Strategic Perspective: 5468796 Architecture's Johanna Hurme on the Economics of Architecture and Advocating for Value
By Julia Gamolina
Johanna Hurme is a co-founder and managing partner of Winnipeg-based 5468796 Architecture. In addition to practice, she is an activist and an advocate, having initiated and co-created a number of design related events and programs. She has taught design at the University of Manitoba, Toronto, Montreal and in 2019 Johanna was named visiting Professor-Morgenstern Chair at the College of Architecture, IIT, Chicago. She lectures extensively around the world and is co-author of ‘Innovative Solutions for Creating Sustainable Cities’ (2018), and 'platform:MIDDLE, Housing for the 99%', to be published in 2021.
In her conversation with Julia Gamolina, Johanna talks about her multi-cultural exposure to architecture and the factors that drive architectural design not often talked about in school, advising those just starting their career to understand the economics of architecture and to know that there are many options in the field.
JG: Where and how did you grow up, and how did that plant the seeds for your career today?
JH: I grew up in the suburbs of Helsinki, Finland. The first impact this had on me was to realize that architecture had a high commodity value, which is very tied to our culture and identity. I think that’s more typical when you’re a smaller nation like Finland is. For example, Alvar Aalto was on our currency as I was growing up, so I learned very early on what an architect was. For that reason, architecture became a very desirable occupation for me. Where the interest really crystallized for me was seeing Zaha’s winning competition design written about in a local newspaper. Architecture was written about regularly, which is very different than what I’ve experienced now living in Canada.
Secondly, what I’ve realized that really affects the work that we do, is growing up in an urban setting, and multi-family housing. I never lived in a house in Finland, and seeing how the common spaces were shared between buildings was really what people’s identities were built around; that’s where you forged relationships and friendships that lasted a lifetime. In our language, you would say that you are “from that yard,” as opposed to from a specific building. So the value of a vibrant public realm and urban living was instilled in me early on as well.
62M, Winnipeg, Canada, 2017. Located on the edge of downtown Winnipeg and the Red River, 62M’s unique form is calculated to drive both efficiency and economy of the project; its elevation is a response to a site that was considered undesirable due to restricted views and a lack of street frontage. Photography by James Florio Photography.
Beacon, Calgary, Canada, 2020. As a purpose-designed dermatology clinic, optimizing natural light for procedures and treatment was the defining factor for the design evolution of the building. Clerestory windows, a unique curved wooden ceiling, cut-away balconies and a multi-storey central courtyard transform the interior environment. Photograph by James Brittain Photography.
That’s exactly how it was growing up in Novosibirsk and Toronto for me. My backyard were the spaces in between apartment buildings, the streets, the public parks. How did you eventually get to Winnipeg, from Helsinki?
I was a high school exchange student in rural Manitoba. The family who took me in was a farming family, and for a year I went to school in a town of 150 people. The town I lived in was eight people total.
Wow. I don’t know many people that have had this experience.
Yes, it was a fairly shocking year out there [laughs]. As a result of that though, I did feel very Canadian, I met a guy there, and I had a desire to return to Canada. Winnipeg was the largest city in that area, so I moved there - in some ways, my now ex-husband took a bigger leap moving to Winnipeg from that small town than I did moving from Helsinki.
How did 5468796 architecture, with your now business and life partner Sasa Radulovic, come to be?
I ended up at the faculty of architecture here at the University of Manitoba, where I then became acquainted with Sasa. We did some competitions as students together, and always had a design relationship, and then worked together in the same practice after school. We worked together as a design team at Cohlmeyer Architects for about five years. During that time, we started to talk about how great it would be to have our own practice, and the things that we would pursue. The ambitions that we had were very aligned and we ended up establishing 546 in 2007.
“Technology won’t solve everything, and architects have a responsibility towards the environment, and towards general equity and affordability. Housing is a fundamental human right...We have to learn to live communally, especially on this continent where that isn’t a core value.”
I like the short form name [laughs]. It’s now been fourteen years, and not to mention the practice started right at the start of the Great Recession. Walk me through those years, and the different phases that the practice evolved through.
