I wanted to explore ideas that turn the white noise of life in a car culture into something artful. There is no such thing as neutral design since the visual world almost invokes a feeling or emotion in everyone. It might not make you excited or mad, but it makes you feel something specific. If many people feel numb or bored by driving culture, I wanted to make it resonate in new ways.
These ideas are taken inside the library. The bookshelves and some of the walls inside are built from the same precast concrete curbs that every parking lot has. Those with a hexagon shape in cross-section. What if they became benches and bookshelves inside the library? What if the tall green light standard that arches up and over with those hideous sodium or LED lights were more than just a light standard? What if you put three or four of them together so the negative space in between makes a “ball” shape? You could have plexiglass, fibreglass, or carbon fibre from the auto industry nestled like a tree canopy at the top. Maybe it would be spheres cut in half. They could collect rainwater to be recycled for parking lots, shrubs, and trees. What if these fake trees created shade or collected the sun for electricity? When a long line of large muffler shop doors is open, the simple pediment shape of the current library would not have much of an overhang, but if you plant a grove of abstract tree light standards, the shade would be created.
If you experienced that kind of abstract light standard tree in the Father E Bulfon Community Centre’s parking lot, you would see the invisible become visible. You would never see them with the same eyes again because you saw their new potential. This would only be possible because someone thought they were interesting enough to become something new.
My solution for the new library in Vaughan can only be imagined in your mind. Readers can and should take sides by reading the Pro or Con review and learning about the other projects designed by our studio.
Super Short Sentences
D’Arcy
If a building needs an addition, just “extrude” part of it like a Sketchup model. Parking lots are places full of potential and people.
Kelsey
A library in the heart of a mass single-family landscape.
Jonny
Background: An existing all-business no fun box with large parking lot adjacent to a commuter’s highway.
Commuter’s refuge or dream are two ways to think about the opportunities for Vaughan’s new public library.
Jesse
How can we add library programming to an existing community center?
Alex
A parking lot library addition to a community centre.
Mary
Not so much about what the library is but can be–a collective effort.
Shane
The Father Ermanno Bulfon community centre is located in Vaughan Ontario, where it is surrounded by a massive parking lot and a tidy hellscape of endlessly repeating rows of copy-pasted suburban housing and grey cars.
Breana
In a place dominated by cars, this project adds more space for cars.
This exploration is part of an ongoing speculative project that began as doctoral research. The collaborative case studies test ideas that will inform future built work. A new design methodology using unconventional techniques explores how to delay aesthetics and form in a search for utility-driven, human-focused projects. Architecture’s status quo is questioned through an optimistic but contrarian lens.
