What are the boundaries of architectural practice? For three firms in Western Canada, they lie far beyond buildings. Patkau Architects, designer Omer Arbel, and Sputnik Architecture have developed branches of their work dedicated to the fabrication of products, furniture, lighting and artwork. All three of them deploy these parallel practices as forms of research, with a significant impact on their architectural thinking.

Patkau Architects began their fabrication practice over 30 years ago, with what John Patkau refers to as “analytical models” of their own built work—not intended as representations, but as tools for working through the formal characteristics of their buildings. As John puts it (with considerable modesty and a touch of irony) “our firm was never ‘successful’,” which led to slow periods when they had to generate their own activity. During these fallow periods, their “well-provisioned” workshop became the site for the analytical models, and eventually, at the instigation of Patricia Patkau, for bolder experiments with materials. A cluster of bent plywood shelters was one of the first full-scale prototypes to emerge from this work, developed as a contribution to Winnipeg’s Warming Huts project, then dispatched to London’s V&A Museum. That project’s experimentation morphed into the steel Cocoons for the Tokyo flagship store of fashion house Comme des Garçons. This was only possible because alongside the Patkau’s research into origami—the elusive quest for a sheet structure generated by a single fold and a single bend—they had developed original breakform processes, with new machines of their own invention. Their fabrication work has since expanded into furniture, lighting design, and production, most of it carried out in-house. 

While it’s clear that their formal discoveries are often made during hands-on testing of materials, the Patkaus don’t shy away from digital tools. Their competition entry for Daegu Gosan Public Library in Korea deployed parametric modelling software Grasshopper to translate sheet-inspired research into a reciprocal structural frame made of timber components. They took a similar approach for the Temple of Light in Kootenay Bay, British Columbia. Completed in 2017, this project evidences collaboration with other skilled makers: they worked with local, internationally experienced timber fabrication firm Spearhead. The Temple applies discoveries about form and material assemblies made on the library and other unbuilt projects, perching eight petal-like shells on existing foundations to enclose a sanctuary. While they are currently developing a products division distinct from their architectural practice, the Patkaus fundamentally see their fabrication work as research into the design and construction of architecture.

One of the many talented individuals who have spent time working in the Patkaus’ office is Vancouver-based designer Omer Arbel. Besides the Patkaus, Arbel has worked for architects including Enric Miralles and Peter Busby. From each of them, he took away a different experience of practice—from what he describes as the “operatic” mode of Miralles’ office to the “quiet prayer” of the Patkaus. But while Arbel came “within a hair” of getting licensed, he grew disillusioned with what he saw as the dominant role played by the architect in North America: as a service provider. 

A unique opportunity led him down a different path. While still at Busby’s office, Arbel independently produced four prototype furniture designs for display at New York Design Week in 2005. Uncomfortable with the number four (stemming from a personal sense of numerology), he felt he needed a fifth element, more as a compositional anchor than as a design for production—but his furniture fabricator had gone bankrupt. In the few weeks left before the event, he worked with friends to put together a hand-cast glass luminaire to be that anchor piece. It was a hit, and that piece—the first Bocci light—remains in production today. The success of this product eventually led him to launch the lighting firm Bocci with friend and client Randy Bishop. 

Since then, Omer Arbel Office has produced, besides an array of lighting products, glassware, furniture, set designs, sculptures, a book and—yes—architecture.  Rather than a name, each design bears an accession number—as though each is a distinct realization of an essentially undifferentiable and potentially infinite font of creativity. All of the work comes from direct and daring experimentation with materials. Arbel, perhaps drawing on his early experience with Miralles, seeks a “celebratory” approach to making, rather than what he sees as the overly critical culture nurtured in schools. In contrast to work born of an author’s imagination—including the products of parametric design—he finds it much more exciting to “let the form occur.” He reflects, “If you explore what materials themselves want to do, you can discover a much more radical form, with a fraction of the resources.” 

The result is a dizzying array of over 100 material and formal experiments, and counting. Arbel says of these experiments: “They fail all the time, they’re a total failure!” Yet it’s impossible to look at this body of work and not see success. From the extremely slow accretion of nickel to copper wire in the jewelry of 71.2, to the sandblasting of pine to produce chair 68.3, Arbel embraces growth and decay, creation and destruction, in equal measure. Seemingly uncomfortable juxtapositions of material—the blown glass and copper wire of vase 84.0, or the hay-cast, saw-cut concrete of Bocci’s headquarters 86.3—result in a strange, even excruciating beauty. In his clifftop house (94.2), he salvages cedar burls as concrete formwork and then, audaciously, repurposes them as cladding. Such works are testimony to Arbel’s willingness to risk everything: perhaps a glassblower’s attitude, applied to architecture.

Grains seem to be having a moment in maker culture. Hay—or in this case, flax straw—was also the focus of a recent project by Anvil Tree, the fabrication satellite of Winnipeg’s Sputnik Architecture. Peter Hargraves, founder of Sputnik, created Anvil Tree as a sister company that could help realize Sputnik’s designs, and a home base for his life-long interest in sculpture. Flax straw is the key material in Lantern, a project inspired by conversations about the European tradition of straw structures between Anvil Tree creative director Chris Pancoe and visual anthropologist and artist Vytautus Musteikis. Pancoe and Hargraves met Musteikis while building a room for Sweden’s ice hotel in 2022; they brought him to Canada to work with them on Lantern and continue the dialogue. 

Lantern was woven from agricultural waste and salvaged wood last fall as part of Holiday Alley, a Selkirk event celebrating creativity.
Left on display over the winter, it was set ablaze for this year’s spring equinox. The intention is to make the burning of a straw sculpture an annual community event in Selkirk, as it is in agronomy-based cultures around the world. 

Such social—even ritual—events are a forte of Anvil Tree. The firm is responsible for the fabrication of most of Winnipeg’s Warming Huts—an annual event for which Sputnik was a founding organizer, and for which the Patkaus built their bent plywood shelters in 2011. Anvil Tree carries out ice harvesting and installation for ice carving competitions in Winnipeg, as well as for rural events like the Trappers’ Festival in the Pas, northern Manitoba. Their grove of glowing bicycles, suspended from trees, has become a prominent part of Winnipeg’s Culture Days celebrations. 

While Lantern was assembled by hand, Anvil Tree is also dextrous with parametric modelling and plasma cutters. Lean In is the first of a number of anticipated artistic/urbanistic interventions for Sputnik’s masterplan in Fort Francis, Ontario, where they are working with Rainy River First Nation. A new box office for Winnipeg’s Dave Barber Cinematheque used plasma-cut perforated steel to solve several tricky service and security problems for Winnipeg’s main art-house cinema. They’ve also built a restaurant in remote Churchill, Manitoba—a tricky logistical challenge. In such work, the company demonstrates a tight symbiosis with the architects and interior designers of Sputnik Architecture. 

But Anvil Tree’s first love remains art. For artist Wayne and Jordan Stranger’s monument to Indigenous leader Chief Peguis at the Manitoba Legislature, the Strangers are casting the bronze for the 14-foot statue in Peguis First Nation. The steel interior armature was fabricated by Anvil Tree in their workshop in Winnipeg. 

It’s in this facility—a former welding workshop that now includes a woodworking studio, a metal shop, a finish shop and ancillary buildings for materials and equipment—that Hargraves plans to see the full realization of Anvil Tree’s mission. “The goal is to have this constant collaboration with artists that are here; and now, if they want to do something big, they have access to a workshop,” says Hargraves. The second-floor workshop spaces will be used to train visiting artists in fabrication techniques, as well as to host design-build studios for architecture students.

As they carry their architectural practices into new realms, Patkau Architects, Omer Arbel, and Anvil Tree manifest a broader definition of the Greek architektōn—master maker—than is encompassed by professional practice alone. From “quiet prayer” to operatic ambition, their fabrication practices provide a wealth of lessons in the artistic, technical and social potential of architecture.

Lawrence Bird, MRAIC, is an architect, city planner and visual artist based in Winnipeg. 

As appeared in the September 2024 issue of Canadian Architect magazine

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On June 13, 2024, Arthur Erickson’s beloved Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia reopened after 18 months of closure. During this time, its iconic Great Hall was entirely rebuilt from the ground up. The epic reconstruction was steered by Vancouver architect Nick Milkovich, whom Erickson first hired in 1968 and who worked on the original building.

Here’s Milkovich’s account of the project, drawn from an interview with Adele Weder.

Since the Museum of Anthropology was built, the knowledge of earthquake impact has changed; the building was about 25 per cent of what it should be for current codes. The building was already showing signs of deterioration: the plastic skylights leaked like hell, steel reinforcements in the concrete were starting to show, things like that. The Great Hall was the worst off.

We started out by scanning the building components. That’s when we discovered that the concrete columns were actually hollow. Fifty years ago, the lifting capacity of the construction equipment was more limited; it would have been difficult or impossible to raise the largest column, which was 50 feet high. So that’s probably why they were thinned out and hollowed. The engineering consultant had said that it would come down fast in an earthquake—and that’s before we found out that the columns were hollow!

When we found out that it was that bad, we thought it would be really difficult to reinforce it without showing a lot of steel, but doing it that way would have changed the whole character of the building.