Huh, I’ve never thought of the practice evolving in steps; it was rather a steady build up. The first year would have been the most surprising one in the sense that we started as two, and within three weeks, we hired another person, and for the first month, we got a new project almost every day. It was a very quick build up to being a practice of ten people.
That’s big for such a short amount of time.
We got lucky in that some of the relationships we had established while working at Cohlmeyer, were spawning work that typically doesn’t come through the door for young practices, one of these typologies being multi-family housing. We very much got trained by developers on how everything is tied to finance, and how we don’t have a job if they don’t make a profit. When you start to view architecture from that perspective, which was never at the forefront of our education, nor in the practices one typically works for, you have to design your way out of the whole economy-driven piece. So that was our first year.
Having had that experience, we ended up getting more multi-family housing work, and the practice has been on a steady incline ever since. It’s interesting to recall the things that brought us new work and avenues. For example, one was a presentation I was doing in Calgary for something called “Design Talks” in 2016, and it turned out that there was a developer in the audience. He ended up contacting me through Instagram afterwards, saying that we should work together, so that took us to Calgary.
IW09, Calgary, Canada, 2023. Introducing mixed-use residential / commercial, higher density, heritage revitalization and mass timber construction to its Inglewood neighbourhood, IW09 incorporates a structural wood diagrid and is woven through with public amenity spaces. Rendering by 5468796 Architecture.
Instagram is a powerful tool. Double-edged sword, but there’s no denying that it’s powerful.
Definitely. Until that outreach, we were very local to Winnipeg. These past two years, we’re working all across the country, from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Victoria, British Columbia.
How would you describe where you are in your career today, more personally?
[Laughs] I don’t know...what do people say to this? I’d say in some ways I’ve been at a crossroads, as I’ve taken some time with our first child over the last year, which has been fairly transformative. For me to reevaluate what is most important and what matters has been great. I’m realizing the level of responsibility that an architect has in the world and how we can do better work and consider the community and future generations.
I’ve also been realizing more and more how much finances drive architecture and our shared spaces, and with that we’ve been deploying our strategic perspective to do better in the world. That’s something that’s important to me and I’d like to find effective ways to respond to these conditions and steer our practice that way.
“We have to advocate, to get involved in politics, to understand the financial aspects, to mentor, to guide the next generation, to get involved with the community, to give back. There are so many different opportunities in architecture within all of these things, and there really are a lot of choices.”
What have been some of the biggest challenges throughout your career?
One of the tough challenges has been that, since the majority of our work is for private developers, the fact that there haven’t been many other females sitting on the other side of the table. That wasn’t so much an issue when I was a student or an intern, but certainly an issue when I began leading our practice and when I was going to meetings with our clients. Having to gain credibility, especially within a group of guys who all know each other and have grown up together, was tough. There’s more dialogue around this issue now obviously, and there is also a younger generation of developers that we’re working with which helps.
The other challenge is really to try and figure out, and appreciate, all the different ways that the profession can be. A career in architecture isn’t just about being a star designer; it’s also about being a strategist and advocating for the value that we all have. In 2017, after several years on the Board, I was appointed the Chair of the Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce, which is an atypical position for an architect to have. Through that role I instigated a conversation about urban design and better city building with the business and political audience in mind. I also pushed for the role of the Chair to include short ‘Food for Thought’ segments and delivered them at the Chamber’s monthly luncheons attended by more than one thousand of the business and political elite of the city. This was an economic argument, not an architectural one. The kind of backlash I received from that from some members of the developer community...let’s just say I had to have some thick skin. These sorts of things have occurred, but I think I’m very privileged ultimately. I haven’t had the same challenges that some of my peers have, and that privilege is something I’m also starting to understand. I don’t by any means feel that I’ve been particularly challenged, I feel that I’m very fortunate in many ways.
With your work and with your career, especially given some of the things you just talked about, what would you say your mission is? What is the impact you’d like to have on the profession?
