Big Plans

Canada isn’t known for its groundbreaking design. An upstart f irm is trying to change that.

- Simon Lewsen

In March of last year, while guest lecturing at the Department of Architectural Science at Ryerson University in Toronto, Alex Josephson, co-founder of the design and-architecture firm Partisans, asked his audience to name an iconic local project. The crowd, with its silence, gave him the answer he’d expected.

In an industry dominated by baby boomers in Oxford shirts, Josephson, thirty-five, stands out in his T-shirts and tight leather pants. After making controversial statements, whether about Canada’s innovation gap (“This isn’t an environment that encourages entrepreneurship”) or the hasty process through which residential structures get built (“like shit through a goose”), he often smiles knowingly, as if daring his interlocutors to disagree.

Josephson argues that because Toronto is a boom town — a nexus of money, knowledge, and human capital — it’s uniquely positioned to be an architectural leader. And yet the city is failing. Just visit one of its many residential towers. Wherever you go, you’ll likely find the same thing: a bland glass-and-steel extrusion atop a rectangular base. In Toronto — as in Vancouver, Calgary, and Ottawa — the towers aren’t just ugly, they’re uniform. In the 2016 polemic Rise and Sprawl, Josephson, along with the Partisans team and co-author Hans Ibelings, compared the city’s condos — unsightly structures, made to maximize every dollar — to the columns on a Microsoft Excel grid. “ Effectively, we are building spreadsheets in the sky,” they wrote.

According to Josephson, the problem is partly legislative — stringent bylaws discourage creativity — but it’s cultural too.