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The Architecture and Design Gallery at the University of Toronto’s Daniels Building recently welcomed a crowd of students, architecture enthusiasts, and industry professionals to attend the opening of the gallery’s first exhibition since the start of the Covid-19 Pandemic. The exhibition is titled Housing Multitudes: Reimagining the Landscapes of Suburbia, and was curated by Richard Sommer, director of the Daniels Global Cities Institute and former Dean of the Daniels faculty, and Michael Piper, director of the Daniels Masters of Urban Design program. Both were in attendance and spoke at the evening event.
Expressing its argument through a cartoon-style medley of illustrations and animations, the exhibition strives to provide a roadmap that guides the viewer to interrogate how we might restructure the existing suburban environment. The question is, how can Toronto work with its challenging housing typography to develop new housing situations that are classified under what has become known as the ‘missing middle’ (housing sized between single family home and mid-rise); the answer, as suggested by the exhibit, isn’t achieved by tearing everything down and starting again, but rather by adapting the existing suburban layout to make it more suitable for the realities of a dense and diverse urban community.
In the context of Toronto, the problem of missing middle housing stems from the process of exclusionary zoning that dates back to the early 20th century. Referred to in zoning terms as the yellow belt, estimates suggest that 70% of Toronto’s residential area is zoned exclusively to accommodate single family homes, based on laws that were established decades — if not a century — ago. While vertical development remains confined to strict corridors around the city centre and different suburban centres, the yellow belt sprawls outwards, creating an auto-oriented landscape that has fallen far behind as a desirable model of urbanism.
The exhibition is laid out physically to tell this story while simultaneously looking ahead, to offer its own ideas on how this process of remodelling the suburbs could look. The analysis is divided into three sections that look at the problem at different scales, beginning with the regional scale, followed by the neighbourhood scale, and concluding with the residential scale. Making clever use of the ramped gallery space, viewers interact with each section chronologically, beginning at the lowest point and traveling upwards until they have reached the end of the exhibit.
Throughout the exhibit, the process of reconfiguring suburban living situations is discussed with different media in visually captivating ways. Animated videos are projected from the ceiling to the floor of the central space, creating a dramatic lighting situation that draws attention to the videos, while the quirky animated style presents the subject matter in a casual, even playful manner. Additionally, the entire ledge of the ramp that guides viewers through the exhibit is lined with a model depicting the way suburban neighbourhoods could be laid out; existing houses are seen in yellow, sharing their large properties with imagined structures that incorporate the ideas of the exhibit.
As a viewer, the exhibit is both informative and thought provoking, illuminating the factors that have created this urban paradox, and offering a seemingly simple solution that imagines the suburban landscape not as the antithesis of the urban landscape, but as an extension of it. The exhibition can be viewed from Monday to Friday between the hours of 9 and 5 at the Architecture and Design Gallery in the basement of the Daniels Building at 1 Spadina Crescent.
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