Reside: Contemporary West Coast Houses

Review By Leslie Van Duzer

March 19, 2025

Reside: Contemporary West Coast Houses, the brainchild of Clinton Cuddington, presents a collection of residential projects designed by contemporary British Columbian architects practicing what might loosely be defined as West Coast Regionalism. Following up on Greg Bellerby’s The West Coast Modern House: Vancouver Residential Architecture (2014), this handsome volume features 34 projects designed over the past 22 years by “the next generation” of local talent.

Architecture books are expensive to produce, and as publishers rarely foot the bill, it is not surprising that Reside was funded by the participants. This must be noted because it is precisely this funding model that compromises the role of both the curator and the author, making this publication so difficult to situate. While Cuddington curated the selection of architects, and many leading practices agreed to participate, there are significant absences that diminish the book’s value as a record of this period. Given the funding model, the participating architects were necessarily represented equally—four pages for every project and two pages for every firm profile—artificially leveling the field and suggesting all the work presented is of equal import. Further relinquishing the role of curator, Cuddington invited the architects to self-select their featured work.

Dr. Michael Prokopow, esteemed cultural historian and curator at OCAD, frames the work both in its historical and contemporary contexts. There is no doubt that his eloquent texts rescue the book from coffee table status. With great determination, the author visited all 34 residences, requiring seven trips from his homes in Toronto and London. Prokopow’s ability to write from within the houses enhanced the project descriptions, but the nature of the publication demanded these texts be more descriptive than critical.

As one who has spent his academic career in the realm of material culture, Prokopow clearly appreciates the beauty of the physical artifacts, but cannot separate their aesthetic appeal from larger cultural issues. He uses the occasion of this assignment to ask us to think more deeply about pressing housing disparities, land stewardship, settlers’ responsibilities and lifestyle choices as we admire these undeniably elegant residences. We see in his framing of the work that it is possible to both appreciate a piece of architecture for all its exquisite formal and material qualities, and to admire the skill of the architects and their innovations, while simultaneously to be troubled by the larger implications of expending so much talent and so many resources on work that, in most cases, benefits so very few.

In his preface, Cuddington himself acknowledges the shortcomings of a volume that features predominantly single-family houses designed for the wealthy, apologetically offering us a trickle-down theory of architecture. “We are concerned with an architectural manifestation that at its worst is a barrier to a shared need, but at its best generates responses applicable far beyond this typology, responses that can be interrogated to help inform a regional response for the broader population.”

Prokopow confronts the same issue more directly. “To admit that settler housing in the province not only represents solutions to the constant need for shelter but also advances the long-term settler-colonialism project is not to profess guilt, but to promote an awareness of architecture as a social force, one with the potential to contribute to the remaking of social relations. . . . Similarly, it is necessary to acknowledge the inherently elitist conditions that produce architect-designed single-family homes. In this place of abundance there is nonetheless pronounced economic inequality and suffering, with structural barriers to widespread homeownership of any kind.” Calling attention to this inconvenient truth might just be this book’s most enduring contribution.