Paul Raff / David Warne

Strachan House (Street City)
Strachan House is a community of 60 chronically homeless persons in a renovated factory. A recent Governor General's Award in architecture cited its innovative approach to public spaces that support healthy collective life offering both private enclaves and shared spaces. The architectural design of Strachan House, by Levitt Goodman Architects, employs a structure analogous to a city street to encourage safe and vital social interaction.

The street itself is designed and constructed as a commissioned artwork. The concept for this artwork follows the architect's analogy to a typical street, but extends it to explore poetic and metaphorical potentials. A city street differentiates itself from a concrete corridor with its texture, signs of previous life and its imperfections with its cracks, puddles and slopes. When experienced from a child's imaginative perspective, the streetscape is indeed a vast terrain: a microcosmic landscape.

As part of a method of embodying these characteristics, the design process involved laying sheets of glass over the architectural floor plans. Each sheet was shattered by applying particular forces analogous to the social and spatial forces of that part of the community. The resulting shatter pattern formed templates for construction. A unique system was devised to create the fractured streetscape with a fine plywood formwork floor on top of the subfloor. The formwork was filled with liquid gypsum-based concrete, which at some points was contained by the formwork, at some points overflowing. Thus, it set in planar shards whose edges disappear and reappear like landscape fissures. As well, artifacts from the street selected by residents of the original Street City were set in the concrete and then removed to leave fossil-like impressions: a first layer of the community's history open for interpretation.

The result is an organic formal field: a groundscape in which every moment is unique. Unlike a traditional floor pattern, it is not predictable, but rather open to imagination. Like a complex puzzle of interconnected, interdependent pieces that form a whole, it is a metaphor for this social collective of truly individual characters.