Can I Biggy Size Your Building?

A million-sq.-ft. warehouse in Niagara, ON

Photo: Ian Ellingham

When the enclosure of space is determined solely by its construction method, the result is a form of architecture that is spiritually vacant. Yet in many building types today, spaces are organized as immense, autonomous forms in the service of pure economics, rather than creating a comfortable environment for people. These economical masses display little concern for their specific function or for the sense of dignity or solemnity derived from the Vitruvian beauty of ordered geometries. When taken to an extreme, these forms and spaces can result in an almost hypnotic boredom.

This supersizing is especially evident in our cities. “Approximately 84% of the U.S. population lives in urban areas, up from 64% in 1950. By 2050, 89% of the U.S. population and 68% of the world population is projected to live in urban areas.”[1] There are over 400 cities with a population of more than a million people.[2] Cities grew more slowly in the past because they became overcrowded and diseases could spread faster. But today urban death rates in cites are low, largely because there are better medical services.

Cities are also cultural and economic centres, providing employment, leisure, and educational opportunities. To maintain these benefits and overcome the congestion and downside of urban living, there are more and more rules. But new economic solutions demand fewer rules, not more. Bringing your product or service to market in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost flies in the face of the current urban reality, making an extra-urban location much more appropriate.

Thanks to favourable taxes, the world’s largest industrial “fulfilment centre,” home to many big tech drivers, has been established in a 107,000 acre desert park in Nevada, a landscape dominated by strange apparitions of enormous white rectangular sheds housing the technology of the cloud or crypto companies. This may be an extreme example, but it’s a trend that is playing out in edge cities popping up around major urban hubs all over the globe.

Daniels Regent Park, Toronto

Photo: Parham Karimi

This embrace of an architecture based strictly on codes, algorithms, technologies, engineering and performance over design intent and comfortable human scale is not just isolated to desert factories and distribution warehouses. It is everywhere, and it drives building around the world. Tiny Netherlands has become an agricultural powerhouse – the second largest global exporter of food by dollar value after the U.S. – with only a fraction of the land available to other countries.[3] This has been achieved by using the world’s most efficient agricultural technologies including the use of drones, driverless tractors and the great potential of production within the controlled climate of greenhouses. The scale of these structures is immense and can be measured by the length of time it takes to pass one on a high-speed train.

Gone are the idyllic views of rural farms and a countryside governed by the seasons. The landscape has been transformed into an enormous laboratory table on which anything too large, complex or unsafe to blend with urban life has been placed. Fortunately, the wild advance of these macro-buildings in Ontario has been held in check somewhat by building laws that spread out to include the countryside.

Of course, we can’t relocate everything outside of the city. Urban growth continues within the city boundaries in the form of urban intensification. On a granular scale that may mean inserting small projects into communities hollowed out as people age and children move away.

Urban intensification has been conflated with economic development. The construction industry is a powerful engine and tall buildings offer increased profits for developers. However, as a building rises higher it becomes more expensive to build. Thus, the tallest residential buildings tend to contain luxury units and not a balanced range of family sizes and incomes. Tall buildings inflate the price of adjacent land as well, so the protection of historic buildings and affordable housing becomes less achievable. In this way, inequality increases.

Even more detrimental to urban livability, high-rises separate people from the street and make no visual sense at a pedestrian at eye-level. You can’t even see the whole building unless you’re in another high-rise. If you do come down out of the clouds, it will not be to spend time with your neighbours so, the social isolation that plagues much of the modern urban experience is increased.

Whether it is huge multi-million square foot factories for robots in the desert, immense greenhouses to grow the world’s food supply, flowers and cannabis, or mile-high towers containing identical cells for condo dwellers, the decisions regarding form and construction method owe more to an idea of economics than to any sense of well-being for the occupants.

Today’s view always fuels visions of the future and this architecture without people has been embraced by science fiction. Think of the banality of the Borg Cube from “Star Trek”: “Resistance is futile.”