(Survivalist) Canadian Architecture 2020+

“Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

Dorothy, the Wizard of Oz, 1939

As we emerge from COVID-19 Lockdown – and its unprecedented restrictions placed on our civil rights - I can’t help but speculate on what prospects await today’s aspiring young Canadian architects in university and practice. 

For me, the Panopticon penal building type, with the central Rideau Hall-like Regulatory Tower overseeing all activity of the facility’s dutiful, restrained architectural denizens, is an appropriate metaphorical answer to my query.

1.      Global Climate and Environmental Catastrophe is predicted by the United Nations by early as 2030 – a scant 9.5 years away – unless all human activity, including patterns of consumption / needs influencing architectural design, are immediately weaned off hydrocarbon-based energy, building systems and products.

2.      There is every likelihood that Global Pandemics similar to COVID-19 will reoccur at least every decade in our globally interconnected world, requiring virtually all building types to adopt minimal acute healthcare levels of infection prevention for their planning, materials, systems and operations.

3.      Debilitating levels of debt shared by federal, provincial and municipal governments to ‘flatten the pandemic curve’, will affect the budgeting, scope, programming, siting and timing of all future public building and infrastructure projects. 

If one accepts these three tenets as fundamental to future architectural activity, then the (Survivalist) Canadian Architecture 2020+ ethos is now: 

Technical Compliance … (and only thereafter) … Firmness. Commodity. Delight.