The Apartment Issue

Apartments shape how we exist alongside one another—how we negotiate space, proximity, and the idea of home. The Apartment Issue looks at apartments, and the buildings that contain them, at the intersection of private life and collective experience. At once familiar and strange, they reveal the gaps and overlaps between lived realities and the development patterns that produce them.

The contributions gathered here consider apartments as a flexible and evolving framework through which architecture, material systems, social dynamics, and policy are closely intertwined. Taken together, they examine how apartments mediate between intimacy and exposure, efficiency and generosity, regulation and everyday life.

In Living Apart, Together, Nicholas Gilliland, Igo Kommers Wender, and Karen Kubey discuss how apartments negotiate private life and shared space; in CLT and Apartments, Jesús Vassallo and Pouya Khadem examine the origins, challenges, and futures of cross-laminated timber in multi-unit housing; in One Street, Eleven Decades of Apartment Building, Dan Seljak and Sebastián López Cardozo document Toronto’s layered apartment landscapes; and in Postwar Parquet, Stefan Novakovic and Sebastián López Cardozo speak with residents about parquet floors as sites of memory and transformation.

Our previous issue considered how sidewalks meditate between architectural understanding and the appearance of civic life. Contributors included Felipe Correa, Uros Novakovic, Peter Sealy, Pouya Khadem, Mai Okimoto, and Lauren Phillips.

Pouya Khadem, Sebastián López Cardozo, Mai Okimoto, and Lauren Phillips