COME TOGETHER, RIGHT NOW
Hobin Architecture aims to design ‘real’ communities — not just clusters of houses
Two very different communities that share important similarities are prime examples of the effect that Hobin Architecture, a firm recognized more often for its custom home designs, is having on Ottawa’s mass housing market.
Those communities — Greystone Village, a mixed-use redevelopment of the former Oblates land in Old Ottawa East that will see more than 900 residential units, and The Haven, an affordable housing project of 98 townhomes and apartments close to the Longfields transit station in Barrhaven — won both of the community award categories (one for a planned community, the other for a built one) at last fall’s Housing Design Awards put on by the Greater Ottawa Home Builders’ Association.
And they were important wins for the team at Hobin Architecture that designed them.
“They’re unlike typical developer communities,” says architect Gord Lorimer, a longtime partner at the firm who was the lead on both projects. “They really are communities in the greater sense; they’re not just clusters of houses on streets. And both of them are intended and designed to bring people together, to actually build community in a real, true sense.”
As part of their shared design approach, both Greystone and The Haven focus on the spaces around the buildings as much as the buildings themselves. Each features a pedestrian allée that serves to draw people in and connect them, encouraging interaction that can help create that sense of community. Both emphasize pedestrians and cyclists over cars, and both pay particular attention to scale, esthetically and as a way of acknowledging the context of the surrounding neighbourhood.
At The Haven, scale is about being relatable, rather than being a social experiment.
“Because the tenants don’t have any say in what the building is, (there are often) all these kind of modernist tomorrow buildings that are designed when the aspirations of the people who live there is to live in houses like other people live in,” says Lorimer.
“We try to design them in a way that I’d be happy to live there. You want it to fit in and at the same time be distinctive.”
But while Lorimer shuns “modernist tomorrow buildings,” the designs at The Haven are forward-thinking. Townhomes have the look of an oversized single home. Rather than a block of units connected in a row, all homes are visitable — meaning people with disabilities cannot only have a unit there, they can easily visit their neighbours without barriers. And there is an absence of the vinyl siding that is common in the suburbs.
The fact that it won an award competing against larger developer projects “recognizes that a not-for-profit project bears the scrutiny of the marketplace and is attractive to live in and is affordable,” says company founder Barry Hobin.
Developed and run by Multifaith Housing Initiative, The Haven is designed to be LEED Gold, although it does not yet have its certification. (LEED, or Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, is an industry-leading program that measures and recognizes a commitment to green building and living.)
Greystone is also a LEED project.
Unlike The Haven, where the design process was straightforward, at Greystone, the path was circuitous. Before the project’s developer, Regional Group, and Hobin Architecture came on board, a Community Design Plan was created in conjunction with the city, the original land owners (the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate) and the community.
That plan had some important elements: keeping the distinctive monastery on the site; keeping the tree-lined allée that led from Main Street to the monastery’s front door; retaining the semi-circular forecourt; and maintaining the shoreline, which for many years had been informally open to the public. But the plan’s attempt at incorporating the almost 1,000 residential units sought for the property and a site next door “seemed totally inappropriate,” says Lorimer.
The plan called for the site to be dotted with mid-rise buildings, something Hobin knew needed to be changed.
“It was Barry who initiated the concept of being sympathetic to the surrounding single-family homes and how we design the community,” says Josh Kardish, vice-president of Regional’s homebuilding division, eQ Homes.
While creating the Greystone master plan was a collaborative effort, Hobin’s vision saw an overall design for housing that started low on the edges, next to the existing low-rise homes on surrounding streets, and gradually built up the height and density as you moved away from that existing residential.
Hobin and eQ have also worked together outside the urban core, most notably on eQ’s innovative low-rise condo buildings in Kemptville and then in Kanata on projects offering an appealing low-maintenance lifestyle and one-level living for downsizers who wanted to stay in their communities.
The Foxwood condos in Kanata, in particular, proved to be so popular they sold out within weeks of going on sale in 2011. eQ has since offered them at its development in Stittsville, Fernbank Crossing.
While Greystone might be one of the most high-profile developer projects Hobin has worked on, the company’s longest builder partnership has been with Uniform Urban Developments. Starting with Uniform’s early, small infill projects in the ’90s and continuing with its larger developments such as The Orchard in Barrhaven and Richardson Ridge in Kanata, Uniform founder John MacDougall says it’s a relationship built on mutual respect and a shared vision.
“We always thought housing was not about volume or to be solely economically driven — we thought it was about art and architecture and we had to partner with an architect who reinforced this.”
Lorimer notes that there’s an element of the same approach taken with The Haven and Greystone in Uniform’s projects; they are relatable while still being distinctive. “Maybe it’s not as extensive, but there’s a theme that’s consistent to the houses.”
Hobin’s effect in low-rise suburban housing has been to bring a combination of elevated architectural elements and design solutions aimed at combating things like the stereotype of a streetscape of nothing but garage doors.
“Not only is (a dominant garage) architecturally uninteresting, but it takes away all the security of the street because from your house, you can’t see what’s going on in the street,” says Lorimer. “Without going back to the 1920s and making all the garages at the back of the house, we try to downplay the impact of that garage and somehow try to get the living space back at the front.”
Those solutions include ways of minimizing garages, which sometimes means putting them in the rear, adding usable porches and lots of big windows.
“It comes from more of our custom home design approach, and we apply that to the production wherever we can.”
Whether custom, infill or suburban, housing and development deserves to be looked at with like goals, notes Uniform marketing co-ordinator Emily Meyers. “Hobin is capable of bringing a similar architectural language to a broader market. They do it with an awareness that the parameters are slightly different, but the end goal is to bring quality and design to another setting.
“Production housing and good design should not be mutually exclusive.”
The next step is bringing the community concept of a Greystone to suburbia, something Hobin and Lorimer feel will be connected to Light Rapid Transit development.
“The next really big thing is when transit gets extended to the suburbs, what does it mean in terms of the nodes around transit stations in the suburbs?” asks Hobin.
When you have rapid transit, you have the nodes where you’re creating a hub that attracts people, says Lorimer. “Then there’s a logic in building higher-density housing here and businesses here and so they become mixed-use buildings.”
The next really big thing is when (LRT) gets extended to the suburbs, what does it mean in terms of the nodes around transit stations?