The key to the seismic upgrade is what’s called base isolation, so the building can move in an earthquake. The old structure was slab-on-grade concrete, resting directly on the ground. We rebuilt it with precast concrete, with a crawl space under the building and a huge beam under the columns that helps supports it.

And underneath every column, we incorporated rubber-and-steel tips called base isolators. They’ll act like shock absorbers in an earthquake. Our projection is that the building will be able to move up to one foot two inches, in two or three seconds. That was the big move.

The existing walls were tempered glass, which wouldn’t break into deadly shards—but in an earthquake, all that glass would all
instantly shatter and pile up on the ground at the foot of the building. We replaced that glass with laminated sheets of glass, which are stronger and still safe.

Before, the glass plates were pinned to the columns and hung from the beams. Now, long plates of glass are cantilevered over the columns a bit, meeting at the vertical glass plates at a right angle, caulked together with a steel rod in the middle of the caulking, and that
allows for a bit of movement in an earthquake.

I hesitated for about a week before I took on the job. I’m not a huge political animal; I’m just a guy who likes to make things. I had to decide if I could handle the politics of it all. But I knew I could handle the architecture part, and I knew the building well.

And I realized too there was an obligation—a moral obligation, in a way.

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Evidently, a lot can happen in ten years, which is the time since Harold “Hal” Kalman and Robin Ward last updated their popular Exploring Vancouver—a keystone volume that has been re-issued nearly every decade since 1974. It is remarkable to look at the newest version in comparison to earlier ones, including the black-and-white edition from almost fifty years ago. The past decade, in particular, has seen an astonishing number of new entries to the book: from a plethora of new residential high-rises by an international who’s who of architects, to several new buildings at UBC, along with new developments by local First Nations.

It is this last group of entries in particular that the book’s authors call out in their introduction to this edition. Following the lead of Vancouver’s pledge to Truth and Reconciliation in 2014, this is the first edition that highlights some of the grievous wrongs that have been perpetuated since the founding of the city—in particular, that the downtown peninsula was not “empty land” as the land commissioner of the CPR declared and had immortalized on the corner of the downtown street named after him. As clearly noted on the first page of this book’s introduction: “The land was not ‘empty’—First Nations had been here for millennia.”

In acknowledgment of the damaging history of colonialism, the book no longer begins with Gastown, accompanied by a picture of John “Gassy Jack” Deighton’s statue in Maple Tree Square, as had been the case in 2012. Instead, the new edition puts False Creek at the start: the book’s authors have chosen Expo ’86, which was staged on those former industrial lands, as the event to frame the book’s narrative and nearly four hundred featured buildings. The introduction is perhaps one of the most comprehensive histories of planning in Vancouver and its region to-date, even more than Frances Bula‘s recent introduction to Larry Beasley’s Vancouverism, specifically because this new edition followed the release of the controversial Broadway Plan. The opening text is particularly strong in documenting the city’s history since the sale of the Expo lands in 1987, when Vancouver planner Ray Spaxman and City Council worked with developer Concord Pacific and local constituents to create what would become one of North America’s most vibrant, walkable communities.

From CityPlan to EcoDensity, from Vancouverism to the new Broadway Plan, Vancouver has seen seismic shifts in its planning sensibilities since 2012, and Kalman and Ward have chronicled the landscapes that have emerged along the way—from the new communities growing up in Olympic Village (now just “The Village”) to the bustling campus in the False Creek Flats where Emily Carr University has made its new home, designed by Diamond Schmitt and Chernoff Thompson Architects. 

As well, the book includes some of the many new buildings constructed at UBC, including Tallwood by Acton Ostry Architects, which at the time of its construction in 2017 was the tallest hybrid mass timber building in the world. Other new buildings included in the ten additional pages on UBC include the Nest by DIALOG and B+H Architects, Formline’s Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre, a new aquatic centre by MJMA and Acton Ostry Architects, a biodiversity museum and research centre by Patkau Architects, and a pharmaceutical sciences building by Saucier + Perrotte with HCMA. The next edition, one anticipates, will provide an update on the recent seismic upgrades to the Museum of Anthropology, the great masterwork by Arthur Erickson which anchors the west side of the campus.

By presenting False Creek as the starting point for the book, the usual suspects of Gastown, Chinatown, and Strathcona are able to follow without much ado, with the downtown CBD and West End still rounding out the book’s core framework, as it has for close to five decades. As a past architectural walking tour guide for the AIBC who led variations of these six walks, I have been watching the transformation of the downtown and environs with interest since the late nineties, and was very curious to see which recent buildings the authors would be able to include at the time of the book’s publishing. The final selection includes Bjarke Ingels Group and DIALOG’s Vancouver House, Revery’s Butterfly, Kengo Kuma and Merrick Architecture’s Alberni, and Herzog and de Meuron and Perkins&Will’s design for a new Vancouver Art Gallery.

By consolidating some of the chapters from the previous edition, the authors have been able to reduce the previous fourteen walks to ten. The tenth tour in the book requires a car as it covers a wide geographic area, including Surrey, Richmond, New Westminster, Port Moody, and Burnaby. This section is a substantial addition to the book, providing for several new buildings atop Mount Burnaby at SFU, along with a num­ber of buildings in Surrey’s growing civic precinct, including its main library by Revery.

As a resident of New Westminster, I appreciated the inclusion of the Anvil Centre by HCMA and MCM, along with the new Sapperton District adjacent to the Royal Columbian Hospital, an often overlooked transit-oriented development masterplanned by Henriquez Partners Architects. Like its older cousin at New Westminster Station, Sapperton will be home to four new residential towers at its build-out, and has turned the area into a vibrant, walkable community. 

Like the story of False Creek, the Expo Line anchors another narrative thread, as its expansion to include the Millennium, Evergreen, and Canada Lines has allowed for Metro Vancouver to remain a fifteen-minute city. The new Broadway Line is also mentioned several times in the current edition, particularly as it enables the Broadway Plan. As the book’s authors make clear, this new plan will potentially affect some 500 blocks along the Broadway corridor, currently home to twenty-five percent of the city’s rental housing stock. Perhaps the game changer here will be the arrival of Indigenous development on the Heather and Jericho lands, along with the Squamish nation’s Sen’ákw, designed by Revery with Kasian, which has already broken ground at the southern foot of the Burrard Street Bridge.

Kalman and Ward note that the most unprecedented result of Truth and Reconciliation, “unforeseen by CityPlan and EcoDensity (or previous editions of this book), is that First Nations would assert their rights and initiate development.” They ask: “Will these initiatives shift the dynamics of real estate development in Vancouver? They will certainly test the sincerity of the City’s 2014 pledge of reconciliation.”

The results of these new developments will doubtless be documented in a future edition. Meanwhile, the fifth edition offers a hopeful narrative of moving into the future together by building upon the lessons of our past. In the spirit of Expo ’86, this positive motion continues to propel this city forward to becoming a place we can all call home.

See all articles in the November issue 

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Oxford Properties Group (Oxford) and James K.M. Cheng Architects have officially opened The Stack at 1133 Melville Street.

The Stack is the first office tower to obtain certification under the Canada Green Building Council’s Zero Carbon Building – Design standard, and is also the first high-rise commercial tower in North America constructed to meet zero carbon standards. Ownership of The Stack is shared by Oxford and CPP Investments.

This 37-story, AAA-class office tower spans 550,000 square feet and boasts a premium location in downtown Vancouver. Its distinctive twisted, stacked box design by architect James K.M. Cheng adds to the city’s skyline.

The achievement of zero carbon status by The Stack also plays a crucial role in advancing the City of Vancouver and the Province of British Columbia toward their shared goal of achieving zero carbon by 2030. The Stack’s attainment of this status is made possible through the incorporation of innovative features designed to reduce both carbon emissions and energy consumption. These features include low carbon building systems and a high-performance triple-pane glazing system.

The Stack also leverages smart building technology to offer insights into energy management, optimize building performance, and enable proactive maintenance. On-site renewable energy is generated through a rooftop photovoltaic solar panel array, producing an annual output of 26,000 kilowatt-hours.

“The Stack is leading the real estate industry to new levels of sustainability and reflects Oxford’s commitment to integrating ESG best practices throughout our assets,” commented Andrew O’Neil, Vice President of Development, Oxford Properties. “We’re incredibly proud to deliver a building that creates economic and social value for the city of Vancouver, and actively contributes to our partners and customers’ ESG goals. By being the first to achieve a Zero Carbon high rise office building, we can use the insights and learnings from this project across our portfolio and share best practices with the wider industry as we collectively tackle decarbonization as one of the most pressing issues of our times.”

The design of The Stack incorporates architectural features that prioritize employee comfort and health, such as operable windows that allow for natural ventilation, outdoor terraces and a landscaped pocket park, which includes a public art installation by Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun.

To encourage active transportation and overall wellness, The Stack provides a 5,000-square-foot fitness center and accommodates 250 bike parking spaces. A 6,000-square-foot rooftop terrace is accessible to all tenants, providing unobstructed panoramic views from a height of 530 feet.

