While laneway suites in Toronto are gaining popularity, many owners are deciding to rent out their newly built units. What many don’t know is that the city has an Affordable Laneway Suites Program that can help you with the cost of building your project. Not only is this a great way to enable your dream of building a laneway suite, but it is also a way of ensuring lower-income tenants can find an affordable home within the city.

Two years after passing the Laneway Suite by-law into effect, the City of Toronto is again looking to the city’s backyard spaces to provide housing options. Garden Suites are similar to Laneway Suites: a living accommodation contained within a smaller detached accessory building typically located in the rear yard, providing a separate and self-contained unit exclusively for the occupant—but with Garden Suites, no laneway required! By summer 2021, backyards that satisfy the city’s Garden Suite zoning policies should have the option to build a tiny home - a crucial next step to unlocking Missing Middle housing options across the city’s ‘Yellowbelt’ of low-rise residential Neighbourhoods.

Many parts of our beautiful city are unfortunately not designed for people with disabilities. Those individuals encounter many roadblocks along the way - from finding a job, a community, and last but not least accessible housing. It is important for the construction industry to increase awareness and go beyond regulations when it comes to design for disabilities. Architects may be able to borrow some tools from the digital design industry, which has made many advances on this front.

Especially when designing rental housing, it is important to design with a more inclusive mindset and envision a diverse pool of potential residents. We have to consider present, as well as future residents' needs to ensure the building can adapt throughout its life. Buildings aren’t a single-use object, and their ability to adapt to a variety of residential needs is limited only by our foresight.

2020 has been an upheaval where the presence of COVID-19, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the ever growing climate crisis have seeped

To say that this year has forced us to reexamine our habits would be an understatement. That said, both in our personal lives as well as in work, it has

A new paper from the Pembina Institute proposes four guiding principles and a suite of recommendations that support job maintenance and climate action in the buildings, electricity, transportation, and oil and gas sectors.

According to the paper, as front-line and essential workers respond to COVID-19 and businesses retool to meet critical medical needs, long-term investments should be based on climate principles while putting workers first.

Every homeowner aspires to have a home that is a reflection of themselves.

Every homeowner aspires to have a home that is a reflection of themselves. Unfortunately, it’s not always possible to get the house of your dreams from the get-go. If you'd like to upgrade your house or parts of it, a home renovation project could be the key to having the home you've always wanted.

They are not your granny’s flats. When Toronto approved the rules for building homes on the city’s more than 300 kilometres of laneways one year ago, the new housing was frequently described as secondary suites, a term that suggested the homes would be the above-ground equivalent of a basement apartment.

Spacing's School of Urbanism
Day-long workshops on emerging trends

Spacing magazine is proud to announce the launch of the Spacing School of Urbanism, four one-day city-building workshops that focus on an issue challenging the residents and urbanists of Toronto.

Dreaming of a warmer Toronto? Kick off your summer right with our 2019 Laneway Block Party in the alley northwest of Queen & Ossington!

In the beginning, when you are starting to plan your budget for building a new house, residential construction costs are not that complicated unless you really want to make them that way. There are some general broad stroke pieces of information that if you know them, you will not be surprised when it comes time to plan your budget.

Increased flooding, wildfires and storms mean tough new rules take effect in 2025

Evacuees from Fort McMurray, Alta., drive past wildfires in May 2016. As climate change intensifies, experts say, fires, flooding and wind storms will become more common, and Canada's building code needs to be updated to withstand the pressure. (Ryan Remiorz/The Canadian Press)

The Ontario PCs have cancelled more than a dozen electricity conservation programs, including the Poolsaver program, which allowed pool owners who purchased energy-efficient pumps to receive rebates. (Galit Rodan/Canadian Press)

Nearly 30 years after Congress passed the Americans With Disabilities Act in 1990, accessible-design advocates say there’s still plenty of work to be done to make the built environment just as accommodating for people with disabilities as it is for everybody else. But Erick Mikiten, a California architect with a specialty in universal design, points out one striking example of accessible design from which homeowners, other pros and accessibility champions could learn a lot. And it predates the ADA by more than three decades.

There is a request that I receive a few times a week that I thought I would finally talk about in an effort to shed some light on a fairly taboo subject. Those requests typically start off something like this:

“I have already designed my house but since I am not an architect, I don’t know how to create the technical drawings I would need to give to a contractor. Is this something that you would do, and if so, how much do you charge?”

As part of World Green Building Week, CaGBC and the Canada Coalition for Green Schools are happy to announce the winners of the annual CaGBC Greenest School in Canada competition: Lacombe Composite High School in Lacombe, AB, and Trinity College School in Port Hope, ON. Through solar arrays, geothermal greenhouses, urban beekeeping and decreasing natural gas consumption, these two schools are exemplary demonstrations of sustainable learning environments.

For the second year in a row, Architect Daniel Hall and The Architect Builders Collaborative were thrilled to assist with the Timber Fever wood design and engineering student competition. Daniel mentored several teams of keen engineering and architecture students from across the country as they worked on their one-day water station project. Check out thie post from the founder of TimberFever, David Moses Engineering…..

The results are in from the fourth annual #TimberFever Design-Build Competition presented by Moses Structural Engineers!