Architecture: Duelling Tensions; Unified Vision

Originally published in the Globe and Mail. Read the full text here.

Reza Aliabadi's Opposite House manages to satisfy both 'servant' and 'served'

The architect Louis Kahn, a master of postwar American modernism, famously distinguished between two kinds of institutional spaces: "servant" and "served." The servant spaces – stairwells, elevators, heating units – exist solely to support the higher order served spaces, such as offices, lecture halls or galleries. Mr. Kahn kept these quarters as separate as possible, so they wouldn't interfere with one another. His Richards Medical Research Laboratories at the University of Pennsylvania comprise three lab towers with plenty of windows and complex prismatic geometry. These buildings cluster around a plainer fourth, the institute's dark heart, which contains elevator banks, air ducts and mechanical systems.

The servant-served conceit forms the basis for the Opposite House, a residential project by Toronto architect Reza Aliabadi that evinces a deep commitment to modernist principles. Today, lifestyle magazines talk about "transitional" architecture, an aesthetic that borrows from modernism and older so-called traditional elements. Some architects do incredible work within this style, but in too many practices "transitional" seems like a euphemism for "unfocused" or "non-committal."

Mr. Aliabadi, founder of the Toronto firm Atelier Reza Aliabadi, will never have this problem. He is a modernist in the truest sense of the word: an architect who likes simple concepts, sturdy forms and honest, unaccented materials. He owns a Jeep Wrangler – what he describes as a "box on wheels" – because what else would a modernist drive?

The Opposite House refigures Mr. Kahn's servant-served typology for a residential setting. The elongated bungalow consists of two rectangular forms. The front-facing rectangle (the "servant" space) is dark with few windows. It's clad mainly in grey Kolumba blocks from Petersen, which are handmade and two-and-a-half times longer than traditional bricks. The back-facing ("served") rectangle is clad in white stucco and adorned with a row of six-by-10-foot windows that look out toward the Scarborough Bluffs and Lake Ontario.

This is an excerpt. Read the full text here.