“With its architectural prominence, unrivalled suite of amenities and breathtaking views, The Stack redefines the workplace experience in Canada,” commented Ted Mildon, Vice President, Office Leasing and Operations at Oxford Properties. “We have long foreseen the evolution of the office from simply being the ‘production floor’ where employees congregated to complete tasks into a destination that creates employee engagement, and drives collaboration, learning and mentorship for high performing teams. We’re seeing in cities across the globe that providing employees with a high-quality workplace experience has been an integral part in successful ‘Return to Office’ programs for firms looking to unlock the benefits of in-person collaboration.”

“We have enjoyed enormous recent leasing success with The Stack, with the majority of the building’s leasing being secured over the past 12 months. This is further evidence of our ongoing conviction that high quality, highly sustainable office buildings in the best locations that are focused on the employee experience and wellness will continue to outperform.”

“In addition to the building’s achievements in sustainability and the workplace experience, we have also received a lot of compliments from our neighbours as to how well this project is fitting into the community, and how much they appreciate the Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun sculpture and the pocket park connecting to the existing network of mid-block passages and plazas,” said James K.M. Cheng, Principal, James K.M. Cheng Architects.

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Vancouver architect Gair Williamson of Gair Williamson Architects, has passed away unexpectedly.

“Gair lived the most unimaginable and fulfilling life. Those of us who knew him well have had the pleasure to hear him recalling his memories in the most articulate and perfect detail. This sensibility was revealed in his work as an Architect, with the belief that buildings are a repository of our collective cultural memory,” reads a statement from Gair Williamson Architects.

“With that idea, his buildings were designed to relate to context, with materials that endure and age well over time. Their apparent simplicity invites careful investigation and multiple viewings to uncover the details and gestures that make them unique.”

Williamson leaves behind various realized projects, many of them within the City of Vancouver’s Gastown, Chinatown and Downtown Eastside. “This reflected his belief in an Architect’s role and responsibility in rebuilding and giving back to the city. His efforts and contributions were celebrated by his peers in Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia Awards in Architecture for The Keefer, The Stables and his Case Study 547,” continued the statement.

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For architecture aficionados, a highlight of each summer is the West Vancouver Art Museum’s annual West Coast Modern Home Tour. For this frequent attendee, the 2023 tour was haunted by the ghost of Arthur Müdry’s late great Beaton house—a 1965 paean to Pacific forest that met an untimely end when it was sold and demolished in 2018. When the Beaton house was part of the tour, Müdry told me in a subsequent interview: “Nature is sacrosanct… One of the sins of our time is that when we find beauty in nature, we never know how to live with it in the right relationship.” 

Müdry’s belief in the sanctity of nature resonates in his 1989 Chun House, on this year’s tour. Like its predecessor, this gem was inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright, as well as by Müdry’s fascination with gothic architecture.

Surely one of the other architectural sins of our time is the price-per-square-footage-driven disappearance of mid-century modern classics. The preservation of our modernist heritage is one of the annual tour’s noble aims. But it also appeals to a certain generational looky-loo longing from those of us on the wrong side of real estate history, to see what once-middle-class homes sited in majestic wilderness actually looked like.

The fundraiser is part of a West Coast Modern Week that includes lectures and events, and is presented by British Pacific Properties, a developer involved with West Vancouver since 1931. Preternaturally nostalgic, the tour celebrates an architectural moment before the city of West Vancouver’s demographic sea change, and is as much a festival of old guard culture as it is a preservationist cause. 

And yet, as one wanders through the vaulted ceilings, natural light, and stunning views from every angle of the Chun home, it’s easy to imagine these homes that seem to levitate off the gorgeous landscape as the cathedrals of our time.

This is perhaps most literally true of Paul Merrick’s boathouse on this year’s agenda, which he designed as an extension of the luxury Sewell’s Landing apartments in Horseshoe Bay. Merrick says the arcing structure was inspired by Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia. 

But it’s the sacredness of both nature and the single-family home that pervades the tour. Wolfgang Gerson’s 1967 Itzinger-Meuldyk house in Caulfeild—down the hill from an of-the-era Erickson and perched on a steep, forested site—honours its mid-century roots even as it transcends them. It was opened up to the spectacular view of Howe Sound by architect and owner Jason Wexler and his wife when they removed a brick fireplace in the living room, bringing the outdoors in. 

Rather than a sense of exposure to the elements, Donald Manning’s 1955 post-and-beam house in the British Properties, elegantly renovated by Georg Koslowski in 1978 and by ABC last year, feels like a sleek sanctuary cocooned by forest.

The owners of the 1957 Ron Thom Carmichael house have replaced a wall in the dining area with foldable glass panels to reveal an ocean view, and moved the original door to create a light-filled hallway. The respectful updates still allow the hexagonal plan to express a sense of tightly choreographed domesticity. The perfectly sited home has the magical effect of bringing the geometry inside the visitor, as they tour this mid-century looking glass, gazing out across the harbour at the downtown micro-lofts they call home.

Hadani Ditmars is a journalist, author, and photographer.

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PROJECT Simon Fraser University Plaza Renewal, Burnaby, BC

ARCHITECT PUBLIC Architecture

PHOTOS Upper Left Photography

PROJECT SFU Student Union Building 

ARCHITECT Perkins&Will

PHOTOS Michael Elkan Photography

TEXT Trevor Boddy

Recently, Canadian architects have had deep cause for worry about the fates of three of Toronto’s key modernist monuments: Eberhard Zeidler’s Ontario Place, and Raymond Moriyama’s Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre and Ontario Science Centre. Luckily, the news from Vancouver is more positive. In the past few years, massive public investments have ensured the continued presence of two standout design masterpieces—the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology, and the core campus of Simon Fraser University. 

The science of seismic design has advanced hugely since Erickson worked with engineer Bogue Babicki to complete the Museum of Anthropology in 1976. A seismic upgrade was long overdue for the Great Hall—the huge room opening up to Pacific vistas that encloses totem poles, house frames and potlach bowls, with its concrete portals abstracting the details of ocean-flanking monumental houses built by coastal First Nations to the north. This prior need was turned into an urgent crisis when it was discovered that the angled crossbeams linking each of the main box beams demonstrated moisture in-migration; the resulting spalling of concrete around rebar increased the likelihood of catastrophic failure.  

Surprising many of us here, during the pandemic, the university and senior government officials quietly came up with the nearly $40 million needed to completely rebuild Erickson’s Great Hall. The new frame of the Great Hall is now up, and it is all but indistinguishable from the original. Long-time Erickson associate Nick Milkovich—working with Equilibrium Engineering—has set all-new columns on base isolators to reduce structural damage from any but the most extreme earthquakes. Improved detailing for the crossbeams will result in a much longer service life. Moreover, new glass technology and advice from Arup means that the new ocean-facing windows will not need angled glass structural supports, enforcing and actually improving the visual relationship between Indigenous artifact and natural landscape at the heart of Erickson’s conception. 

Minimal intervention into a superb existing design has also driven two recent commissions at the heart of Arthur Erickson and Geoffrey Massey’s Simon Fraser University campus. A new Student Union Building by Perkins & Will and a massive rethink of the university’s outdoor public spaces by Public Architecture both demonstrate how SFU can preserve and build for the future, without compromising the architectural asset that first earned it a global reputation.  

While composing the 1963 design competition campus plan with partner Geoffrey Massey, Erickson drew upon his extensive travels to search for a precedent for a university on a flat mountaintop. He briefly considered the Acropolis and other Greek hill-topping ritual centres, but thought them too small-scale for an entire university. His thoughts turned to Monte Alban, the Zapotec ceremonial city he had visited just outside Oaxaca, in Southern Mexico. Monte Alban has a long axis, framing linear ball courts and ceremonial spaces, and a range of walls, pyramids and gateways defining its long line, with a continuous public space extending from mountain edge to mountain edge.

SFU does the same. Erickson once joked to me that despite the torrent of words written about the campus, noone got the Mexican reference: “We even built a pyramid up there to make it easy!” At the highest point is the Academic Quadrangle, a square ringed by a raised two-storey structure containing faculty offices, designed by Zoltan Kiss in conformity with Erickson’s plan (and yes, with his grass-covered pyramid set within it). The gap below the offices frames landscape views in all directions, and classrooms are set underneath the square of hard surface decks. After a half century, the membrane running above these classrooms was at the end of its service life. Down the grand stairs, the membranes had also failed all along the main axis—including past the library-flanking core of Convocation Mall topped with its pioneering space frame, and continuing around a fountain and downstairs to the transit hub. By and large, there is only a parking garage below these areas, but things leaked from day one. (SFU’s first president
returned to a soaked car after the building inauguration events.)

SFU’s charge to Public Architecture’s team, led by design partner John Wall, was to renew this entire length of public spaces—an astonishing 25,000-square-metre area—with an equally astonishing final budget of $61 million. Public is a firm with an unusually strong interest in design communication, working with client groups to form a consensus and to document this in a Project Charter. For SFU, the Charter lists constitutional design principles such as “Enhance the Convocation Experience,” “Provide new Social Gathering Spaces,” and seven others.  According to Wall, “Every firm should prepare a Charter for every project—it really helps keep things on track.” 

