ARCH_419 International Housing Studio: ‘Halifax: E Mari Merces—From the Sea, Wealth’

Halifax, the largest city in Atlantic Canada, is a vibrant and progressive city where over 40 percent of the province of Nova Scotia’s population resides. Since its founding in 1749, Halifax Harbor has played a central role in the physical, cultural, and economic character of the city. Its bustling port is home to the Canadian Atlantic Navy, major container shipping operations, and is a frequent port of call for passenger vessels. 

The Halifax Regional Municipality is an amalgamation of towns lining the harbor, with the urban core built on a peninsula anchored by the Citadel. A recent wave of development in the urban core is transforming this regional center of government, commerce, education, and culture. Capitalizing on this renaissance, students investigated the design of new residential developments that embrace the city’s coastal legacy while adding to the vitality and density of the city center.

Students were introduced to Halifax and the Maritime culture through readings and lectures and were asked to visit the city and province virtually through internet mapping programs. The students used this information to identify dwelling typologies, settlement patterns, and the history and culture of material use to extract the character of the place. This information was synthesized into a collage that fused drawings, photographs, and mapping. Informed by the virtual visit and research, students developed an experiential perspective drawing focusing on a threshold condition—either expressing the relationship between the interior dwelling space and the city, or the collective space of the building and the unit entry. The architectural responses considered the city’s changing seasonal climatic conditions and the often harsh, wet, and cool coastal environment. 

Following these introductory exercises, students designed a unit cluster prioritizing the spatial quality of the interior and natural light and views. An emphasis was placed on designing through physical models to require the careful calibration of room size, organization, and proportion. After establishing a set of guiding dwelling principles, students were assigned to one of three waterfront sites in central Halifax and asked to design a minimum of 25 units of multifamily housing. The three sites, all occupied by municipal surface parking lots, were subdivided equally and shared by three or four students.

Over the remainder of the semester, students balanced the priorities established for the dwelling spaces—the desire to harness southern light and sea views—with the challenges of the sites’ orientations. Students were responsible for designing collectively at the urban scale and encouraged to manipulate sites to enhance public interaction while ensuring solar and physical access to neighboring parcels. These complex interactions required collaboration among the designers and a focus not only on the issues of each individual project, but on the sum of the collective.