A City to Call Home: Revisiting the Form of the Urban Family Home in Ottawa

While ground-breaking architectural ideas and typologies have emerged, shaped and refined domestic architecture throughout the history of modern architecture, there has been little true innovation in recent years in Canadian housing, particularly in family housing. New domestic architecture can take many forms; however, in the urban core, space limitations render the task of innovating housing forms more challenging. This is not to say that the current typologies, the condominium high-rise being dominant among them, do not work, but rather, that they are ill-suited for housing families. This thesis proposes to refine urban family housing and takes on a current Ottawa Community Housing Corporation (OCH) project, seeking to develop renewed urban housing strategies and residential intensification methodologies. As OCH's largest family-oriented social housing community, Rochester Heights, Ottawa, provides an ideal opportunity to re-imagine the conventional definition of urban residential housing.