Seniors Housing

SENIORS HOUSING - BUILDING ECOLOGY

The roots of this Arts Umbrella Summer Architecture Intensive grew from an article in local media about a proposed tower near Keefer and Gore streets that would house local seniors from Chinatown/Strathcona.  However, the Chau Luen Society was thwarted in their efforts to move forward because the tower’s location would impact the roots of 4 mature trees and therefore ran afoul of the City of Vancouver’s Tree Preservation By-law.

Digging a little deeper, we found that both this property and the nearby Chau Luen’s building at Main and Union were expropriated for a 1970’s freeway infrastructure that was never constructed. The successful Chinatown Freeway Protest was a landmark in local, grass roots resistance to unwanted development and draconian governance.

The week intensive imagined that the City of Vancouver ceded the entire piece of land adjacent the proposed Chau Luen Seniour Tower back to Chau Luen and the local community for re-development at its’ ‘highest and best use’. 

In our conversations, the group acknowledged an admiration of the City’s Tree policy but felt that elders should be able to have access to quality housing alongside our elder trees. We did not approach this as an ‘either/or’ situation but rather a ‘both/and’ issue that can be address through good design.

The Design Challenge:

• Housing seniors in Vancouver’s Chinatown
• Density increase from 82 units to 130 units – 48 new homes
• Lovely and liveable housing and amenity spaces 

The Studio explored the foundational role of ecology in relationship to housing by asking the following framing questions:

• Is this a house? (ground, tree, fence, road, buildings, etc)
• What is housing? Whose housing?
• What is ecology? Whose ecology?
• What is the guest/host relationship in housing? 
• Can building ecology improve housing conditions? 
• What conditions does housing depend on ecology? 
• What is a right-of-way? What is a right-of-housing?
  Who has the right-of-way? Who has the right-of-housing? Who does not?