They Work On So Many Levels

Classic turn-of-the-century triplexes on St. Urbain Street

In Montreal, it’s hard to avoid plexes. Found in almost every neighbourhood, they define the landscape and have made this city what it is today, architecturally, culturally and socially. With their distinct form—several superposed flats, each extending from the front of a building to the back—plexes are a popular form of housing, adaptable to many different lifestyles. But what’s their story? How did Montreal come to be a city of walkup apartments, outdoor staircases and balconies?

According to David Hanna, professor of geography at the Université du Québec à Montréal, the origins of the plex can be traced to a nineteenth century “marriage of convenience” between French and Scottish traditions. Historically, some French-Canadian settlers used outdoor staircases to link the first and second floors of their houses; immigrants from Scotland, meanwhile, brought with them the custom of stacking one flat on top of another. “It kept morphing in the nineteenth century until it settled into the form of an outdoor staircase leading to each apartment,” said Hanna.

Architect Susan Bronson, who teaches at the Université de Montréal, notes that turn-of-the-century building codes, designed to improve living conditions, played a big role in reinforcing the dominance of the plex. In Montreal and the suburb of St. Louis (now Mile End), lot sizes were increased from 20 by 60 feet to 25 by 100 feet and laneways were built in between blocks to service new apartments. Setbacks were mandated on newly-built residential streets, indirectly encouraging the use of outdoor staircases as a space-saving measure.

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Filling Tokyo Space with Tiny Houses

When he wrote earlier this year about the “two faces” of Tokyo, our contributor Siqi Zhu noted that, in Japan’s capital, “weak eminent domain laws have resulted in years of piecemeal development and an incredibly fine-grained urban fabric.” This is unlike many other cities in the developed world where government agencies eagerly expropriate land for vast new building projects. In the 1950s, 60s and 70s, vast swaths of urban landscape were razed in Canada and the United States to make way for utopian housing complexes, stadiums and office blocks. The same thing is happening throughout China today.

In Japan, though, urban neighbourhoods remain eclectic patchworks of individually-developed houses and apartment buildings. Even in the middle of Tokyo, the world’s largest city, the backstreets of many retail and residential districts retain a cluttered, hodgepodge quality. Naturally, this jumbled pattern of development has left some odd-shaped spaces between buildings—spaces that are attracting attention from people who want an affordable home in the heart of the city. Enter the kyo-sho-jutaku, or microhome: houses built on parcels of land that, in some cases, are as small as 250 square feet, about the size of a single room in many North American dwellings.

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Toronto’s Innovative Infill

Laneway in Toronto. Photo by Jeremy K.

They are the spaces we ignore: Toronto’s alleyways and awkward corners, where the urban fabric droops like a gangly teenager’s ill-fitting shirt. Recently though, new ideas have emerged to deal with two of the city’s most overlooked spaces: its 300 kilometres of laneways and the underside of its infamous Gardiner Expressway.

When architects Brigitte Shim and Howard Sutcliffe were looking to build a house in the early 1990s, they wanted something modern but affordable. This combination, however, is virtually unheard of in Toronto, where high land values and restrictive architectural guidelines (essentially, new houses are required to look like their neighbours) make it hard to build unusual houses in established neighbourhoods. Their solution? Build something out of sight, in a back alley. After finding a piece of property in the city’s east end that was used mainly for storing abandoned cars, they applied to the Ontario Municipal Board for permission to build a laneway house. At first, neighbours were alarmed and some protested against the project. Despite the complaints, however, Shim and her husband got the go-ahead from the OMB, and their concrete-block house was completed in 1993. “Part of the design is that it really protected everyone’s privacy,” says Shim. “Everything is really unobtrusive.”

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Capital Housing

Like many other cities across Canada, Ottawa experienced a boom during the 1880s and 1890s, which persisted well into the 1930s. Much of the housing that has become characteristic to the the nation’s capital was built during this period, and most of these homes still exist. As in Toronto and Montreal, the choice building material for Ottawa’s first permanent homes was brick. While Toronto and Montreal both had large quantities of apartment buildings, though, Ottawa’s housing stock was comprised mostly of relatively large single-family homes that were often later subdivided into apartments.

The photo above shows three 1910-era multi-family homes with typical Ottawa design features: the prominent front balcony, and in the case of the two houses on the right, “barn roof” detail. Such homes were usually built to house two families—one on the upper two floors and another on the bottom floor—but many have since been subdivided into three or four-apartment units.

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Getting to Know the Plex

There’s a type of urban housing that is more versatile than rowhouses, more human-scaled than apartment buildings and far denser than single-family homes. It’s called the plex—but unless you’ve lived in a select few cities, you’ve probably never heard of it.

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Roadsworth Vindicated — And Other Interesting Ideas From 2006

Roadsworth’s stencil art in 2004

This week I was flipping through the New York Times Magazine‘s annual “Year in Ideas” issue when I came across a particular innovation that reminded me of something else. It seems that the tweedy good folks of Cambridge, Massachusetts have decided to tackle the problem of speeding cars, not by installing a speed bump or a mini-roundabout, but by street art. For $10,000, much less than what it would cost for traditional traffic-calming devices (raised crosswalks run about $100,000, for instance), the city paid local artist Wen-ti Tsen to paint an abstract design — a mural pretending to be a traffic circle, to paraphrase the artist — in the middle of a busy intersection, Although studies are still underway to determine its effectiveness as a traffic-calming measure, local residents already swear that it has worked: “There’s something in the road, so there’s a moment of confusion and you slow down. Then you see it’s flat, and you drive over it,” said one.

Montrealers will be reminded of local street artist Roadsworth, who had a moment of glory in 2004 when he decorated Montreal street surfaces with his tongue-in-cheek stencils: parking space dividers were turned into bird perches, crossworks were framed by barbed wire, zipper heads added to lane dividers and so forth.

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