Feauturing work by Davidson Rafailidis, Bindya Lad, and normal goods
Curated by Patrick Macaulay
Suburban areas across Canada are at once burgeoning and diversifying. New residents from around the world, constituting the bulk of the country’s population growth, are increasingly choosing to settle in suburban areas. The typical characterization of these areas as socially and culturally homogenous is no longer accurate. As the demographics have changed, so has the built form. Strip malls — once pure expressions of the suburbs’ bedrock of car culture and consumerism — have become central to many of these new communities. Language schools, places of worship and ethnocultural community centres now populate the storefront spaces. Despite this change in content, the form of the strip mall has remained relatively unchanged.
For this exhibition, we have invited two architecture firms and one design partnership to look at the strip mall and the changing dynamics of the surrounding communities and to propose new approaches and new purposes for this staid suburban built form.