The first major design challenge Wall and his technical teammates from RDH Building Science faced was a replacement for the decking—the right material, along with a design that would reinforce Erickson’s linear concept. They quickly ruled out a literal restoration of these surfaces: Erickson’s patterned blocks of ceramic tile framed by concrete boxes allowed too many opportunities for water ingress. The University requested a minimum 50-year service life, so hardy and utterly impermeable granite seemed best.  

Chinese sources for the granite pavers would have been cheapest, but client and architects agreed on the importance of supporting a Canadian supplier, so picked Quebec’s Polycor. From this source, they selected four shades of grey granite, ranging from a mottled off-white to a cloudy dark grey. To evoke the warm-hued tones of the original earthen tile, they also selected a speckled pink-hued stone. Setting these new stones in the previous sequence of offset boxes made no sense, so instead the Public team developed a variegated patterning, with the highest concentration of dark granite set along the central axis of the Mall, a subtle visual cue from the ground plane to complement the powerful linear array of architecture above. The highest concentration of charcoal-coloured granite was placed at the lower levels of the transit hub, then lighter tones gradually introduced around the fountain and through Convocation Mall to the raised Academic Quadrangle, where the lightest colours predominate. John Wall waxes metaphysical when explaining these choices: “Erickson spoke of education as being a progress from darkness to revelation, so we chose to amplify his philosophy with our subtle phasing of different stones.” This approach is quiet, effective, and most of all, apt.

The choice of Public Architecture for the SFU commission rested in part on the strength of their renewal of UBC’s Buchanan Courtyards, completed with landscape architects PFS Studio (see CA, March 2012). The showpiece of the Buchanan renewal is an elegant tapered trapezoidal pavilion—a place to get out of the rain with a book or a dear friend—and its formal differentiation from the surrounding blocky buildings makes it an even more welcoming psychic refuge. For SFU, Public designed an analogous pavilion which is larger, and just as eye-catching in its non-Erickson forms, set on one of the highest plazas of the axis. With its panoramic mountain views, the result is a magnificent place of repose—a needed counterpoint to Erickson’s concrete frames. From the Filberg House to the Canadian Chancery in Washington, Erickson was more polyglot than dogmatic in his tastes, so I think he would have approved.

A similar panache is found in Public’s detailing of other interventions in SFU’s public realm. For example, Erickson’s original rough concrete railings are maintained, but new metallic box structures are set within and behind them, raising the railings up to the heights demanded by contemporary safety codes. This is a fine example of sensitive upgrading: keeping the original intact, but subtly enhancing its function using low-key insertions. Glass balcony and stair rails are used whenever possible, and accessibility ramps are cleverly woven into the matrix of stone, all of these ensuring a continuity of light, view and movement. With their SFU Plaza Renewal, Public has risen to their firm’s chosen name: their sensitive interventions will guarantee a long and happy life for the university’s most important gathering places.

The results are more mixed for Perkins&Will’s new $35-million SFU Student Union, set on a prime slot opposite the library on Convocation Mall. Led by project architect Jana Foit, there is a serenity in the new student quarters facing Public’s plaza renewal. A large multifunction room at top is cantilevered out over the entrance, a silvery box that slips into the greater whole with surprising ease. It is set back, and is ringed by vertical fins, an appropriate reference to the ring of concrete fins that sets the architectural rhythm of the nearby Academic Quadrangle. The humility and thoughtfulness of Foit’s massing is also appreciated. The ballroom at the top offers magnificent views of Erickson’s handiwork; from there, the Student Union gradually descends down from Convocation Mall through four levels. These stages match, but are more elegantly proportioned, than similar tiers in Stantec’s Maggie Benston Centre next door.

The Student Union’s interior spaces are less convincing. Building costs were almost entirely funded by the student body, and the development of the program and some supervision of early design was aided by student volunteers. These factors contributed to a funding, programming, design and construction process that lasted a decade, and that predictably ground to a halt several times. Foit notes that it was the athletic clubs and sporting students that kept it going, building trust with the university to the point that SFU’s stadium was moved nearby, intending to complement the Student Union as a secondary campus hub. Here, a team led by Foit and colleague Max Richter worked with engineers Fast and Epp to fashion a handsome rank of bleachers under the serene long brow of a hugely cantilevered roof—proof of what the Perkins&Will team can do with a less encumbered site and more straightforward program. Unfortunately, SFU has recently disbanded its varsity football program, so the structure has become an elegant viewing stand without its main team.

Perkins&Will’s large firm resources include a staffer in their Atlanta office specializing entirely in student union buildings. The specialist, working with student groups, devised a building program remarkable for its many notes, but little music. The SFU Student Society website lists a baffling range of 72 campus clubs, ranging from the Biomedical Physiology and Kinesiology Student Society to the Mechatronic Systems Engineering Student Society. Most of these got their own permanent spaces, and the building is a warren of these little rooms. The select communal areas are devoted to computer gaming, the upholstered benches of a nap room, and an awkward tiered study zone—but there are no music spaces or places for un-club-organized fun.  

What’s more, there is no student pub or food service—just a chain coffee kiosk at the front door. An atrium at centre provides welcome daylighting for a building landlocked on its sides; however, it’s largely occupied by a wood-covered wedge form that makes flanking spaces feel like leftovers. Reacting to student perceptions of the greyness of Erickson’s design, Perkins&Will’s early design documents include a photo of a jar of jellybeans as an interior design reference. That notion seems to have been adopted too literally as elevator lobbies in searing bright candy colours. More successful is the soffit of the multipurpose room facing Convocation Mall, covered with multiple bands in randomized bright colours—a welcome, yet more appropriately understated, bit of fun at core campus. 

Overall, the investments into Arthur Erickson’s works at Simon Fraser University and at the University of British Columbia is cause for celebration, even more so because of the subtlety and technical excellence demonstrated by the firms entrusted with their legacy. In an era when glowing showpieces and sculptural indulgences drive too much of the architectural press, the time has come to praise restraint and respect, along with the deep knowledge and experience that empowers these design approaches.

The renewal of the Museum of Anthropology will be completed in time for the centenary of Erickson’s birth in 2024. This, alongside the projects at Simon Fraser University and the recent restoration by Measured Architects of the second house Erickson designed for painter Gordon Smith, will give our architects all the excuse they need to come to Vancouver to see Erickson’s finest works.

Trevor Boddy FRAIC is on the board of the Arthur Erickson Foundation. With colleague Barry Johns and Sticks and Stones Productions and the support of local sponsors,
he is planning an event for Edmonton this fall that will include an all-new feature documentary premiere, panel discussion, and site tours of Erickson’s 1962 Dyde House. Details forthcoming at aefoundation.ca.

Simon Fraser University Plaza Renewal 

CLIENT Simon Fraser University | ARCHITECT TEAM John Wall (MRAIC), Robert Drew (MRAIC), Brian Wakelin (FRAIC), Susan Mavor, Martina Caniglia, Alberto Buldon, Andrea Kopecka, Henry Posner, Luc di Pietro, Courtney Healey, Laura Killam, Marta Nicolau, Jay Alkana, Chris Forrest | ENVELOPE RDH Building Science Inc. | STRUCTURAL Fast + Epp | MECHANICAL AME Group | ELECTRICAL AES Engineering | LANDSCAPE ETA Landscape Architecture | CONTRACTOR Ledcor Group of Companies | AREA 24,665 m2 | BUDGET $45 M | COMPLETION March 2021

SFU Student Union Building 

CLIENT Simon Fraser University | ARCHITECT TEAM Anna Atkinson, Leah Briney, Darcy Collins, David Dove (FRAIC), Jana Foit, Harley Grusko, Hailey Holloway, Fang-Chun Hsu, Jade Littlewood, Rodney Maas (MRAIC), Irene Neven, Joshua Rudd, Jeffrey Stebar, Gavin Schaefer, Sumegha Shah | STRUCTURAL Fast + Epp | MECHANICAL Integral Group | ELECTRICAL WSP Group | LANDSCAPE Hapa Collaborative | INTERIORS Perkins&Will | CONTRACTOR Pro-Can Construction Group | CODE LMDG | AREA 10,015 M2 | BUDGET $39 M | COMPLETION 2021

ENERGY USE INTENSITY (PROJECTED) 127.5 kWh/m2/year | WATER USE INTENSITY (PROJECTED) 0.06 m3/m2/year

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PROJECT Focal on Third, Vancouver, BC

ARCHITECT ph5 architecture inc.

TEXT Bruce Haden

PHOTOS Graham Handford

It can feel oddly refreshing when a good architecture practice is not focused on slick marketing. PH5 is one such firm. The work and life partnership of Peeroj Thakre and Henning Knoetzele has been quietly producing thoughtful work in Vancouver for many years. Their care and attention to detail for the type of projects that often don’t have ambitious design agendas (or plump budgets) is a consequential contribution to the city. 

This is especially evident in PH5’s most recently completed building, an office block named Focal on Third. My previous office was a close neighbour to this project, and I watched its construction with curiosity and appreciation. The building is at the southern edge of the developing North Mount Pleasant tech area, a zone anchored by Hootsuite’s offices, with many smaller-scale technology and design firms located nearby. In this neighbourhood of new corporate builds deploying multiple up-to-the-minute architectural strategies—some good, some not so good—the craft and confidence of Focal on Third stands out.

