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About Avi Friedman
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 Dr. Avi Friedman was born in Israel in 1952. He received a PhD in Architecture in 1987 from the Université de Montréal and has published extensively in both academic and trade publications. Avi Friedman is confidently acclaimed by Wallpaper magazine as "one of the top 10 style setters who will most influence the way we live in the next quarter century."
His international award-winning work in home design, community development and sustainability has earned him his keep as Canada's housing guru and style setter. Avi is an advocate of the "life cycle house," a home with greater flexibility and creativity to accommodate changing lifestyles and priorities. A passionate speaker, he projects an articulate vision of our future in home design, and will change the way you think about our priorities as a society.
 Dr. Friedman's latest book, Room for Thought is an illuminating collection of twenty-one essays about the points where design touches life and the big and small things that make us appreciate, or become disconnected from, our homes and neighborhoods.
Drawing on his experiences as an architect, planner, world traveler, and educator, Friedman delves into issues such as the North American obsession with monster homes, the impact of scale on the feeling of comfort in our communities, environmental concerns such as deforestation, innovative recycling methods in building materials, the booming do-it-yourself industry, the decline of craftsmanship, and the role of good design in bringing families together. Written with Friedman's trademark flair, Room for Thought offers a compelling vision of the influence of design on our everyday lives from one of the world's most innovative thinkers.
Book Review
Homegrown reflections
Avi Friedman's collection of essays explores the house, neighbourhoods and the search for civility.
CHERYL CORNACCHIA, The Gazette
Published: Saturday, October 29, 2005
Room for Thought Rethinking Home and Community Design
By Avi Friedman
Penguin Canada
In the opening pages of his latest book, Avi Friedman takes readers on a journey to his childhood home in the rural village of Petach Tikva in the newly established state of Israel.
It was there, he writes, that his family lived after the Second World War in a modest 33-square-metre apartment that appeared to be tacked onto the back of a fourplex.
The apartment had a tiny bedroom, a living room that doubled as his parents' bedroom, and a kitchen so small the table needed to be moved into the centre of the room so the family of four could sit.
But Friedman remembers the modest home fondly and tells us that it was warmed as much by its proximity to the people and places around it as by the kerosene stove in the kitchen.
He recounts how orange orchards surrounded the neighbourhood that was dotted with small public parks where children played. There was a daycare and a clinic that could be reached on foot and also a four-shop strip mall - the community's social centre.
The childhood surroundings, according to Friedman, taught him "a valuable lesson about human scale" and "a sense of togetherness with (one's) community."
In his new book, we learn that Petach Tikva - as well as his second home in Israel, a fourth-floor apartment above a department store on a main commercial street in the bustling city of Tel Aviv - became the yardstick with which he has measured all other neighbourhoods.
What they had, and what many other neighbourhoods being built today don't have, he calls "civility."
Friedman's fifth book, Room for Thought, is a masterful collection of essays about the home.
In it, the McGill University professor of architecture explores the house itself; the house as part of a community and city; home-building craftmanship, including the use of new materials; and, finally, his personal experience on being a homeowner and designing homes for others.
Since 2000, Friedman, a Montreal architect who has earned an international reputation as the father of the Grow Home and the Next Home, has attracted a loyal following in the mainstream as the author of a syndicated Canadian newspaper column, which appears every second Sunday in The Gazette.
For those column readers who might be wondering whether a book by Friedman could offer more than what they already receive weekly in their newspaper, the answer is yes.
Room for Thought is greater than the sum of its parts.
Those parts - 21 essays chronicling various aspects of how home design has changed from Victorian times through to post-war tract housing to new designer a la carte models available today - are formidable individually.
Read one after another, they reverberate. The echoes about smaller families (3.9 members in 1961 to 2.6 members in 2001) to ever-bigger houses (80 square metres in 1943 to 100 square metres in 1955 and 200 square metres in the mid-'80s), leaves one questioning the design of today's homes and neighbourhoods and how they affect our daily lives.
Widening streets, longer commutes and over-consumption of resources are all on Friedman's hit list.
He looks at today's more casual lifestyle and the decade-long trend toward bigger kitchens with centres for kids' homework, home accounting, reading, TV watching and entertaining.
But he questions why we need kitchens designed for gourmet-food preparation and outfitted with dual dishwashers, indoor grills, Sub-Zero fridges, and built-in espresso-makers when we prepare fewer meals than ever before.
What's especially pleasant for Montreal readers is the book's numerous architectural and cultural references to the city and the surrounding area. He writes about the duplex-lined streets of N.D.G., the neighbourhood where he lives and that reminds him of his childhood surroundings.
We learn how Senneville is trying to maintain its architectural heritage with new urban and architectural guidelines, and how Friedman brings his McGill students to Dollard des Ormeaux and Coursol St. in Little Burgundy to teach them about "human scale" and what makes a community livable. Coursol, which was built in the early 1900s, wins out over the 40-year-old suburb - and that's another essay.
Like his columns, the essays include international references from how pre-fabricated houses are helping impoverished neighbourhoods in Mexico to the oddity of Victorian-style homes in a village in China. But I enjoyed the homegrown examples best.
Housing the Rest of My Life is the book's final essay and one in which we learn that Friedman doesn't much like thinking about growing old. But he does think about it, and he notes how house and neighbourhood design can allay some of the challenges of aging.
Whether it be new housing in old buildings on the St. Lawrence River and rejuvenating Cornwall, Ont., or the environmentally sustainable tall, willowy three-storey houses in a forest in St. Nicolas, Friedman points to new models that can make a difference. |
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