forward. “We never set out to do housing, but this kind of housing has a lot of community involved in it, so it’s perfect for us,” Jennifer says. At the same time, UAA also hopes to continue working on more traditional community buildings. They believe those kind of public buildings are important to the development of sustainable communities. “Housing units themselves – especially affordable housing units – are getting smaller and smaller, so these public spaces are becoming more and more important to society and to healthy communities,” Jennifer says. “As we shrink our living spaces, we need places to go – and we need places that don’t always cost you money to be there. We believe those spaces are very important and we want to do our part in creating them.” “We also want to continue to bring an Indigenous perspective to our practice, and to continue to decolonize our practice as we work towards reconciliation,” she concludes. “We put a lot of focus on that. We’ve done a lot of education work with our staff.” “Some of that has been fun – we went out and paddled with a local Indigenous community around the local inlet and we heard stories from elders while we were doing it. Some of it has been hard – we’ve done some decolonizing workshops where we’ve had to dig deep and look inward. We believe that it’s all been worth it, because it’s made us better as architects. Working on reconciliation and incorporating indigenous perspectives has made all of our projects better.” APRIL 2022
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