The strong presence of this small building was hard-won by PH5 on a site with many limitations. Architecture can be thought of as created in the tension between external massing strategies and internal program needs. In this context, Focal on Third is an especially difficult challenge. First, the massing strategies were dictated to the centimetre by City requirements for setbacks and height limits on a constrained site. Accordingly, the massing of Focal on Third is a result of external proscription, not creativity. And the as-yet unoccupied program of speculative office shell space creates no real pressures for internal forms that are distinctive or special in a way that can set the stage for moments of architectural identity.

This means that for this particular building type, on this particular site, the range of possible expressions was very narrow. Once massing and program are excised, all that is left is the design of the shell to produce identity and character. 

Fortunately, in the hands of PH5, the shell is masterful, giving the neighbourhood a textured icon. The material palette is limited but expressive: in addition to the necessary glass, two earth tones of terracotta cladding panels are crisply bracketed by sharp chocolate-brown mullions, with the vertical mullions dominant. This colour combination creates a richness that is exceptional for Vancouver, where new towers are often cloaked in a nearly monotone dark blue-and-grey—a too-dull palette in a climate where the sky is often dull. In contrast, the warmth of Focal on Third’s terracotta creates a sense of solidity and permanence, while avoiding the trap of using splashes of bright colour as an appliqué to lend life to an otherwise drab building. The extended verticals provide a pleasing shadow play, further enhancing the texture and movement of the façade.

The framed blocks of terracotta are oriented vertically, allowing the building to further stand out: the concrete residential towers that dominate Vancouver’s skylines have a ubiquitous horizontal expression. This choice of orientation, combined with the pixelation of the panels, creates a rich proportion and rhythm on the façade. And although pixelated facades are becoming more common, the strategy also provides variety in the interior, and a contrast to the rigid five-feet-on-centre grid that dominates the design of office façades.

Focal on Third is a bit like PH5 itself: neither the building nor the practice seek out attention, but both deserve it.

Vancouver-based architect Bruce Haden, MRAIC, is principal of FLUID Architecture. 

CLIENT Tradeglobe Consulting Ltd. | ARCHITECT TEAM Henning Knoetzele, Peeroj Thakre, Aitziber Altuna Iztueta, Mike Knauer | STRUCTURAL Wicke Herfst Maver | MECHANICAL Yoneda & Associates | ELECTRICAL Nemetz & Associates | LANDSCAPE Durante Kreuk Ltd. | CODE Celerity Engineering | ENVELOPE Aqua-Coast Engineering | GEOTECH GeoPacific Consultants | TRANSPORTATION Bunt & Associates Engineering | ENVIRONMENTAL Keystone Engineering | CONTRACTOR Ventana Construction | PREFAB FAÇADE Phoenix Glass Inc. | AREA 2,787 m2 | BUDGET $15.3 M | COMPLETION summer 2022

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St. Andrew’s Wesley United Church, 1012 Nelson Street, by RJC Engineers,  Ryder Architecture, Donald Luxton & Associates, Heatherbrae Builders, St. Andrew’s-Wesley United Church

The City of Vancouver has announced the winners of its 2023 Heritage Awards.

The biannual program recognizes recipients for their extraordinary efforts to safeguard and regenerate tangible and intangible heritage throughout Vancouver’s neighbourhoods.

Heritage Award winners include architects, community organizations, developers, writers, artists, and ordinary citizens.

This year’s winners in the category of Heritage Conservation include the following nine buildings:

UNION

MA+HG Architects, Terris & Company General Contractors Ltd., Mira Malatestinic

This award recognizes the retention and restoration of the exterior architectural elements, interior details, and finishing of the Victorian-era home at 851 Union St.

Broadhurst & Whitaker Block, 3495 Commercial St

MA+HG Architects, Donald Luxton Associates, Hudson Projects

This award recognizes the thoughtful rehabilitation of this Edwardian vernacular building, contributing to the character of its streetscape.

Coulter House, 67 West 6th Avenue

Ance Building Service, Conwest Yamamoto Architecture

This award recognizes the thorough work on conserving this modest 1901 home as part of a larger industrial development.

BC Securities Building, 402 W Pender St.

Reliance Properties Ltd., Barry McGinn Architect, Etro Construction Ltd., Van den Kerkhof & Son Masonry Ltd., and Ital Décor Ltd.

This award recognizes the extensive upgrade of masonry cladding, including the rehabilitation of deteriorated elements and creative use of materials for replicated elements.

Heritage Hall, 3102 Main Street

City of Vancouver, Barry McGinn Architect, Read Jones Christoffersen Ltd., and Scott Construction Group Grist Slate and Tile Roofing Inc.

This award recognizes the sensitive rehabilitation and partial seismic upgrade, exemplifying model stewardship of this community-serving space.

Mah Society of Canada Building, 137-139 East Pender Street

Mah Society of Canada, Barry McGinn Architect, JTW Consulting, MEC Engineering Consulting, Raven Metal Products

This award recognizes the rehabilitation of exterior and interior features, supporting the continuation of services that the Mah Society provides to its community.

Hollywood Theatre, 3123 West Broadway

MA+HG Architects, Donald Luxton & Associates, Bonnis Properties

This award recognizes the sensitive restoration work on exterior and interior elements, and enabling the enhanced and continued use of a beloved community cultural venue.

St. Andrew’s Wesley United Church, 1012 Nelson Street

RJC Engineers,  Ryder Architecture, Donald Luxton & Associates, Heatherbrae Builders, St. Andrew’s-Wesley United Church

This award recognizes the sensitive conservation and seismic upgrade of this iconic neo-Gothic church. The church’s conservation took two years to complete and was the first significant upgrade to the building in its nearly 100-year-long history. The results are appreciated: a seamless integration of old and new architectural elements that will continue to serve its congregation and community while proudly asserting Vancouver’s architectural and civic history.

Sun Tower, 128 West Pender Street

Allied Properties REIT, Barry McGinn Architect, Van den Kerkhof & Son Masonry Ltd., Alpha Masonry Ltd., Heather & Little Ltd.

This award recognizes the respectful envelope seismic stabilization, and implementing creative solutions for the rehabilitation and replication of deteriorated elements.

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PROJECT Hollywood Theatre & Residences, Vancouver, British Columbia

ARCHITECT MA+HG Architects

TEXT Benny Kwok

PHOTOS Ema Peter and Janis Nicolay, as noted

Down the street from where I recently lived in Vancouver, there’s a building that has long been a treasured local oddity. Designed by Harold Cullerne, the streamlined Art Deco Hollywood Theatre was built in 1935, boasting roofline hieroglyphic decorations, a black-and-gold tiled ticket booth, and vibrant neon signage. It was a source of escapism for patrons during the Great Depression and remained a beloved family-run cinema for 76 years. After its closure in 2011, the theatre was leased to a church group and was then proposed to be turned into a fitness facility. But communities around the city came together in opposition, and plans for redevelopment were eventually scrapped. Recently, MA+HG Architects have stepped in to restore the theatre to its former glory, while adding rental housing to ensure the long-term viability of the site. 

The process of saving this beloved icon of the Kitsilano community was a collaborative effort between the city, the local heritage community, the arts and culture community, and the public at large. Through a series of workshops and ‘curiosity sessions’, everyone found common ground in their goal to preserve the building, including its original use and unique identity. 

To achieve this, the theatre underwent significant upgrades, including the addition of adequate restroom facilities to maintain its status as a 650-seat venue. The Hollywood’s versatility was also emphasized,  opening the possibility of hosting not just films and live acts, but also community gatherings. The renovations were executed with care to respect character-defining elements, such as through maintaining the original light troughs and restoring the building’s wooden wainscotting. In the spirit of the Art Deco period, the new bars have a stylish yet understated design; red highlights appear throughout, a colour prominent in the original theatre. Behind the bar, film reels and curtains pay homage to the rich history of the building.

MA+HG also designed a six-storey mixed-use residential development on the neighbouring lot. Under a heritage revitalization agreement, the Hollywood property’s development potential was transferred to the adjacent property, together with additional bonus density that rewarded the restoration of the theatre. To showcase—and use—this relationship to full advantage, the condo block extends over the theatre, effectively gaining a third façade. This is an unusual opportunity on a commercial strip, where buildings normally only open to the front and back, and the added exposure allows for the inclusion of east-facing units. The city emphasized the importance of lightness in the building’s corners, and this was achieved by staggering the condo’s balconies to visually open up its edges. The building has been constructed above the street in such a way that the shadow it casts falls primarily on Broadway, rather than the single-family residences behind it, minimizing its impact on the low-slung neighbourhood.

The two buildings were further stitched together by setting the residential block back 2.7 metres from the street, creating a prominent canopy that echoes the theatre’s marquee and draws attention to the six-metre-tall Hollywood sign. In contrast to the vertical banding of the theatre, the residential portion of the project adopts a horizontal orientation, playfully accentuating the length of the site. The envelope of the new building was kept simple and box-like, with emphasis placed on height through tall front entry doors and a high-quality material palette. The balconies were allowed to have a slight dance-like effect, adding interest to the otherwise straightforward form. Its long horizontal bands are reminiscent of the fluidity “found in yachts,” according to design principal Marianne Amodio, or “a scarf blowing on a motorcycle,” with “a touch of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater” as an inspiration.

