I started thinking about this the other night. For the first 18 years of my life, in other words, up until I moved away to university, I lived for the most part in a detached single-family house in the suburbs of Toronto. But since then, I have almost exclusively lived in apartments/condominiums ranging from converted houses to high-rise buildings.

This was true when I was at the University of Toronto and it was true when I lived in Philadelphia for grad school. In my first year of grad school I lived in a converted house in a questionable area of West Philly. In my second year I lived in a high-rise brutalist building. And in my third year I lived in a small three level walk-up apartment above a pet store and a really great deli. This perhaps not surprising given I was a student.

But since moving back to Toronto, the same has been true. I initially invested and lived in a single-family house, but then decided I preferred living in a condominium and so I have done that ever since. Maybe this changes with kids or maybe it doesn't. But it's interesting to think about the housing types we have chosen or were handed. Location and other factors certainly play a role.

What housing type have you lived in the most throughout your life? Let us know in the comment section below.

Cover photo by Michal GADEK on Unsplash

Feargus O’Sullivan's CityLab series on European housing typologies started in London, but has since gone on to cover Berlin's mid-rise tenements -- called Mietskasernen -- and Amsterdam's canal houses. The series is exactly the sort of thing that I like to geek out about. In fact, I can see a book on this topic staring at me from my bookshelf.

If you end up taking the time to read the articles, you'll be reminded of a couple of things about the way cities work. One, the way we use buildings changes over time. Two, the kind of architecture we pursue is always a reflection of the socioeconomic milieu at that particular moment in time. And three, the way we perceive buildings also changes over time.

In the case of Amsterdam's canal houses, their original function was live/work. They were residences, but they were also warehouses. Amsterdam's maritime dominance meant that it was more profitable to store things, instead of just house people. (Sometimes as much as half of the house was dedicated to storage.) Trade patterns had moved from the Mediterranean up to the North Atlantic, and that worked out pretty well for the Dutch in the 17th century.

In the case of Berlin, their typical mid-rise "rental barracks" went from reviled to coveted as the buildings aged, elevators made the penthouses desirable, and people started to appreciate some of their idiosyncrasies. It's an example of what I was getting at when I spoke to the CBC for this article about Toronto's skyscraper boom. Some things, including buildings, take time. They need to settle in.

Alex Bozikovic (architecture critic for the Globe and Mail) is one of the most vocal proponents of more housing and more density within Toronto's low-rise neighborhoods. Last year, he organized an international design competition where he asked firms to come up with innovative, yet sensible, solutions for how this could be done. I'm a little late getting to this, but today I'd like to walk you through this immensely clever solution by Batay-Csorba Architects, called Triplex Duplex.

The project uses two prototypical, but random, semi-detached lots from the Christie & Bloor area of the city. Each one is 18' wide x 100' deep. So your typical long and narrow lots. From the street (see above image), it looks highly contextual. But in plan, you begin to see the 3 main volumes of the project emerge. Here's a ground floor plan from the architect:

Each volume is around 2,500 square feet. I presume that includes the basement. If you exclude the basement area and the vertical voids throughout the project, which you're allowed to do in your calculation of gross floor area in residential zones, I suspect we'd arrive at an FSI (density) number that isn't that much more than what already exist in these sorts of areas.

At the front of the house (right side of the above plan) is a set of stairs (and a patio) leading down to the front basement unit and a set of stairs leading up to the main front unit. An inset patio also forms part of this main entrance (image below), which is a great way of adding outdoor space while at the same time maintaining privacy across the units. These strategy is one of my favorite aspects of the project.

The rear units are similarly accessed at the back of the building. And the two middle units are accessed along the side of the house. All in all, this housing typology has the ability to accommodate up to 6 units: 3 main suites and 3 secondary type suites. By the architect's own estimate, this could result in 147,000 new housing units across the city if every lot occupied by a semi-detached house were to be redeveloped in this way.

But I wonder if any consideration was given to the secondary (basement) suites that may already exist in these zones. Because in some cases, and as beautiful as these homes may be, we may only be talking about 2 additional suites. Triplexes are also already allowed in some areas of the city. So does this ultimately achieve its intended goal, which is the creation of more "missing middle" housing in order to ease overall housing pressures? Or do we need to be thinking bigger?

As a follow-up to this post (subscribe to stay connected), I am going to look at what a development pro forma might look like for a project of this scale. The numbers have a way of answering a lot of questions. That said, kudos to Alex for taking on this initiative and kudos to the design team for a pretty spectacular architectural solution.

All renderings by the talented Norm Li.