What would happen if an iconic Housing Project from the 20th Century were to land, today, in downtown Toronto?

This semester 15 teams of undergraduate students have been working on 15 different design fictions — and their results were shared this week on instagram, using the hashtags #WhatIfToronto and​ #HistoryofHousing.

Each team constructed its own story using images from a seminal housing project as well as new drawings and short texts announcing its launching in downtown Toronto. The work was completed for the course History of Housing: Crisis, Visions, Commonplace (ARC354), taught by Assistant professor Petros Babasikas.

The housing projects the students drew from include: M. Brinkman's Justus Van Effen Complex (Rotterdam, 1921), M. Ginzburg's & I. Milinis' Narkomfin Building (Moscow, 1932), M. van der Rohe's Lake Shore Drive Apartments (Chicago, 1951), Le Corbusier's Unite d'Habitation (Marseille, 1952), M. Safdie's Habitat 67 (Montreal, 1967), K. Kurokawa's Nagakin Capsule Tower (Tokyo, 1972), A. & P. Smithson's Robin Hood Gardens and N. Brown's Alexandra Road Estate (London, 1975 and 78).

While remaining a design fiction, #WhatIfToronto sketches what might happen if global architectures were to land in Toronto in a 'non-Toronto way.' It also reflects on the city's real estate boom and on the contemporary housing crisis experienced by the students' generation. The project's alternate versions of 20th Century urban life — Modernist, Metabolist, Collective, Communal, Low- and Mid-Rise, High-Density — have been extremely influential in the history of architecture and in the making of cities.

In their ongoing research for History of Housing, students, using multidisciplinary sources and tools, have been discovering repeating patterns, building types, crises and visions of community, identity and public space realized by housing architecture over the past century. They now broadcast some of this work to a city that keeps changing, opening and closing, reinventing itself and asking questions about its global standing.

The posts, stories and collages of #WhatIfToronto #HistoryofHousing @uoftdaniels are meant to travel in the Cloud as public images of how we could live together.

To view the students' projects, search #WhatIfToronto​ #HistoryofHousing on instagram.