The building is designed to be slightly deeper than usual because of its greater width, allowing for slightly atypical apartment layouts, including studios that interlock with one-bedroom units, as well as over a dozen two-bedroom units and five three-bedroom units.  

The Hollywood Theatre is a symbol of the community’s memories and heritage, and its restoration became a win-win: preserving the institution for future generations to enjoy, as well as enabling a more flexible approach to the adjoining residential development. The outcome is a unique and visually appealing pair of buildings that showcases the potential of imagination and innovation in design. While the theatre will always stand out as the “weirdo on the block,” it is also a testament to what can be achieved with community, creativity and conversation.

Benny Kwok is a project manager with Herzog & de Meuron, and is co-founder of Vancouver- and London-based Smll Studio.

CLIENT Bonnis Properties | ARCHITECT TEAM Harley Grusko, Marianne Amodio (RAIC), Lindsey Nette | STRUCTURAL Kor Structural | MECHANICAL Integral Group | ELECTRICAL Integral Group & Advanco Electric | LANDSCAPE Prospect & Refuge | HERITAGE Donald Luxton & Associates | CODE Jensen Hughes | CONTRACTOR Bonnis Properties | AREA 5,852 m2 | BUDGET Withheld | COMPLETION August 2022

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D’Arcy Jones Architects, 2009-2020 

By D’Arcy Jones (Dalhousie Architectural Press, 2022)

EXCERPT FROM INTRODUCTION BY Trevor Boddy

Barely at the mid-point of his career, D’Arcy Jones is already established as one of Canada’s most inventive designers of houses. As this book demonstrates, Jones is constantly searching for new forms, through reconsiderations of construction and space-making. The re-invention of the idea of the house is, for him, almost an obsession.

How is it that D’Arcy Jones has devised so inventive a series of houses as the 14 shown in this book, so variable in their design? All are different in detail and construction, yet each of them advances the notion of the enclave. One answer might be found in the architect’s biography. It is rare for an architect of his generation to have spent hardly any time working for other firms—in Jones’s case, this included brief periods working with Vancouver’s Nigel Baldwin and Acton Johnson Ostry while he was a student. Many architects, by contrast, spend their careers working out the “anxiety of influence” from former employers or a validated canon of prominent precedents, from which they borrow, too often simplistically. 

It is also worth noting that currently many students do not graduate from Canadian architecture schools until they are over the age of 30, and are often over 40 before achieving professional registration. At this point, most have the responsibilities of families, property, and student debt; these factors can easily combine to make design careers short and conservative. D’Arcy Jones, on the other hand, founded his own firm in his 20s and fulfilled his professional registration while executing his own designs. When designers are not socialized into the habits of others, opportunities for individual invention increase.

This pattern also applies to Jones’s education. After a year in general arts at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, he went on to receive a degree in Environmental Design from that institution in 1995. He then moved to Halifax, where he earned a second bachelor’s degree in Environmental Design Studies from TUNS (now Dalhousie University). Returning to Winnipeg, he completed a professional Master’s in 1999. In that same year, he opened his own design practice, and it has been in operation ever since. His built work was being published in Europe and the United States a mere six years after he founded his firm, extremely early for a Canadian designer. All through his career Jones has immersed himself in unusually wide and deep reading—he is much more likely to cite inspiration from something he has read in the New York Review of Books than that online bible for his generation, dezeen.com. 

Before Jones graduated from the University of Manitoba his parents relocated to Kamloops; they and their new neighbours became his first clients. Subsequently Jones established a partnership in Vancouver with Caralyn Jeffs, an architecture graduate who now works as the primary caregiver for the couple’s three children, including twins; the architect’s empathy for the needs of couples with children is grounded in his own experience, and many of his clients are at the same stage in the family cycle. A sense of community is crucial to Jones. His early practice was boosted by the modest house he designed for his own young family in 2007. Its completion prompted a string of requests for renovations and rebuilds in the same neighbourhood—one of them breathing new air into the tired formula of the split-level rancher, another finding privacy while wedged between larger neighbours, a third raising up a small house to capture light and increase space for a photo-based artist, a landscape architect, and their children. Noting this pattern in his work, Jones explains, “I take families seriously—we listen to them, observe them.”

A house is one of the most complex human inventions. There is no more practical or essential a structure, yet dwellings represent some of the highest cultural and spiritual aspirations. A well-conceived design for a house demands deep understandings of the lives it envelops. As Le Corbusier suggested, houses are “machines for living.” They are also exemplars of sociality, live-in artworks, membranes against the forces of nature, and shelters that nurture personalities. They represent one of the biggest investments that people make. Houses are our castles—though also our prisons, playthings, and our psychoanalysts.

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The re-imagining of the Waterfront Station precinct, in downtown Vancouver, blends the seamless integration of existing and future transit modes with the creation of a vibrant public realm.
The speculative project by Perkins&Will Vancouver offers a vision of positive change that is boundaryless, equitable and inclusive. According to the firm, the goal of this study is to “stimulate debate focused upon the transformation of a site which has significant historic, symbolic, and logistical importance, and to speculate upon the manner in which its urban objectives are manifest with appropriate and heroic expression.” 

“The Waterfront precinct is a location with a multitude of existing challenges, but is also a site of tremendous opportunity. The site is remarkable in that it connects rail, mass transit, aviation, and marine services (albeit in a chaotic fashion) within a single city block,” says Perkins&Will Vancouver.

The company’s research reveals Waterfront Station’s potential to be ‘super-modal’, however, connectivity between existing services is fragmented, resulting in poor user experience.

Perkins&Will Vancouver states that this study demonstrates that, through the application of a well-defined design framework, modal integration can be achieved in a manner that is legible and efficient. 

The scheme integrates all existing and future transit modes within a legible waterfront masterplan. Associated development opportunities blend commer­cial and cultural uses, enhance the public realm and create a destination that is symbolically appropriate.  

Waterfront Station was the catalyst for the development of Vancouver, with the downtown core growing out from this commercial nexus. Behind the plan is a desire to extend the axis of Granville Street, which currently ends at Waterfront Station, connecting the city to the water in a meaningful way. The potential to fully integrate public connectivity through land, sea and air on such a significant site provides an opportunity of incredible consequence.

The proposal also aims to make station boundaries porous to support greater access and use. “We envision the extension of Granville Street through the site, blending seamlessly into the upper concourse level and creating direct visual connection to the water. Pedestrian and cycle connections are introduced from Canada Place to the new public parks and amenities along the revived waterfront,” writes the designers. “As part of a simplified system, we envision the integration of Skytrain lines into a single nodal interchange. Our schematic vision safeguards a potential high-speed rail connection within a terminus, providing both intracity and inter-provincial rail services, with grade connections to mass transit, marine services a new Skyport and personal and autonomous mobility services.”

Perkins&Will Vancouver’s proposition for Waterfront Station will be user-centric with a high level of service. The firm further states that the creation of an open, day-lit concourse, characterized by spatial continuity, will facilitate legible orientation and intuitive way-finding. “The precinct will become a destination, providing a wide range of functions beyond those associated specifically with transit, a vital aspect of city life, reflecting its central location within the downtown core,” they write.

A passive-first approach is a guiding principle of the proposal. The station is imagined as a covered outdoor space, its extensive roof optimized for renewable energy generation. The precinct will be carbon positive, with extensive utilization of mass timber construction. 

“The station of the future is no longer a liminal space, but one that is integrated into the urban and cultural fabric of an increasingly complex public realm. We believe that our vision demonstrates the extraordinary potential of the Waterfront precinct. Through the realization of this potential Waterfront precinct will be central to the reimagining of our city,” writes the designers.

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Buildner has announced the results of the Vancouver Affordable Housing Challenge. The competition is part of the organization’s Affordable Housing series, in partnership with ARCHHIVE BOOKS, showcasing projects that invent new means for driving down housing prices.

Designers were tasked with proposing a flexible, innovative, pilot-phase concept for affordable housing within Greater Vancouver. Winning projects will be featured in ARCHHIVE BOOKS’ second edition of its publication, What is Affordable Housing?

Buildner’s Affordable Housing design series posits that there is no one right answer to making housing affordable. Today, a host of new ideas and platforms are enabling people to own or purchase homes. These creative methods include everything from community co-living facilities, to 3D-printed homes, stackable modular homes and new forms of transit-oriented development.

“In addition to rising interest rates and a limited housing stock putting pressure on Vancouver’s housing market, the city is also restricted by zoning laws that render most types of housing – other than single- family detached homes – impossible to construct in many regions of the city. These issues, as well as many more political and economic factors, contribute to Vancouver’s mounting housing challenges,” says Buildner.

