Daniel Karpinski Berkeley 2013 Competition entry

Text below was presented at 14th Hawaii International Conference on Arts and Humanities, “POST-COLONIAL ARCHITECTURE OF UNIVERSAL ACCESSIBILITY AND EXTREME.”, Honolulu, Hawaii, January 2014 , (co-author Lauren Haein An, U of T student)

In the summer of 2013, the office of Daniel Karpinski Architect (DKA) was invited to a limited competition to develop a project for a condo building in the area close to Toronto’s core downtown. The site of the competition, located on Queen Street and Berkeley was approximately 100 x 200 feet, including existing venue objects, and a heritage church building. The surrounding area is a mixture of residential and commercial uses along the axis of Queen Street and it is dominated by Moss Park a group of five buildings, each eighteen story tall. Stigmatized by crime, high poverty rate Moss Park is a social housing project, populated by more than half of sixteen thousand people living in this area. Prior to social housing, from the beginning of the twentieth century up to the sixties, the area was predominantly industrial, with rental houses for local workers. 1871 Berkeley Church can be seen in this area as a post-colonial “heritage” object (a church building itself), which twenty years ago lost its religious character and is now used as an entertainment venue.

The competition program called for a high end condo of up to 100,000 SQ FT (zoning of this site is up to 40,000 SQ FT) that could be constructed on a tight budget of 120 CAD per SQ FT and later sold for 500 and more CAD per SQ FT. It is quite typical for construction market in Canada, which (as a political tool manipulated by capitalistic propaganda) is striving to achieve higher economic results. However, such results can be achieved only if the building concept is not only original and unique, but also innovative in functional, social and aesthetic way. The competition brief suggested collaboration and creation of a new “heritage” of the land (simultaneously blurring different pasts: post-colonial, colonial and aboriginal) while at the same time directing participants to come up with a project which could participate in the gentrification of the area.

Part of the project requirements of the project was environmental design. It was supposed to be integrated throughout the design and building process meeting the City of Toronto Green Development Standards, with the goal of LEED Platinum rating. The sustainable design project involving contemporary technologies such as solar collectors, wind mills and green roofs that can increase the construction budget, can also open an opportunity to heal this part of the area, which has been severely abused since industrialization up to nowadays.

The project by DKA proposed 90,000 SQ FT of mixed-use development spread on 10 storeys at 10 FT floor to floor, with Ground Floor up to 15 feet. The project included an underground parking, and was segregating the pedestrian oriented “front facade” from loading areas and service access located at a mid-block laneway. Key ‘ingredients’ of the project included:

· open access to the public Queen Street Garden and Berkeley Church gardens as well as open first floor as an invitation to a participation in the constantly developing site (especially the Ground Floor)

· universal accessibility trough out the whole building in the form of continuous ramps from street level to the top of the roof, safe corridors allowing for wheelchair and bike next to each other, vertical transportation and the units themselves accommodating universal accessibility standards

· continuity of green spaces and parks connecting Church Park, Lobby Parkette (both street level) with the Vertical Green Wall and the garden along the continuous and accessible bike ramp

· LEED design and sustainability

· an infinity pool and recreational functions of lower roof level

· Taddle Creek (a creek which disappeared during the post industrial era) under a glass bridge in the lobby

· the historic (1871) church connected to the proposed building

· recollection of the historic Berkeley Bicycle Club and two velodromes on two levels of the roofs

An event

Far more important than just the programmatic, spatial and functional combination of the elements of this project, was an opportunity to create a “historically symmetrical” event. The event, in Derrida’s words, is “the possibility of the future (to come) in its non-foreseeable otherness, as the irreducible condition where the relation to the other can take place. The architecture (..) must be responsible for this space, its opening to the other yet to come; it must take care of it” (J. Derrida, Générations d’une ville : mémoire, prophétie, responsabilité, cit., p. 245).

