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Kanva's Elaa housing development uses some unorthodox design ideas to deliver something familiar: the close-knit character of an old Montreal neighbourhood, built around walkable social spaces.Alex St. Jean/Handout

What if the future of urban living looks like the past? Imagine people living together in low apartment buildings – gathering on a park bench or at a courtyard for a chat, or a drink.

In Montreal, this scale of housing makes up much of the city fabric. Now it’s taking new architectural form with Elaa, a condo project by the architects Kanva: a subtle blend of public and private, hard surfaces and greenery that is deeply urban and also welcoming.

I visited recently with Tudor Radulescu, an architect who is a partner at Kanva. Elaa’s six buildings, clustered on a prominent corner in Verdun, seemed to stand out from the two- and three-flat apartment buildings next door. Instead of old brick, Elaa is finished in off-white stucco and blackened cedar.

But Mr. Radulescu didn’t talk about that first. Instead, he stood on the sidewalk out front. “Everyone knows that I’m the public domain here,” he said, “and in the private domain here” – he stepped across an invisible line onto the walkway that leads into the complex. “But that boundary gets eroded here. There’s no gate, and there is no fence.”

From there we moved inward among the six separate volumes, three or four storeys tall, that hold the complex’s 41 units. The pathway continued, lined here and there by ivy creeping up a wall, and marked by a well-crafted bench and picnic table. We were overlooked at each moment by balconies and windows of the flats above and below. “There’s no need for security here,” Mr. Radulescu said, citing Jane Jacobs: “You have eyes on the street." Dina Safonova, the architect at Kanva who managed the project, added: “You will get to know your neighbours.”

Such low, dense living has been the dream that urbanists in Vancouver and in Toronto have been pursuing for the past few years. Not many such neighbourhoods exist in those cities, and in large part they’re not even allowed by planning rules.

In Montreal, however, much of the island has exactly that character, established in the late 19th century. Elaa comes from this tradition. “It connects to city housing, mostly three storeys or less, which makes up the majority of housing in the city,” Mr. Radulescu said. A typical block on the island of Montreal is long, with a central alley “that is a staple of our urbanism,” he said, “and always had this vibrant life. They become an extension of the yard, a meeting place where kids from the block will play.”

The courtyard here, designed by Vlan Paysages, builds upon that. It mixes hard surfaces (fashionably skinny concrete pavers) with a variety of plantings, fed by rain running off the roofs above. A network of steel cables climbs the walls and crosses the courtyard above where I stood; I could see vines beginning to follow these cables and establish what will be a green canopy.

As for the apartments themselves, they are workmanlike in terms of their finishes and materials, but enjoy a rich and complex variety of spaces. There is one significant catch: Because these are walkups, almost none of the units are fully physically accessible. However, each apartment has windows on at least two sides. Many have balconies, which all face in different directions or are separated by a generous distance for privacy.

The unusual arrangement of the complex into six separate buildings, each split by central stairs, creates roughly square floor plans – allowing good-sized rooms and a minimum of wasted space. On the whole, it’s a brilliant game of architectural Tetris.

Such invention is a hallmark of Kanva. The firm was founded in 2003 by Mr. Radulescu and Rami Bebawi. The two business partners are now 40ish, an age at which many architects are just getting their practices off the ground. However, they are thriving. They won the Emerging Architectural Practice Award from the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada back in 2015 and a raft of provincial design awards.

More meaningfully, they won an international design competition to remake Montreal’s Biodome. That popular biology museum, which occupies the former Velodrome linked to Olympic Stadium, is now scheduled to reopen in the spring.

Their redesign project – dubbed Migration – together with colleagues Bouthillette Parizeau and NCK, reorganizes the space around a set of white textile walls, which created a unified experience, and a set of elevated passageways that bring visitors up into the canopy of its tropical rainforest. It should create a novel view on a familiar scene.

So, too, does the Elaa project. Developers KnightsBridge and District Atwater have sold the 41 homes here despite the project’s novelty, and the relative lack of parking. (There are only 10 spots total, tucked onto the back of the building in vertical stackers.) In Montreal, at least, there is plenty of demand for young professionals to live in quarters that their grandparents – or parents – would see as cramped.

The payoff? Urban living in a close-knit neighbourhood, not far from a canal, a metro stop and a just-chic-enough strip of restaurants, cafes and unfussy depanneurs. All this in a highly energy-efficient building with no picket fences and, quite happily, no fences of any kind.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article incorrectly named one of the developers of the project.

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