The competition encouraged participants to submit flexible solutions to accommodate a range of unit sizes including families, single professionals, and couples. There was no set competition site or scale, and participants were also encouraged to be as creative as possible:

1ST PRIZE WINNER
PROJECT AUTHORS
Xian Chris Li
Elitsa Vutova
Nadthachai Kongkhajornkidsu

COUNTRY
United States

PROJECT NAME
Laneway Village

2ND PRIZE WINNER
PROJECT AUTHORS
Christopher Doray
Piotr Pasierbinski
Yekta Tehrani
Lukas Vajda

COUNTRY
Canada

PROJECT NAME
Living Trails

3RD PRIZE WINNER+AAPPAREL SUSTAINABILITY AWARD
PROJECT AUTHORS
Martin Chow

COUNTRY
Canada

PROJECT NAME
Tall Trees, Tall Houses

ARCHHIVE STUDENT AWARD
PROJECT AUTHORS
Mariia Pykhacheva
Olesia Ivleva
Alika Appaeva
Ekaterina Klyusova

COUNTRY
Czech Republic

UNIVERSITY
MOSCOW INSTITUTE OF ARCHITECTURE – MARHI , МОСКОВСКИЙ АРХИТЕКТУРНЫЙ ИНСТИТУТ – МАРХИ

PROJECT NAME
Crossroads

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PROJECT Gastown Child Care Centre, Vancouver, British Columbia

ARCHITECT Acton Ostry Architects

TEXT Adele Weder

PHOTOS Michael Elkan Photography

Let’s start with the accolades. Everything seems to work seamlessly in Vancouver’s Gastown Child Care Centre. The Passive House project deftly occupies a previously underused stretch of roof atop an inner-city parkade. Its spatial layout and detailing is attentive to safety concerns; the daylighting is strategic and generous; the outdoor space is outfitted with an Astroturf hill and rainbow-hued tricycle track. I can’t help but think of the brightly perfect world of the Teletubbies. The design team—comprising Acton Ostry Architects, Durante Kreuk, and an assemblage of consultants and municipal overseers—has ticked all the boxes that make a sustainable, functional, contemporary daycare for up to 37 children, and double that number when its southern section opens later this year.

So, the design team has done its job as well as our society will allow. Efficient plan, economical “found space,” a much-needed daycare in a densely populated, gritty neighbourhood—on paper, it’s a ten. In the messy world of real life? Depends on what you wish to evaluate, and for whose benefit.

The journey begins in the processional space. Arriving by foot, you enter the glazed elevator box and behold a cinematic view of the parkade’s glass-block exterior, which appears to stream downwards like a waterfall as you ascend. But despite the neighbourhood’s high population density, most parents drive their tots to the daycare centre, according to staff. By car, the experience is less cinematic-waterfall and more Tarantino pre-climax as you wind your way up a stack of parking ramps to the rooftop.

It’s not the first time a Canadian parkade’s penthouse floor has been cleverly repurposed: in 2008, PH5 Architecture transformed another Gastown parkade rooftop into a drive-in movie theatre; Revery Architecture’s SAIT Parkade includes a full soccer field; Public City Architecture inaugurated the Calgary parkade-turned-High Park during the pandemic. As cities densify, we can expect planners and developers to transform more rooftops into all sorts of programmes. As a good use of scarce urban space, it makes sense. For reducing car use, its impact—in the case of the Gastown Child Care Centre—is negligible.

But even those who drive there still get to experience the most delightful feature of this project: the galvanized-steel-enclosed pedestrian ramp over a jog in the rooftop grade, a metaphorical and literal transition from the grit of Gastown to the entrance of the child care centre. Inside, Acton Ostry has configured the space as an open plan—a white-cube gallery without the art. It’s luminous and welcoming at first glance. But children have to spend most of the day in this space, and that makes the design ideal a major challenge. In my own maternal experience of 20 years ago, when daycare spaces were less regulated, I noticed how my kids delighted in exploring the nooks, crannies, and idiosyncratic gestures that make a space intriguing. From the day they take their halting first steps, children are instinctively driven to explore. Our society is no longer prepared to expend the resources or accept even a highly limited risk to address that hard-wired need.

Don’t blame the architects; their options are limited. In Japan, Tezuka Architects’ Fuji Kindergarten—which includes climbing nets in trees and an open-air rooftop racetrack, connected by slides to the courtyard playground below—won the 2017 RAIC International Prize. But here, our architects are forbidden by code to design with such an expanded spatial imagination. Surrounding every daycare project is a nimbus of unspoken anxiety about the facility’s tiny and vulnerable end-users, and their ever-nervous parents and bureaucratic overseers. Each design brief and building code is loaded with directives to minimize or eliminate any risk of harm—large or small, perceived or real. The highly codified design of the Gastown Child Care Centre, like others of this paradigm, ensures that no child can conceal themselves at any moment. For better and worse, the design approach transforms the daycare centre into a panopticon, a concept that we collectively find unsavoury in institutions with adult end-users, but acceptable—even obligatory—for spaces catering to children.

The laudable safety of the Gastown Childcare Centre, as with so much of the contemporary typology, is also its deficit. Officiously secure and smartly laid out, the centre looks and feels more like a pediatric dental clinic than a tot’s paradise. Safety and efficiency come at the expense of intrigue and mystery. There are no hiding places, no shadows, no poetics of space. This is something of a departure for an Acton Ostry project; the firm’s projects are usually enriched with unexpected design gestures.  Even to maintain the integrity of the project’s most interesting gesture, the galvanized-steel entry bridge, the architects had to fend off concerns that a child might trip and scrape their knee on the unpainted perforated metal. This is an example of collective refusal to consider the principle of consequences. If the potential consequence of a design decision might be serious or deadly, let’s be clear: it’s good that we don’t take the risk. That series of locked doors, inside and out, requiring fobs and intercom access? Somewhat inconvenient but undeniably crucial, in this neighbourhood as in many others. Soft-close, pinch-free swinging doors to the interior kitchen and administrative spaces? Good idea, even if the consequence wouldn’t be deadly, as the implementation of that particular safety feature does not affect a child’s experience.

But a scrape on the knee, a slip off an adult-size chair—are they unthinkable events, ripe for litigation? Are we designing out of our kids’ environments the important lessons on the way to growing up? That is: if you do this or aren’t careful with that, you might slip and it will hurt for a few minutes, so now you know and you won’t do it again.

The fact that the Child Care Centre is furnished entirely with child-sized furniture, at the operator’s directive, makes the high-ceilinged space seem cavernous and, ironically, less child-centric. Kids know they live in an adult world; I would argue that a happier environment for a child is one that is inclusive, with a mixture of adult and child-sized chairs and tables.  As I watched the children play in the outdoor deck area on a balmy summer morning, I noticed how none of them paid any heed to what most adults would describe as the standout feature: the sublime panoramic view of the north shore mountains. My guess is the view is a strong selling point to the parents, city bureaucrats, and design press—but not to the project’s actual end-users. Despite the temperate weather, many of these preschoolers chose to gather and stand motionless under the area’s only two covered spaces: an arched trellis-tunnel, and a wooden playhouse. They had to be coaxed out of these sheltered spaces so that this visiting reporter could take an authorized (i.e. child-free) photograph of the spaces.

The benefit of a risk-averse design approach is the near-elimination of any kind of mishap or skirmish among the young charges, which makes life easier for the overworked staff, not to mention the litigation-fearing owners and operators. The cost is the denial of the need—especially within children—to find a sense of cocooning and concealment. We would do well to recall Gaston Bachelard’s contemplation of a dream house: “However spacious, it must also be a cottage, a dove-cote, a nest, a chrysalis. Intimacy needs the heart of a nest.”

Architectural curator and critic Adele Weder is a Contributing Editor to Canadian Architect.

CLIENT City of Vancouver | ARCHITECT TEAM Mark Ostry (FRAIC), Sergei Vakhrameev, Marissa Wang, Matt Wood (MRAIC), Mingyue Zhang | STRUCTURAL Fast + Epp | MECHANICAL/ELECTRICAL Integral Group | PASSIVE HOUSE Ryder Architecture | LANDSCAPE Durante Kreuk | INTERIORS Acton Ostry Architects | CONTRACTOR Heatherbrae Builders | CERTIFIED PROFESSIONAL GHL Consultants | SUSTAINABILITY Stantec | BEP RDH Building Science | AREA 920 m2 (two buildings combined) | BUDGET $14 M | COMPLETION October 2020

ENERGY USE INTENSITY (OPERATIONAL) 65.4 kWh/m2/year | WATER USE INTENSITY (OPERATIONAL) 4,357 litres/occupant/year

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In the ruthless postwar arena to build the nation in the modern paradigm, Barry Downs presented an anomaly. Soft-spoken, modest, and devoted to both architecture and family life, he brought a rare sensibility to his work. When he died, in July, at age 92, it marked the passing of one of the last giants of West Coast Modernism.

Mr. Downs built his career in the second wave of Canadian modernism, when verdant lots on the West Coast were cheap and plentiful. The timing allowed him to benefit from the mentorship of the earlier architectural trailblazers, including Ned Pratt and Ron Thom. As he built his career through the late 1950s and 1960s, his houses and public buildings bridged the often-austere high modernism of the day with a more earthy, organic sensibility that fit the coastal context.

Barry Vance Downs grew up in a C.B.K. Van Norman-designed home, whose steeply pitched roof, timber and stucco gables, baronial oak-plank front door, and huge garden made an indelible impression on him as a young boy. During high school, he befriended Art Phillips, who later became one of his first clients and later still one of the most transformational mayors of Vancouver.

