“With our work, there’s always this social agenda to create buildings that are not purely inward looking,” says 5468796’s lead architect Sasa Radulovic. “We tried to do this through ‘erosion’—by biting away at the black box with white space, connecting balconies and patios through the building.” The team further broke up the massing by creating what are essentially two discrete boxes, linked artfully by a multi-height glazed transition that serves as the building’s main entrance. The material palette is emphatically modern: white cement board and corrugated black metal cladding, aluminum window framing, and perforated metal screening over the smaller windows. OZ offers a sleek counterpoint to the texture of clapboard and brick elsewhere on the street, yet honors the liberated spirit of the community.

Led by Radulovic in collaboration with coprincipals Johanna Hurme and Colin Neufeld, the project marks a new level of sophistication for this young firm, whose unusual name is taken from its business incorporation number. Its earlier residential projects, like The Avenue on Portage and Stradbrook Avenue apartments, have been more notable for street-front animation than for spatial imagination. Their recent Block_10, a three-story, 10-unit condo building composed of linked elements, can be read as a pilot project for OZ. But now the design team has ramped up both volumetric complexity and scale.

The project began with a design brief to transform three standard house lots into a 25-unit condominium building. Two previous architectural firms had already tried and failed, finding the task impos­sible within the existing building-height and floor-space restrictions. The 5468796 team rose to the challenge by designing most of the condos as bi-level interlocking units with lofts, so that they fit together within the mass like Tetris blocks. The architects finessed a reduction in the floor-to-floor height requirement from 12 feet to 10 feet for the single-level units. Compensating for the compression created by the lofts, they incorporated 16-foot living spaces into the bi-level units, most of which have two bedrooms. In this way, the design team was able to create a total of seven levels—including mezzanine levels—within the prescribed 60-foot height limit. (Or close, anyway: they negotiated an extra 2 feet of height in order to realize their design.)

The architects created yet more living area with the patios and balconies. Most of the outdoor space is configured in a way that allows residents the option of some privacy, but more often it is open, clearly intended to activate neighborly interaction. (On a rainy end-of-summer afternoon, residents sat on their patio, sheltered from the drizzle above while still able to exchange pleasantries with passersby on the street below.) It’s a European approach, imported by Radulovic (who emigrated from the former Yugoslavia) and Hurme (from Finland). The openness seems natural to them, but North American sensibilities are not quite there yet—hence two of the project’s shared interior patio spaces, cut through the building like the hole in a doughnut, now read as dark caves since the two adjacent condo owners segregated their common space with a solid wall. The architects only shrug. “I’m flabbergasted by the way we treat space here,” says Radulovic. “There’s so much fear of rubbing shoulders with your neighbor.”

People often end up living in formulaic boxes because both residential builders and buyers are afraid of what they don’t know, suggests Radulovic. “We’ve always been interested in breaking out of that. The question is, how do you do it on a budget? I think we’re proving now that you can, on a growing scale.”