New National Website Brings Together a Cross-Canada Architecture Superstudio Confronting the Housing Crisis
Architects Against Housing Alienation (AAHA) has launched a new public website bringing together student work from END HOUSING ALIENATION NOW!, a cross-Canada architecture Superstudio that mobilized students and faculty to imagine alternatives to the country鈥檚 current housing system.
Running from September 2025 to May 2026, the Superstudio brought architecture schools across Canada into a shared pedagogical project focused on one of the country鈥檚 most urgent challenges: how architecture can meaningfully contribute to ending housing alienation.
Rather than approaching the housing crisis simply as a problem of increasing housing supply, participating studios examined the deeper forces shaping housing today鈥攊ncluding land ownership, financialization, displacement, colonialism, the climate crisis and the organization of collective life. Students developed architectural proposals that explored decommodified forms of tenure, such as cooperative and co-housing, community land trusts and collective ownership; as well as locally engaged forms of building and urbanism such as adaptive reuse and infill housing.
The newly launched website creates a national archive and public exhibition of this work. Visitors can explore projects by school and studio, or move across the exhibition through shared themes and demands. Together, the projects demonstrate the breadth of architectural possibilities that emerge when housing is understood not primarily as a financial asset, but as the physical foundation of individual and collective and ecological life.
鈥淭he Superstudio began with a simple proposition: a challenge as large as the housing crisis requires us to work collectively. By bringing students and faculty across the country into conversation, we wanted to multiply the possibilities for what housing could become. This website makes that collective body of work public鈥攏ot as a single solution to the housing crisis, but as an expanding field of alternatives.鈥
鈥擜drian Blackwell, AAHA Co-founder
The Superstudio connected individual courses through common resources, lectures, discussions, and exchanges while allowing each school to develop its own approach to the shared theme. The result is not a single vision for the future of housing, but a diverse collection of architectural propositions emerging from different cities, regions, pedagogies, and forms of inquiry. The studio involved 12 universities: Athabasca University, British Columbia Institute of Technology, Carleton University, Laurentian University, OCAD University, Toronto Metropolitan University, Universit茅 de Montr茅al, University of British Columbia, University of Calgary, University of Manitoba, University of Toronto and University of Waterloo, with more than one studio from a number of schools.
The Superstudio was supported by Canadian Council of University Schools of Architecture (CCUSA), and the website was designed by Ali Qadeer.
Projects now presented on the website range from the adaptive use of underutilized church lands and cooperative housing to community land trusts, transformations of existing housing towers, alternative methods of housing manufacture, and new relationships between housing, ecology, public space, and collective life.
The project extends the work of Architects Against Housing Alienation, the national collective that represented Canada at the 2023 Venice Biennale of Architecture. AAHA was formed in 2021 around the proposition that Canada鈥檚 housing crisis is fundamentally connected to the treatment of land and housing as commodities. Its work brings together architects, advocates, activists, researchers, and communities to develop alternatives that reconnect housing to land, community, and creative selfdetermination.
The Superstudio shifts that work into architectural education. By coordinating studios across the country, it asks a generation of emerging architects not only to respond to the housing crisis, but to reconsider the systems, assumptions, and forms through which housing is produced.
EXPLORE THE SUPERSTUDIO聽
About Architects Against Housing Alienation
Architects Against Housing Alienation (AAHA) is a collective of architects, activists, and advocates working to end housing alienation in Canada. Formed in 2021, the collective develops architectural proposals, research, exhibitions, advocacy, and pedagogy aimed at creating socially, ecologically, and creatively empowering alternatives to commodified housing. AAHA represented Canada at the 2023 Venice Biennale of Architecture.