These days, Barry Johns would be fine with you not noticing his projects. Maybe he’d prefer it.
Johns is the architect behind the concrete-pillared MacEwan University, one of Edmonton’s most conspicuous buildings. But when he recalls his more than 50-year career, he doesn’t mention it. Instead, he points to projects that blend in rather than stand out: an inner-city social services complex (Operation Friendship), or the Governor General’s medal-winning Advanced Technology Centre, that disappears into a southside hillside.
He talks about the future the same way. Now 77, Johns is fresh from earning the doctorate degree that led to his new book, Effective Urban Densification, a reimagining of infill’s role in meeting housing needs. To achieve density, affordability and sustainability, Johns wants to leverage the unassuming and overlooked: Edmonton’s established communities.
“The mature neighbourhoods are the best bones in the city,” says Johns. So he questions the replacement of those bones with skinny, multi-storey infills.
“Infill is being used as a way to solve the housing crisis — just get more supply out there.” But that approach comes at a cost, Johns says. A monolith towering above post-Second World War bungalows cannot “respect” the character of a neighbourhood; it’s disruptive. With conventional infill, he says, “the very idea of place is ignored.”
Another cost is, well, cost. About half the price of a new home in Edmonton today, he points out, covers the lot. “The wicked problem is land,” says Johns. But if no one’s making any more of it to help keep prices down, and the city intends for 50 per cent of new housing to come from infill, can that problem be solved? “It can,” Johns insists. “I did.”
He calls his solution “Baakfil.” And if it works as he hopes, almost no one will notice.
“Serendipity” led to his epiphany, says Johns. Around the mid 2010s, “I was getting tired — mentally tired. I wasn’t feeling optimistic about what was happening in the profession.”
The homebuilding industry was — and still is, in Johns’ opinion — mass-producing templated houses, no architects required. From Johns’s view as then-chancellor of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, architects weren’t rallying to change a process he saw to be inflating home prices and, through infill, often altering the culture of established neighbourhoods.
“It was a moment of crisis for me,” says Johns. “I’ve always wanted to make a difference.” But he wasn’t.
He needed a change, which arrived at a conference where he happened to cross paths with with John Brown, dean of the University of Calgary School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape. The university was launching a doctorate in design studies in which participants could examine their past work and, from it, develop something entirely new.
Johns realized this was his chance to step outside the profession and think deeply about it, and about his role in it. “I was able to focus,” Johns says of the nearly four years of study that followed. “I was able to create new knowledge.”
That knowledge was Baakfil — Back Alley Advantage Kinship Family Integrated Living.
“I was able to zoom-in after having determined that the cost of land is the biggest barrier to affordability,” says Johns. “Nobody (had) ever acknowledged it … The cost just gets passed on.”
Removing land from the equation drives Johns’s innovation to make the most of what’s already on the lot. It starts by subdividing a piece of the lot. “Keep the existing house and build something in the back,” he explains.
Also, keep the original owners in that house. They temporarily partner with a developer, contributing the land space but retaining ownership. Together, they build a Baakfil unit: a roughly 24-by-24-foot (garage-sized), net-zero-ready house accessed by the back alley of a corner or other good-sized lot. When the Baakfil house sells — for “well under” the current average detached home price because it’s on a smaller plot of land — the partners share the proceeds.
To Johns’s delight, an architect is integral. Orientation and layout of each Baakfil home is entirely customizable. He couldn’t have it any other way.
“If any two of your buildings look the same,” Johns says, “there’s something wrong.”
Johns calls this “gentle densification.” It leaves the streetscape unchanged and even animates back alleys while boosting housing stock. By Johns’s math, if 25 per cent of new development was by Baakfil for 25 years, it could accommodate 250,000 Edmontonians in mature neighbourhoods.
Kevin Taft would like that. The former MLA and now community advocate with the Coalition for Better Infill feels that city of Edmonton zoning bylaw changes have amounted to “deregulation” of the infill industry, allowing for “poorly thought-out” builds.
In contrast, “Barry’s an architect who pays tremendous attention to context,” says Taft. “How does a house fit into its neighbourhood? How does it fit on site? How does it relate to the trees? Barry is bringing the whole combination to the issue.”
Baakfil is “slow, steady, organic,” Taft adds. “It’s not going to happen overnight, but if city council had the wisdom to get behind it, five years from now it could be quite remarkable.” It could lead to “quality infill that preserves our neighbourhoods.”
This is a national concern, says Larry Beasley, a Vancouver-based urban planner and designer who has influenced the shape of cities worldwide.
“Densification has too often meant destabilization,” he says. “Do we really have to destabilize our neighbourhoods just to be sustainable?”
Beasley says he appreciates Johns’s sensitivity to the impacts of the work of architects, and how his book is not just an idea, but a manual for its implementation.
“He’s presented it as a way of doing things, and gone beyond architecture to think about real estate (and) social issues,” says Beasley. “It is the beginning of a better conversation in the country.”
To properly guide that, Johns plans to soon initiate demonstration projects in two mature Edmonton neighbourhoods — the start of what may be the final chapter of his own practice.
“I believe this is the culmination of a career, and that it has the potential to be the best project I’ve ever done,” he says.
Johns admits to wishing he were “20 years younger.” But he’s re-energized. He feels he’s contributed to his practice, to the understanding of an architect’s role in building not just structures but cities — and that his work is beginning anew.
And he’s happy about that.
This article appears in the April 2025 issue of Edify