Contemporary architecture cannot be only functionally open, exchangeable, structurally flexible and ready for unknown future needs, but must create a space able to give accommodation for what we cannot even imagine, the unknown otherness. The first and foremost demand for a designer or an architect will be then to accommodate the extremes. That is why the project proposed a dwelling for people with disabilities moving on wheelchairs, along with bike users – both reaching their apartments by the same ramp, a common space, a common ground and the community hub. The first universal accessible extreme biking condo opens a space for mutual cohabitation and a potentially new lifestyle, reducing otherness based on physical ability and embracing aging together. It is also includes the possibility of aging together with animals / pets while cultivating private or communal gardens.

Derrida talks about the event as an opening towards what may come. But what about the past? Can an event be open not only towards the future but also towards the past? In other words, could an event be historically symmetrical? From the moment which is now, from a potential of architecture, can an architect create an opening that can accommodate the other yet to come with the other already gone, respecting the past and lost heritage? In post-colonial Canada, before the indigenous object Others had been displaced to Indian Reserves, the another subject other was created, a settler, a colonizer. While the “master” was associated with the Crown, the metropolitan center, the colonist and settler was the other on the periphery of Europe. This process wasn’t related to the perspective of an observer but to power http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/2012/05/18/the-impossibility-of-architecture-in-post-colonial-canada (Dark Matter Karpinski)

Incompleteness

Derrida says that: “what makes the living community of generations who live or build the city possible, who set themselves permanently in the very projection of a city to de-re-build, is to give up the absolute tower, the total city touching the sky, is to accept what a logician would probably call an axiom of incompleteness” (J. Derrida, Générations d’une ville : mémoire, prophétie, responsabilité, cit., p. 245).

Of course each proposed city structure should have a potential, an openness of being adjustable not only to new functions and new otherness but also to unpredictable social development. According to the capitalist logic of the real estate market, the Berkeley Church condo next to, situated just across the impoverished social housing area, should be designed like a gated community, with security dogs, guards and 24 hour concierge. Otherwise the economic value of the property, the price per square foot, and its ability to generate profit will be low. In our proposal the public realm of the street, the profanum is extended throughout the whole building, up to each door of a private apartment. Depending on the poin-of-view, it is an economic suicide or an opportunity to create a new community. On a micro-level, when you see the ramp as street with row houses, the economic viability of the project is different.

But before the axiom of incompleteness can be understood as a positive aspect of urban development, it should embrace other issues. One of them is heritage.

Heritage

According to Derrida: “A city is a whole which must remain indefinitely, structurally not saturable, open to its transformation, to the minimal additions which come to alter or displace the memory of its heritage. A city must remain open to the fact that it does not know yet what it will be: it is necessary to inscribe the respect of this not knowing into the architectonic and city-planning science and skill, as it were a symbol” (J. Derrida, Générations d’une ville : mémoire, prophétie, responsabilité, cit., p. 245)

There are a number of heritages brought together in the competition project. Some of them are obvious and include:

· the post colonial urban grid defining and at the same time being defined by, the Berkeley Church (e.g.: corner location of the church);

· the heritage status of the church and its scale, proportions and massing, respected and reflected in the new scale of the proposed podium of the building, separation of the two buildings, structural rhythm and natural (warm) materials;

· the post-industrial heritage and the fact that the competition grounds were used as a lumber yard, reflected by the wooden facade (or outer skin) of the podium;

· the Taddle Creek, which disappeared with (or because of) the predominantly industrial character of the site, recalled as a creative “archaeology” of the site as well as echoed in the “infinity pool” on the intermediate level of the roof;

· finally even the historic Berkeley Bicycle Club, in its modern version in the proposal of the extreme biking condo.

