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For three days at the Niagara Falls Convention Centre, hundreds of architects and other experts from around the world gathered for the Ontario Association of Architects’ 2024 Conference to discuss innovative ideas and solutions to design safe, inclusive, and sustainable spaces that foster community, health, and well-being.
The OAA, which regulates the practice of architecture in the province to protect the public interest, holds its Conference annually. With this year’s theme of Housing: Pushing the Envelope, attendees discussed the urgency of addressing the province’s critical housing shortage, sustainable development, and new technologies to improve architectural efficiency.
Between session seminars, a trade show, design awards, and a robust opening plenary, attendees had the chance to bring together their love of design and the need to solve pressing problems for Ontario residents.
“This conference brings elements of not only technical academic topics, but also socio-political and arts-driven criticism conversation,” says Settimo Vilardi, a Windsor-based architect and OAA president. “When you combine those, there’s a lot of really good dialogue that happens — not only in the sessions, but then afterward at the social events and dinner parties.”
Here are some of the major themes — and takeaways — of this year’s conference:
Housing — Pushing the Envelope
With Ontario’s urgent affordable housing crisis, architects spent the conference discussing how to help create more housing options simply, cost-effectively, and durably.
“Housing is incredibly important for Ontarians, and we are looking for the roles that the architectural profession can play in finding new approaches to solving it,” says Vilardi. “At the OAA, we try to see everything through a lens of climate action and through a lens of equity, diversity, inclusion, and Indigenous Reconciliation. We need solutions that create more accessible, healthy spaces for all people to live, and we need to do this in already-vibrant neighbourhoods that optimize land use, leverage existing infrastructure, and promote welcoming, resilient communities.”
Creating more homes isn’t a new problem, nor is it one that can necessarily be solved through rapid construction.
“We need to be fast, we need to find housing for people — but maybe too fast isn’t always the answer,” said Shawn Micallef, a Toronto Star columnist and moderator of the conference’s opening plenary. “How do we be fast, but also thoughtful?” he asked the audience to consider.
Naama Blonder, co-founder of Smart Density, challenged the notion that cities like Toronto are at capacity and “dense enough”. She looked at how much room the city has for more people, and how much land near transit is underutilized.
“Sometimes I feel it’s our industry’s fault — we arm the public with the buzzwords,” Blonder said during the plenary. “There’s something in the planning system that allows you to live in a single-family home by a subway, but it allows you to dictate that there’s no greater density next to you. We think it’s democracy. It’s not.”
Architect Robert Boyd, senior construction manager of development for the Toronto Community Housing Corporation, also pointed out that there are factors besides architecture at play in Ontario’s housing crisis.
Affordability is typically understood as a place where people spend 30% of their income on housing, and there are slow but steady increases in household income. In Toronto, there was a first-quarter increase in housing of 5%, but most people have not received a 5% wage increase over the last year.
“I’m not sure we have a housing crisis, so much as we have an income crisis,” Boyd told Conference attendees.
The Importance of Sustainability
Architects are also well aware that Ontario’s drive for more housing must take the ongoing climate emergency into consideration.
“It’s important to have more homes, but it’s not just a matter of building a bunch of houses or apartment buildings. It has to be quality and environmentally conscious,” says Vilardi.
One of the biggest environmental issues in the world of architecture is concrete. It’s one of the most polluting industries in the world, as well as one of the most widely used building materials.
As Adam Auer, president and CEO of the Cement Association of Canada, explained in a session, some engineers or specifiers are resistant to lowering embodied carbon.
“Even if, as an architect, you specify the lowest carbon and concrete possible for a given project, the as-delivered concrete is often a lot different from what you’re hoping for,” Auer says.
The speakers in this session said these are systemic barriers to decarbonization that exist through the decision-making chain across the construction industry. “These are only going to be solved,” Auer says, “if we’re all talking a lot more regularly with each other to make sure that we’re not blocking these solutions from making it into the market.”
Conference attendees also discussed tackling embodied carbon through their selection of building materials.
Matthew Winters, project manager at ArcelorMittal Global R&D, says architects, engineers, developers, and contractors all need to work together to address the complex mix of factors around material selection.
This is especially important for projects in cities like Toronto, where embodied carbon calculations are required for new city building projects. One of the easiest ways to address this is to build lighter.
“The lighter the mass of the building, the better the environmental performance,” Winters told Conference attendees.
Tech transformation
Architects also discussed how to use everything from 3D printing to the latest AI tools to support their craft.
There’s also been a lot of technical changes that have impacts on the way spaces are designed, as well as how teams collaborate.
Graphisoft discussed how architects can use software to streamline the digital design process and manage collaboration across an entire team. Their tools let architects be designers, rather than slog through routine or time-consuming administrative tasks.
Meanwhile, architect Dory Azar unpacked the ways other architects can leverage social media to step out of the design studio. Cultivating an online persona can drive business for a firm and promote collaboration.
“What we are after here is attention,” Azar kicked off by saying. “The question is: What do we do with that attention?”
He suggested architects using social media identify their ideal audience and get in front of them with relevant content — especially if it lets people see behind the curtain of what architects do every day.
But technological innovation in architecture extends far beyond the digital. At a session on additive manufacturing, architect Tara Bisharat explained how 3D printing techniques can pour concrete and other materials much cheaper, faster, and more efficiently than conventional methods.
“It competes with other methods on time, cost, and quality,” she told the session. “It exponentially improves operations and deliveries, and it allows for customizations without a premium.”
Watch the opening plenary of the Conference here, or visit the OAA Conference website here.
