Author’s Note
Nugent Home, circa 1990
This project began for me in the October of 2013, although maybe you could say this topic was inevitable. I was a child of the suburbs, having spent my entire pre-adult life in the same single-family detached house. My parents had both grown up in factory towns, and the suburbs were seen as a very real escape from the pollution and noise of heavy industry. In 1990 they picked a house backing onto a small creek with farm fields beyond at the end of a subdivision in northern Oakville. It was a convenient midway point for them, halfway between their jobs in Hamilton and Toronto and a ‘good place to raise a family’ for when the time came. My childhood was contained within the ‘boulevards,’ ‘lanes,’ and ‘crescents’ of that neighbourhood, along with the wooded ravines and grassy utility corridors that snaked through it. Summer after summer, I remember new tracts of houses going up, seeming to correspond to the expanding boundaries our parents would let my friends and I explore on our bikes. Eventually, houses filled in the land between the concession roads, and the roads themselves grew to four, and eventually six lanes. And the creek behind my parents’ house that used to flood every spring and freeze over into a neighbourhood skating rink dried up, turning into nothing more than a muddy patch of wild grass.
Looking back, I can see why the suburbs are so attractive to parents and young families because, as a child, it was genuinely a nice place to grow up, but that could not last forever. Like many others, I experienced the frustration and boredom of being a teenager in the suburbs. There was nothing to do, nowhere to go except hanging out in someone’s basement or in a fast food restaurant. Even the ability to drive only expanded those options but didn’t introduce anything new. It was the suburban teen angst that inspired the wave of punk rock garage bands during the previous decades. All that is to say: moving away to university was a long-awaited escape, and the first few weeks of studying architecture were nothing short of a world-shattering experience for me. The sudden plunge into the majesty that was the twentieth-century city and professors who were old-school modernists made me feel as if I have been living under a brick-veneered, hip-roofed rock my entire life. I returned home at Thanksgiving, a changed man, and promptly informed my parents that ‘the suburbs were terrible and that no one should live in them’.
That was where this journey began for me. In the seven years since that moment, I have had the privilege of living in Los Angeles, Toronto, Venice, San Sebastian, Berlin, Rome, Montreal, and now returning home, each one imparting to me a different view and appreciation of city life. During that time, I also had an evolving discussion—and at times argument— with my parents about the suburbs, as I tried to understand what made them choose the suburban lifestyle and the emotional significance that it held for them and their friends. Grappling with this has led me to a rather simple conclusion: the suburbs exist, and they aren’t going away. The suburbs are too omnipresent and too significant to too many people to simply be ignored or dismissed, and so, they deserve our attention. The same attention that we give to our cities. So, I have come full circle. My undergrad taught me to view the world as constantly being built, and therefore capable of being transformed. My masters has taught me to value and care for what is already there.