Open Plans of Unit A

New architecture firm seeks public input in cityscape design.

The patriarch of television's The Brady Bunch notwithstanding, the working life of an architect is largely a mystery to most members of the general public, but three Toronto architects want to change all that.
Stewart Adams, Jeff Latto and Francesca Piccaluga formed their Unit A architecture firm last fall and a month ago set up shop, quite literally, in a storefront on the edge of Toronto's rough-around-the-edges Parkdale neighbourhood. "We want to make the design process a little bit more public," says Latto, who worked with Adams at the Toronto office of international architecture firm HOK. Adams and Piccaluga are partners in life as well. (Piccaluga is the daughter of Francesco Piccaluga, who along with brother Aldo are local legends for bringing an unparalleled level of detail and precision to Toronto architectural projects in the 1970s such as La Fenice restaurant and the revolving dining room at the CN Tower. They continue to work today.) All three principals of Unit A have practised architecture for a dozen years or more. The name Unit A was chosen for its understatedness and implies that as the firm grows, more 'units" will be added.
Not content that passers-by and clients visiting their spartan 700-square foot office at Dundas Street and Ossington Avenue will see a more transparent design process (the space is the former home of a Vietnamese fashion emporium in this eclectic neighbourhood), Adams, Latto and Piccaluga are also strongly advocating the ramping up of the quality of Toronto's civic architecture, a quality which Adams notes has dropped off noticeably in the past 20 years, citing Metro Hall as an example. The architect says that while the citizenry of Toronto of many generations ago would have been pleased to know that the local government was planning a new civic building for their environs (think the R. C. Harris water filtration plant circa 1930), citizens in recent decades have lost faith in city officials and developers to create civic buildings and spaces which are anything more than economically driven. (City Hall, of course, was one notable exception.)
Unit A wants a kinder, gentler Toronto. Combining the public building project experience of Adams and Latto with a more grassroots community approach practised by Piccaluga, the firm is taking its first steps towards a more amenable form of urban design. The firm would like to specialize in school and community centre projects. With her experience as a volunteer with school and parks committees in her and Adams' Trinity-Spadina neighbourhood, Piccaluga says their architectural role will be generating community-sanctioned projects which have the potential to be models beyond local boundaries. Community, say the trio, is a word that came up time and again when they first discussed the possibilities of their new collaboration.
In a recent residential project on Crawford Street, Piccaluga designed a rear addition to a three-storey home by combining two by two horizontal cedar strips with board and batten siding. She also designed a garden featuring a deck, trellis, pond and fountain. For the architect, the project reflects her interest in the integration of indoor and outdoor spaces, a common architectural approach in European countries such as Italy, but a design consideration increasingly lost in the larger urban design fabric of Toronto.
Unit A contributed a modernist approach to a construction company's head office in Toronto's Junction neighbourhood. The space, a former pasta factory, now features an exposed ceiling, a drop ceiling over employee workstations and budget-conscious materials like MDF and parallel strand lumber. With a major rail route right next to the building, Unit A's design of the rectangular space also suggests the interior of a Pullman car. In keeping with this train theme, the firm is also designing a new railway museum in the northern Ontario town of Capreol, next to Sudbury. In a departure from small project work, Unit A is poised to contribute the architectural design for a $100 million 40-storey indoor ski tower in Dallas, Texas, the first such building of its kind in the world. The project is an initiative of a Swiss developer with a Toronto office. Latto says he and his colleagues will be mindful of advocating on behalf of the public for this large scale project which, in addition to six figure-8 runs, will also feature a hotel, offices and townhouses.
Adams is concerned that typically the Toronto public has little input in building projects that affect their communities and Unit A would like to become part of a more transparent architectural design process that would help to return trust between architects and communities. Adams notes that the design process is ideally an extremely thorough one, from initial concepts right through to following up with clients after construction. "It's more time and effort to get the public involved," Adams says, "but true civic architecture - we think - can only be developed with the public." The interests of the user, Piccaluga adds, is "really what architecture is about."

Publication Date: 2003-04-20
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=2636