Greening and loving our slabs

Spacing contributor and Modernism fan Graeme Stewart had a great long piece in yesterday’s Toronto Star on how the concrete high rises built in the 1960s and 70s can be made efficient and green. Stewart recently travelled through Europe’s tall suburbs and found that some of those Soviet-ish slabs have a lot of green going on behind the grey.

Spread evenly throughout the region from Sherbourne St. to Don Mills, Bathurst St. and Steeles Ave. to Bramalea is an enormous stock of large high-rise apartment buildings, providing housing for hundreds of thousands. Typically viewed as “mistakes” from the 1960s and ’70s, and largely excluded from urban debates, they may in fact represent one of our greatest opportunities for creating a sustainable region. Built in an era when energy efficiency was not a big consideration, these buildings are energy pigs.

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But the slabs have their plus side. Due to their relatively straightforward structure and boxy facades, upgrades can be achieved with relative ease. This has not been lost on two members of the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Architecture, Ted Kesik and Ivan Saleff. After running numerous simulations, they have concluded that this building type may be the most cost-effective candidate for retrofit.

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For many years, the European Union has been actively restoring its enormous stock of tower blocks as a key component of its environmental strategy. Across both Eastern and Western Europe, the carbon-saving potential of aging Welfare State and Soviet-era towers has been exploited to achieve greenhouse gas reduction targets. In my own tour of European tower districts last fall, the abundant examples of regeneration, “greening,” intensification and retrofitting were truly eye-opening.

When I came to Toronto nearly seven years ago we moved to the 19th floor of of 40 Pleasant Boulevard at Yonge and St. Clair. It was the culmination of 25 years of Toronto high-rise envy, and it lived up to the ideal I imagined while residing in an exurban split-level — but sometimes it was like we lived in a building no more substantial than a tent. The windows were old and useless. In the winter we had to keep the heat as high as it would go, and in the summer the A/C would not stop, ever — it was all it could do to keep the elements at bay.

As Stewart points out, Toronto’s suburbs aren’t like most in North America — much closer to a European model than a Yonkers one, so there is a lot of potential to take advantage of the density these buildings offer by upgrading them to (post) modern levels of efficiency.

The distribution of these high-rises contradicts the typical notion of the North American suburb. Pockets of high density were created with as many as 350 people per hectare (double that of Little Italy or the Annex) as far as 20 kilometres from the city centre.

This encouraged R. Buckminster Fuller (of geodesic dome fame) to remark: “In Toronto, an unusually large number of high-rise apartments poke above the flat landscape many miles from downtown… this is a type of high-density suburban development far more progressive and able to deal with the future than the endless sprawl of the U.S. … “

(Image by Derek Flack)