From a few minutes to a few hours, hundreds of thousands of tweets disrupted our world’s digital landscape seemingly overnight — as the Notre Dame Cathedral was set ablaze.  Its spire, nearly 150-years-old, was destroyed.  As the fire quickly spread, so did our stories of personal connection to this gothic structure.  In real time, through various social media platforms, people started to reflect on and share their memories of this institution through photographs and words.

 

As the fiery passion of Paris, France manifested into a literal fire, the world began to face a sobering reality — a loss of the world’s most beautiful architectural monuments.
 

7,000 kilometres away, Edmonton’s Strathcona Hotel suffered a similar fate earlier this month, when it too caught fire.  Sparks from an electric grinder ignited insulation.  As the city’s firefighters arrived at the scene to battle the blaze, hundreds of people rallied around this historic building, sharing their disbelief.  Online posts of the burning building went viral.  Media crews covered the story throughout the week.  Edmontonians shared their hopes for the building’s restoration.  Aged 130 years, which is older than the province itself, the Strathcona Hotel is one of Alberta’s last wood-framed hotels from the 19th century. 
 

Fortunately, both buildings were built in an era where materials were meant to last.  As damaged sections are reimagined and rebuilt, both buildings’ histories will live to see another day.
 

While dissimilar in scale and location, the public response to the damages at the Notre Dame Cathedral and Strathcona Hotel illuminate an important insight — that architecture plays a critical role, not only in the design of our urban fabric, but in the coalescence and reflection of our history, culture, religion, ideology, and tradition.  How our values are translated into what we see today in our daily lives is part of the delight (and often, complication) of design and city building. 
 

As Canadian cities grow, change and re-build themselves over time, perennial questions about how to design for density and diversity bloom across the urban and political landscapes.  In an ongoing effort to build better places for more people, communities big and small are grappling with similar issues when it comes to redeveloping and retrofitting our existing neighbourhoods, corridors and centres.  This is particularly challenging when it comes to the transformation of older suburban areas which are often beset by the false choice of either accepting ultra large development schemes that threaten to dwarf the existing built environment or outright refusal to accept any new development proposals that are even slightly out-of-step with what’s already there.  A healthy conversation about ‘missing middle’ housing is sweeping the nation, but the real question to grapple with is how to move from words to action? How should we design in the face of near constant disruption?
 

In Edmonton, significant population growth has outpaced most of the country over the past decade.  This phenomenon has acted as the catalyst for the conversation around the need for residential infill and to efficiently and sustainably make use of existing infrastructure. Mature neighbourhoods have been positively impacted through redevelopment, introducing more housing choice for residents at all income levels and stages of life. Despite positive changes made, the conversation around what constitutes good design for infill remains.  What defines “character”?  How can designs be “contextually appropriate”?