Certainly a few of the things that I touched on. I think my mission is partially towards an urban scale, as well as towards very local issues. I’ve been advocating for a different direction for our growth in the city for a long time, and trying to speak to decision makers, politicians, and business people in the language that they are accustomed to, in numbers and dollars and such, has been important. We have massive sprawl in Winnipeg, we are one of the least dense cities in the world, and yet we are in a seven billion dollar infrastructure deficit. People don’t understand that the only way we can dig ourselves out of this is to start building in between the sprawl, instead of continuing to sprawl out, which is the easiest and laziest way to proceed. There is a lot of unwillingness politically to take a stand, so my mission is to speak to people and address these issues within the local communities.
On the larger architecture side, we simply can’t continue living in the way that we’ve been living! Technology won’t solve everything, and architects have a responsibility towards the environment, and towards general equity and affordability. Housing is a fundamental human right, and I want to fight for that and to ensure that design is accessible for more people. We have to learn to live communally, especially on this continent where that isn’t a core value. That’s one of the ways we can begin to save the planet.
OMS Stage, Winnipeg, Canada, 2013. An open-air performance venue, OMS Stage is a multi-functional design that throws out the old bandshell concept and activates the new stage year-round as a light-refracting surface, projection screen, concert venue, shelter and sculptural object. Photography by Travis Ross Photography.
One Bucket at a Time, Mexico City, Mexico, 2017. Designed in collaboration with Factor Eficiencia and Studio NYL Engineers, One Bucket at a Time was constructed for city design festival, Mextrópoli. The structure uses common painter’s buckets as the building blocks for interactive pavilion that questions the ownership of public space and how we reclaim it. Photography by Jaime Navarro.
I’ve mentioned this before, but I grew up in Russia and Canada, in very cosmopolitan environments, and that idea of urban shared living is so beneficial and powerful.
That’s right! And the actual space in apartment complexes that is the public yard, where people can socialize, and seniors can sit and watch kids play, is something that we’re really missing in Canada and the US. We don’t build apartment blocks that way, so no wonder they don’t attract families and aging citizens. That is the crux of how we have to develop differently, and have these standards of quality in place.
Who are you admiring right now?
One of the people I certainly admire and who provides me endless inspiration is Canadian Senator [independent], and my former neighbour and client - now friend and mentor, Marilou McPhedran. She is a lawyer and human rights advocate and her work has focused on the promotion of human rights through systemic reform in law, medicine, education and governance in Canada and internationally. She has co-founded several widely recognized non-profit systemic change organizations. She is fearless and willing to take on anything or anyone if it improves equality/equity, and someday I hope to embody even a fraction of some of those qualities.
On the architecture front we’ve looked up to the quiet power and weight of RCR’s architecture well before they became a household name through their Pritzker recognition. Similarly, Smiljan Radic’s work embodies some of those qualities, while being wonderfully weird and brave at the same time. I find his work surprising and even odd – all in a good way that keeps us guessing what comes next.
Finally, I just devoured Matthew Soules’ new book Icebergs, Zombies and the Ultra Thin, Architecture and Capitalism in the Twenty First Century. Matthew is an associate professor of architecture at the University of British Columbia and we have gotten to know one another a bit over the years. Matthew speaks brilliantly about architecture’s blind spot toward finance capitalism and manages to make sense of those forces that many of us have a hard time naming.
What advice do you have for those starting their careers in architecture? Would your advice be anything additional or different for women?
Educate yourself to understand how architecture is driven by dollars. Learn that lingo because learning that will allow you to push and pull your design better. Don’t be cynical with it - this is very important - just go with it, and challenge that norm to carve out a space for good design within that really tight formula. Even if it means taking an extra course in business management or economics in school, or getting acquainted with a developer who can walk you through some of these things, is beneficial. If you don’t understand these realities, it’ll be very difficult to make architectural decisions that truly help drive the project.
The second part is to understand that architecture is so much more broad than just design, and formal design. We have to advocate, to get involved in politics, to understand the financial aspects, to mentor, to guide the next generation, to get involved with the community, to give back. There are so many different opportunities in architecture within all of these things, and there really are a lot of choices.