Pecha Kucha (20 slides x 20 seconds)
16 Nov 2022

Bryn Davidson is a co-founder and lead designer at Lane Fab a vancouver-based design build firm crafting Custom Homes duplexes and infill laneway houses that blend West Coast modernism with passive house design principles.

Bryn has a degree in mechanical engineering from UC Berkeley and an masters of architecture from University of British Columbia. His 2014 TEDx talk laid out the firm's goal of creating projects that go beyond Net Zero to have a net positive impact on the climate crisis.

[Applause]

Welcome, so this is a house designed by Lanefab.
Well, not not really.
Actually I asked an AI program to to show me a house designed by Lanefab and and 15 seconds later this is what popped out, and I was like "awesome, a robot can do my job I can go sit on a beach".

Now of course I don't think that's how it's actually going to work. These are looking at past works as a kind of a pattern language. In previous pattern languages it's only looking in the rear view mirror at what's been done in the past, but it's not doing much to actually think about what we need to do in the future.

It's the same problem with, you know, other types of pattern languages - and so when you look at the sort of sum total of our work over a hundred something custom houses you know there's a whole bunch of stuff there 80% of which we try to repeat things that are actually working and in each project maybe 20% we're trying to find that seed of something that's kind of new and Innovative to try and push things a little bit further forward, and that that 20% really kind of captures the story behind these projects.

So, in this case, we've got the first certified passive house in Burnaby and so there's no other house like this in Burnaby and there was a lot of work that had to be done to kind of shepherd this through that that first kind of process, to to kind of make way for what's coming.

The same thing with this.
This was almost a decade ago or more ago: the first laneway house in the city of Vancouver, and we built that and through that process I realized that I wasn't really that interested in being kind of like a Frank Gehry artsy kind of guy I was more interested in being kind of an icebreaker like plowing through the city bureaucracy and the preconceptions and creating a space for what's behind us.

And, so, you know here we we created an emergency housing shelter because we were frustrated with the city's inaction at the beginning of Covid around homelessness. We collaborated with downtown east side artist to kind of sort of poke at the city and say like hey in 3 months we designed and built this thing.

In the same way the St George Rainway doesn't fit into a kind of category but in the next few months the city's going to start tearing up St George Street and turning it into this new kind of ecological infrastructure.

It's an idea I started working on 18 years ago during architecture school and with this community group, over the years, we've shepherded it. Now it's becoming real.

You may have seen this in the news: this is our 9 foot wide property. We're going to try and build a house that's nine feet wide and three stories tall.

I'm not sure if that's going to happen but again we're trying to really get at the city's idea of what a house is and what it could be, to kind of stretch that boundary a little bit.

So, you know, this continues in that vein. A local political party asked us to drop passive house multiplexes into shaughnessy and I was like "yes" and so we quickly sketched up something and a day later we're here you go and they use this in their kind of promo material and I, I love that idea of of taking ecological housing at a big scale and dropping it into a mansion district and a lot of this work that we do is this kind of inventive sort of stuff that we are collaborating online because these these problems are bigger than us and so we have these discussions online with this great network of of folks all around the world who are working on passive house and other types of housing strategies.

So you know where does that come for our work?

In terms of as a professional we could do a bunch of shiny things for rich people or or we could build a whole bunch of the same stuff (and either one of those would frankly probably make us more money than what we do now) but it would be boring! and, so, what I'm interested in is this intersection between making things, designing and building, and making things and Big Ideas: climate change, housing crisis, systemic change, policy, and if I can do something where I'm bringing those two sides of the world together that's what I find intriguing and that's the kind of thing that energizes what I think of as our kind of work.

...and so here's this certified passive house the it's supposed to be, you know, 90% less energy for heating compared to a regular house and the shape of the building is entirely driven by these super rigorous constraints. It's a pain in the ass but it drives the shape!

At the same time, you know, I also have this ongoing fascination with small spaces for many of the same reasons. This is 360 Square ft that I lived in for 3 years. Every little bit, every little piece, has to have a function and so there's no kind of slack, but there's also kind of a beauty in terms of making something like that work and so those those two pieces, those two poles, go forward and inform what we do. in some cases it's spatial Jenga, you know, you've got a house and an home office and storage all crammed in the space that used to be a garage. I like this because (not just because the New York Times picked up on it) but it was because we're taking a car space and turning it into something that's living and I, I love that it's part of this laneway house which is also about a new form of housing that's allowing multigenerational extended families to live together on the same property without actually driving each other crazy.

So it's been really fun working with families creating these kind of infill housing opportunities in all sorts of different ways. We also sometimes have a chance to work with mid-century modern architecture.

This was a an Arthur Erickson house and the clients (it was very tiny) they didn't want to tear it down they wanted to expand it so we really wanted to keep the kind of visual clarity of the original triangular structure of the building, while at the same time making it actually comfortable. So, we we did this sort of addition off the side and redid the house. Now it's probably the only Arthur Erickson house with triple glazed Windows, and it was it was just a really fun sort of project to to try and keep the soul of that original structure while also totally transforming it.

So this is another project near Douglas Park in Vancouver. This is a client in a wheelchair. He wanted something modern, green, also with a bit of rustic Italy thrown in so you know we've designed this structure around the central elevator core and that became the organizing principle for bringing all of these ideas together and when we were able to create that for him I think you know it felt good. So, in the same thing with this last project the Burnaby house, taking the old House's wood and reusing it on the new house.

It's a symbol of what I would call meaningful invention and that's what we're looking for in in all of our work, something that goes beyond just novelty but something that moves us forward.

[Music]

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