A housing catalogue for 21st-century housing woes
In the late 1940s, when William Lyon Mackenzie King’s Liberal government began publishing “catalogues” filled with floor plans for modest homes meant to relieve a crippling post-Second World War housing crunch, the federal officials overseeing the initiative adopted a conspicuously modernist, suburban and mass-produced aesthetic.
The core of the exercise is to develop code- and zoning-compliant accessible designs for ADUs, duplexes, triplexes and sixplexes that homeowners or small builders can download, customize and adapt to local conditions, such as lot sizes or setback rules. The catalogue will live on CMHC’s website and include digital models of each design.
She mentions some well-known vernacular elements in East Coast residential architecture: street-facing front doors, steep-pitched roofs and wood siding that can resist blustery weather. “We try as much as possible to work within that kind of visual language that you see in older buildings here,” Ms. Abbott says.
However, Ms. Levitt says the catalogue designs that evoke the residential traditions of one region can be erected elsewhere, provided they comply with local building codes. “There’s a lot of advantages for the small developer,” she says. “It derisks the preconstruction, predesign phases. It synthesizes all the preconstruction phases so that you can download a set of drawings that is a reasonable reflection of what you want, with all of the performance criteria, mechanical, electrical, structural specifications, climate zone, what your walls need to be like. It also allows you to do your own costing.
The 82-page online catalogue, which includes 10 templates with detailed floorplates, went live in mid-September. A ministry spokesperson says plans from the catalogue have been downloaded almost 900 times in the two intervening months.
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