Architectural Design Studio 6: Option Studios - Baird

As If Toronto Were Tokyo …..

George Baird

For some time now, I have been interested in the relationship of patterns of urban land ownership to the building typologies that characterize the urban form of cities. One early example of this is the studies of the North Jarvis neighbourhood in Toronto that I published many years ago in the Walker Art Centre’s journal: Design Quarterly. Issue 108 of that publication was edited by Barton Myers and me, and was entitled “Vacant Lottery”. 

More recently, this interest of mine has been revived, partly by a growing interest in the work of the Japanese architectural firm Atelier Bow Wow, and partly by a trip to Tokyo, on which Yoshiharu Tsukamoto of Bow Wow acted as my part-time tour guide. Bow Wow’s interest in the patterns of land ownership in Tokyo, and in the intensive use of very small parcels of land there led to the publication of their book “Pet Architecture”, in which Tsukamoto and Kaijima document a series of very small buildings on very small, and anomalously configured parcels of land in various Tokyo neighbourhoods. This interest of theirs is also reflected in a series of their own designs for houses on small parcels of land in such neighbourhoods. 

In the studio I propose to conduct in the Winter Term, I am interested in investigating this phenomenon of buildings on small and/or anomalously configured parcels of land further, in Toronto, as well as in other cities. Tsukamoto has told me that there are 1.8 million separate parcels of land in Tokyo, and that these parcels are controlled by no fewer than 1.7 million separate land owners. This is a very highly diversified pattern of urban land ownership, and historically, it has contributed significantly to the typical urban form of Tokyo.

In the studio I propose, we will begin with an urban research investigation of examples of the relationship of patterns of ownership of land to urban form in selected case study cities, including Hong Kong, Tokyo and Toronto. We will seek to understand how the pattern of land in each such city influences the pattern of urban form that typifies each of them.

The studio will conclude with the preparation of a series of design projects for a series of (relatively) small, as-yet, un-redeveloped parcels of land in Toronto. (Admittedly, the Toronto sites selected will not be as small as the ones that Bow Wow has documented and has designed for in Tokyo. But they will be small enough to - as yet - not have attracted the interest of developers in this city). Each student in the studio will be assigned a site and a series of possible programs, and will prepare a design.