Humanities
What one man’s obsession with the evolving blueprint of the suburban home reveals about us.
The marking of a house with creative aspects on the facade solidifies the sense of ownership
More than 8,000 academics are gathered in St. Catharines, Ont., this week for the annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, presenting papers on how we live, love, learn and clash. Over the coming days, the National Post will highlight some of the most compelling research. Today, Joseph Brean writes about how suburbanites find their own paths to individuality:
Saulius Svirplys’ academic expertise in suburban architecture began as a hobby, collecting the floor-plan drawings of houses in Bramalea, on the northwestern outskirts of Toronto, where he grew up.
Sometimes, he would walk the streets, taking note of the ways people had modified their homes from the original innovative architecture; Bramalea was created in 1958 as Canada’s first self-contained satellite city, like a utopian suburb you never had to leave.
A former real estate agent, his hobby gradually turned into a journalistic research effort, as he discovered how secretive big builders are with their designs. So he turned to unusual sources, like historical marketing bumpf and the ads in newspaper archives, and of course many open houses.
Now a PhD candidate in geography at the University of Ottawa, Mr. Svirplys has expanded his interest to include awkwardly Spanish-themed villas in Ottawa’s 1970s west-end suburbs, and in the process built up an unrivalled collection of suburban floor plans. In them, he has not only brought academic rigour to an architectural field that is typically ignored in favour of more grand urban buildings. He has also sketched a unique historical moment in do-it-yourself Canadian architecture.
“Much like an animal marks his/ her territory, the marking of a house with creative aspects on the facade solidifies the sense of ownership,” he writes in a paper to be presented next week at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences.
By documenting the ways people renovate their houses, and tracking this architectural change according to social theories, he has shown that suburbs of both Ottawa and Toronto have unique housing that reflects the elite cultural status of their designers, which is at odds with the people who have lived in them.
This tension sets in play a slow dynamic in which “homeowners feel ill at ease or out of place with the landscape, and a struggle ensues in which they adapt the existing framework so they are comfortable.”
The basic physical structure of the housing — “the bones,” as real estate agents say — remains in place, reflecting the intent of the designers. But the renovations offer a perspective on the needs and wishes of the inhabitants.
The original homes were designed at a moment when architecture was riding the mid-century modern wave, and avant-garde buildings like Moshe Safdie’s Habitat ’67 in Montreal seemed like the way of the future. As with many suburban designs where space was freely available, they tended to “accentuate the horizontal,” as Mr. Svirplys put it, with unusual roof lines and off-centre placing in the lot.
The renovations, on the other hand, are less deliberate in their stylistic aspirations, more pragmatic, emphasizing comfort over style, and personal utility over outward displays of opulence, or cultural savvy.
In his walks, he can see the evidence of, for example, sales on windows at local home-improvement stores. For the most part, these renos were done on a shoestring, based on what is available, rather than with government support, capitalist in- vestment or expert planning.
These are neighbourhoods in which nearly every single house has been changed, reflecting what Mr. Svirplys calls the “creative suburban condition,” a curious term, given the stereotypical view of suburbs as a land of cookie-cutter sameness.
This is not the “creative class,” popularized by celebrity economist Richard Florida’s idea that culturally elite downtowners with jobs in the knowledge economy drive up real estate prices in gentrifying urban areas.
Rather, this is regular folk making their homes in the burbs a little nicer, creatively.
“As a part of my personal process of reading the plans, I often like to visit the built communities either by car, foot or virtually on Google Street View to see what the actual built landscape looks like,” he writes. “To my surprise, in many of the areas with the most innovative or unique designs the houses have been drastically changed, and in some cases nearly every single house is unrecognizable from the original design.”
Even with all that creativity, though, trends emerge, in a process that recalls a quip from the influential 20th-century architect Le Corbusier, whom Mr. Svirplys favourably quotes: “It is life that is right and the architect who is wrong.”
In an interview, Mr. Svirplys cited the example of the Spanish villa style in Ottawa, which came complete with stucco that reliably failed in the Canadian weather, such that now almost all of the houses are clad in siding.
Many did similar upgrades, such as enclosing the carport, or the porch over the garage, to make an extra room. Others punched windows in odd places.
“Unlike standard suburban housing where the middle class is convinced to settle for what they can afford, the housing under study reveals that when the producers of housing are misaligned with the domestic field, the homeowners take matters into their own hands,” he writes.
Canada is not the first to see a process like this, in which the grand theories of urban planners run up against the pressures of real life.
Letchworth, England, for example, has a claim to be the world’s first suburb, in that it was the first “garden city” built in the early 20th century according to the “three magnets” theories of Ebenezer Howard, followed soon after by Welwyn Garden City and the larger commuter hub of Milton Keynes. The three magnets were city, country, and garden city, and each had its pros and cons, according to the theory. The city offered opportunity but was crowded and crime-ridden; the country was pleasant but offered little hope for social advancement. Only the garden city could offer a happy medium. It was popular, but not quite revolutionary.
Bramalea took that theory one step further by aiming to be selfsufficient, a vision epitomized by its advertising mascot, little Bonnie Bramalea, who declared in a poster: “I live in Bramalea — doesn’t everybody?”
It did not work out that way. Bramalea has since been absorbed by Brampton, Canada’s ninth-largest city; the circumstances that gave rise to Bramalea, with lots of government support and massive cultural interest in escaping the city, are no longer in place. Now the pressure is to increase urban density wisely, not escape it entirely. As a result, Mr. Svirplys’ “creative suburban condition” is fading from view.
It was a distinct and unique period of architectural innovation, he said, worthy of study in part because it is unlikely to be repeated in quite the same way. “It’s hard to say today if that type of community exists,” he said.