But the most important and challenging heritage was the pre-colonial one, the indigenous peoples’ heritage. The challenge was not only to select certain elements of the indigenous heritage but also to do this in a non offensive way. The following elements of the project are trying to engage with this heritage:

· “Off grid” – the upper part of the building was shifted from the post-colonial urban grid to recall pre-contact urbanization, based on non geometrical, but rather natural alignments ( like world directions) of structures;

· Manipulation of top soil – Indigenous people were living with nature and earth rather than “own” them (in the western way of owning or possessing a property). In the project the top soil was manipulated in two ways: - as “uncovering” (creative archaeology) to propose a historic continuity of layers of earth from nowadays, through industrial, colonial (the settlers’ time) to pre-contact or – so called - “native” ground, and - as physical continuity in the form of a green wall rising from the street level and from the combination of different gardens and parkettes to the level of the first (intermediate) roof and further, to the top roof. This continuous vertical garden is in a physical way bringing nature to each level of the building, to each apartment.

· Continuity - In indigenous culture only “death beds” (the way in which certain tribes “buried” their dead people) and “winter beds” (constructed in longhouses for the winter season), were detached from the ground. Everything else was related to continuity of the surface (dwelling, travelling, hunting). To create the similar connection with the ground, to extend the ground to the roof, the project is proposing the extension of the street level surface in a form of the accessible ramp (walking, wheelchair-ing or biking from the street to every apartment);

· Living with nature – the combination of the ramp and the vertical garden would allow each member of this community to cultivate and share the plants in this communal garden. The ground level with a number of gardens, is also free of the structure (the openness of the ground floor is maximized) to protect the natural way of vegetation.

· The natural and local materials – Practically, apart form the underground garage, the first floor structure and above podium level (which has to create openness with big spans) the rest of the building could be constructed in a traditional way with local, natural materials.

· Fifteen posts of tipi (main structure) – the necessary concrete structure has a reduction of its logical number of columns to fifteen, to recall the number of tipi posts and is related to native teaching. Each one of the 15 tipi poles represents one aspect of the teaching:

1. obedience

2. respect

3. humility

4. happiness

5. love

6. faith

7. kinship

8. cleanliness

9. thankfulness

10. sharing

11. strength

12. good child rearing

13. hope

14. ultimate protection

15. control flaps (depicting that we are all connected by a relationship) (http://www.fourdirectionsteachings.com/transcripts/cree.html)

We believe that each subject could not only be represented by a column but as well explained.

The structural columns reduction and “destabilization” should contribute to the incompleteness of this building, creating or inviting a potential of the other structural improvements in the future, such us new configuration of the building or its components.

The project includes two open or outdoors velodromes (an arena type of a structure for track cycling or wheelchair racing). Their supports are inspired by the tipi structure (the top roof) and by the pit house (the lower roof).

· Orientation – division of world directions and their relation to indigenous healing wheel:

(http://www.fourdirectionsteachings.com/transcripts/cree.html)

The plan of the building was divided as per the wheel:

- Center – the vertical park

- East – open space and pedestrian entry to the building trough the church garden

- South – the major parts of the apartments are located in this area

- West – the most closed area, the vertical hotel, receptions, vertical transport and energy distribution

- North – airy, open space for meeting, potential and teaching.

· Sharing and invitation – North part of the ground floor of the building was created in the project as an architectural potential, incomplete structure and program. Being a part of the condo and the street, this area offers:

- To the Berkeley church (as a venue place): extension of its functions

- To the street: an urban space, a covered city room welcoming city dwellers

- To the Moss Park across the street: potential space of a meeting between differences of life style and wealth

- To the others who disappeared: a place to re-appear

- To the others who are yet to come: a place to appear.

Reconciliatory architecture?

We might define reconciliatory architecture that creates a historically symmetrical event welcoming not yet present and past otherness, being inclusive to all heritages, but at the same time - being open and incomplete for what may come, offering a sustainable development of a city. “Otherwise what else would one do but carry out some plans, totalize, saturate, suture, suffocate? And this, without taking a responsible decision, since to carry out a plan or to make a “project” into a work is never a responsible decision.” (J. Derrida, Générations d’une ville : mémoire, prophétie, responsabilité, cit., p. 245).