For better or for worse, the modern movement in architecture (circa 1900-1975) banished the loquacious old language of Classical adornment and brought us the box.
Not all boxes were created equal. There were some remarkable ones, such as Mies van der Rohe's steel and glass towers and banking pavilion at the Toronto Dominion Centre, and numerous flat-roofed, sheer-sided houses that have not lost their streamlined power to delight us. And of course, many ill-proportioned and forgettable residential boxes were also thrown up during the modernist episode, especially in the decades just after the Second World War.
But despite the hostile press the bad buildings attracted, and the often poor design quality of the boxy high-rises put up these days, the simplicity and elegance of the old-fashioned modernist box continues to inspire the occasional piece of solid, engaging work by contemporary architects.
Take Charcoal House, for example.
Designed by Reza Aliabadi for builder Armin Sheivari, this starkly modern 2.100-square-foot dwelling stands on a quiet street of elderly bungalows and other single-family homes in Toronto's rapidly gentrifying Pape and Danforth neighbourhood. Indeed, the dose of modernist medicine the house administers to the streetscape might seem, at first glance, too strong for the amiable old avenue.
But Mr. Aliabadi has clad his building in charcoal black brick (of the kind Toronto architect A. J. Diamond used in his Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts), which mutes the structure's visual impact. Too, the house is narrow (only 16 feet wide) and not large – it does not loom – which helps it fit neatly into its slot in the urban fabric.
That said, Charcoal House is hardly meek. No porch connects it to the sidewalk, and nothing softens the severely tailored exterior. Mr. Aliabadi has also put the main entrance around the corner of the building, and so left the street-side façade a vertical oblong expanse of black cladding punctuated by windows arrayed in a jauntily asymmetrical pattern.
What really makes this small box unusual and successful, however, is the poetic arrangement of the space within it.
Mr. Aliabadi aptly describes his work here as a "coconut": dark and hard on the outside, white and delicious on the inside. If he were an unreconstructed, unquestioning modernist, which he isn't, he might have merely extended the strict, plain exterior geometry of this wood-framed house into the core, created an ordinary, open-plan, three-level loft, and called it a day.
Instead, he has fashioned a tiny, exciting interior landscape that rises and falls, bunches and relaxes – an active setting and a kind of choreography, in other words, for the people who dwell within. It's a "machine for living in," to quote Le Corbusier, Mr. Aliabadi's hero – though this building is quite devoid of the mechanical impersonality implied in Corbu's famous dictum about housing for thoroughly modern people.
The visitor entering by the principal door steps up from the driveway through a little pavilion embedded in the east façade of the house. A foyer, conveniently furnished with a washroom, is just inside the front door. This interesting sequence of introductory spaces concludes in an oak-floored, open-plan room, handsomely lit by the south-facing windows in the front wall. The room contains a seating area, a dining zone and, at the rear, a kitchen gently washed by radiance descending from a high skylight.
From this room at the heart of the house, the space flows downward, into the family room beyond the kitchen, or into the basement suite. And it spirals up toward the four small bedrooms and ultimately to the walkout to the roof deck. Each bedroom is different in character from the next, which lends a welcome touch of drama to the passage upward through the house. While the inner precincts of Toronto's Victorian residences tend to be gloomy – a problem that is hard to cure easily – those here are filled with light, falling from above or coming in through those eccentric windows Mr. Aliabadi likes and punches in everywhere on his façades.
Because it features so many steps-up and steps-down, this beautiful new home (currently on the market for $1,189,000) is clearly not suitable for people ready to age gracefully in place. It would also be a challenge for those who need spacious quarters. But for a busy couple with a growing family and an eye for contemporary architectural style that's out of the ordinary, Charcoal House could be the ideal box, vivid and hospitable, in which to get on with the art of modern living.