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.
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