After two listless years studying commerce at the University of British Columbia, Downs moved to Seattle in 1950 to study architecture. Although UBC had just established its own architecture school that very year, Mr. Downs chose the University of Washington’s well-established programme. When he returned to his hometown in 1954, he apprenticed at Thompson, Berwick, Pratt & Partners—at that time the largest and most important firm in Western Canada: “my much-appreciated ‘graduate school’”, as he called it. The size wasn’t as important as the connections and mentors it brought to him.

“The major turning point for me was the introduction to Ron Thom and Freddy Hollingsworth and Doug Shadbolt—that whole gang,” recalled Mr. Downs in a 2012 interview with this writer. “All my work at the University of Washington was directed towards Mies van der Rohe’s idea of minimalism. But I discovered a whole other design approach here, and I’m forever grateful for that.”

From those early mentors, Mr. Downs absorbed not only their famed sensitivity to the West Coast landscape, but the emotional and sensory aspects of design. “At the start, I didn’t realize that architecture isn’t all about construction and engineering and huge glass walls open to the views. It also has much to do with exhilaration in being in certain spaces,” he recalled in our interview. He began to question the Miesian mantra of austerity, openness, and precision—which, he came to realize, did not suit every need in every region. While he appreciated minimalism and new materials, he recognized the human need for organic texture and form, especially on the West Coast.

At the same time, he brought ideas from elsewhere back to his firm. In 1956, with his wife, Mary, he made an international pilgrimage to major architectural landmarks, including Frank Lloyd Wright’s Oak Park houses and Johnson Wax Building in Wisconsin, and Lever House in New York. Overseas, he visited Le Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation in Marseille, which he remembers as a building full of “fascinating moments,” whose modularity allowed the building to be scaled to the human figure. He also toured Mussolini’s Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana in Rome, the circa-1940 slab-block tower that he remembered as “cruel, stripped-down rationalism. It was fascist. And yet my simple less-is-more brain sort of liked it!”

Back in Vancouver, Downs became a voracious reader of the European design journals in the TBP library: Domus, Architectural Review, and a slew of magazines from Finland and Scandinavia, which brought him new ideas about imaginative form beyond the International Style template. His love of craft, landscape, drawing, and watercolours helped endear him to the star designer at Thompson Berwick Pratt, Ron Thom, who enlisted him to render the handcoloured presentation boards for the 1960 Massey College competition as well as hundreds of his other projects.

Meanwhile, his role at TBP transitioned from illustration to full-fledged design. His breakout projects include the 1957 house for his friend Art Phillips; the 1958 Ladner Pioneer Library, designed in collaboration with TBP colleagues Richard Archambault and Blair MacDonald; his own 1959 glass-and-brick Downs House I; and the 1963 Rayer Residence, later expanded by Blue Sky Architecture + Design into a live-work residence.

In 1964, when an anticipated partnership at TBP failed to materialize, Downs left to start a new firm with Fred Hollingsworth. Their skill sets weren’t entirely complementary, however. Hollingsworth’s penchant for Frank Lloyd Wright differed from Down’s more subdued and minimalist approach. Also, Downs wanted to design larger projects and public buildings, while Hollingsworth remained content to focus on single-family homes.

In 1969, his life and career improved when he teamed up with architect Richard Archambault. While at Downs/Archambault, he designed or co-designed several important landmarks, including the North Vancouver Civic Centre, the Brittannia Community Centre in East Vancouver, and Lester B. Pearson College of the Pacific on Vancouver Island (with Ron Thom as lead designer), and more houses. His 1972 Oberlander House II, designed in collaboration with urban planner Peter Oberlander and Cornelia Oberlander, was recently sold to a sympathetic buyer who plans to restore it.

For his second family home, he designed the Downs House II in West Vancouver, with walls curving in a contiguous plane into the roofline like an Airstream trailer. The house is the subject of an eponymous 2016 monograph by UBC architecture professor Christopher Macdonald.

He spent much of his later career on urban projects, including Vancouver’s Library Square by Moshe Safdie, and the Roundhouse Community Centre plan. “Perhaps most extraordinary in Barry Downs’ career was his demonstrated ability to transform his practice from a modest, largely residential focus to expansive urban design projects,” says Macdonald. “It was precisely this ability that has given us an enduring sense of locale both in individual residential design and the distinctive contours of our cities.”

The post In Memoriam: Barry Vance Downs, 1930-2022 appeared first on Canadian Architect.

PROJECT Grosvenor Ambleside, West Vancouver, BC

ARCHITECT James K.M. Cheng Architects

TEXT Sean Ruthen

Discussions of the “missing middle” often focus on densifying single-family lots, or sites made by consolidating a handful of lots. But occasionally, the opportunity arises to develop a larger infill parcel in an existing neighbourhood. If done right, this can result in much-needed housing while enlivening the public realm.

This was the case with a project our firm, James K.M. Cheng Architects, recently completed after a decade of work. Grosvenor Ambleside occupies a 180-metre-long waterfront site in West Vancouver. For many years, the site had been home to a gas station, several single-storey retail buildings from the 1950s and 60s, and surface parking. It also housed an aging Ron Thom-designed police station that’s since been replaced with a newer facility elsewhere. The site sloped down to the south, where built-up railway tracks created a 1.2-metre-high visual barrier to beach and ocean views.

For our team, the idea of a new development here was an opportunity to inject new life into the aging neighbourhood block, improve access and enjoyment of the waterfront, and create a much-needed heart for the neighbourhood. We were working on a number of other master plans at the same time as Ambleside, including the 14-acre former TransLink bus barns site in central Vancouver, now set to become a new community for over 2,000 people, and an eight-acre strip mall in Coquitlam, being transformed into a transit-oriented development. Our office thinks of these projects as acts of “urban mending”—where an outdated commercial or industrial area is reworked as part of a more sustainable community.

For Ambleside, it was no small feat to see the 98-unit mixed-use development project through to reality, starting with a complex land assembly process led by Grosvenor, and followed by a robust public engagement process—perhaps the most comprehensive of the many that our team has seen in the past 40 years. A development of this density on a prime waterfront site would simply not have been possible without the support of the community—from the residents of the District of West Vancouver to the long-time locals around Ambleside Beach.

From the beginning, it was clear that the project needed to do more than provide high-end condos for its residents: it needed to create a strong public realm that would serve the entire community. Raising the ground floor to the level of the railway tracks was a first strategic move in this direction: it allowed for the commercial units (and not just the residents above) to enjoy views of Stanley Park and the Georgia Strait, while also providing flood protection against the annual King Tide and rising sea levels.

Early on during the public consultations, the team also settled on a terraced building form and a mid-block breezeway. The terraces help preserve views for neighbours in a small cluster of apartment blocks across the street, while the breezeway opened views to the beach for passing pedestrians and cars on Marine Drive. The upper floor condos pivot slightly from the ground floor street grid to align with the area’s overall north-south orientation, further opening up views and minimizing the building’s bulk.

The mid-block passageway quickly evolved into an all-weather living room for the community, complete with a transparent glass-and-wood canopy spanning 60 feet between the buildings. Tree Snag, a 30-foot-tall sculpture by Douglas Coupland, occupies the central space, complementing other works around the site by the same artist. Original paintings by the late Gordon Smith, who passed away in early 2020, adorn the residential lobbies. The developer, Grosvenor, has also forged partnerships with the Kay Meek Art Centre and other local arts organizations for Christmas performances and other special events to take place in the sheltered outdoor space.

The development also aims to contribute towards housing availability and sustainability. The 98 high-end, home-like units are the kind of places intended to appeal to aging boomers interested in opting for a lower-maintenance condo with waterfront views, and a chance to live in the ‘five-minute city.’ Such occupants could produce the knock-on effect of freeing up nearby existing houses for use by families. Currently, West Vancouver is Canada’s wealthiest municipality, with an average household net worth of over $4.45 million dollars—but much of that is tied up in the value of under-occupied homes that were purchased at much lower prices, and that owners can’t afford to relocate from without an alternative such as Ambleside.

On each floor, deep overhangs contribute to solar shading and weather protection while protecting each unit’s views; extensive planters allow for the capture and slow release of rainwater before being discharged at ground level. Nodding to the area’s West Coast Modern legacy homes, Grosvenor Ambleside sports long horizontal lines, wood parallam beams in the breezeway, generous glazing, and stunning views of the water and mountains.

Herman Hertzberger once wrote about the warp and weft of urban design. He commented that architecture and its surrounding context—the roads and infrastructure that support each building—combine and complement each other in a successful design. We see our work at Ambleside and other large sites around Metro Vancouver as part of this greater whole. These projects participate in an ongoing revitalization of the city’s infrastructure, mending city streets while introducing new building fabric.

At Ambleside, we’re proud of what we’ve accomplished, both for residents and for the greater community. Through public engagement and a shared vision of how we wish to live together, we believe that beyond providing housing, we’ve forged a strong public realm in this key community site—a place from which we can stand back to look at the state of our world, and find our way back home.

Sean Ruthen, FRAIC, is the current RAIC Regional Director for BC and Yukon, and a senior architect at James K.M. Cheng Architects.

CLIENT Grosvenor | ARCHITECT TEAM James KM Cheng (FRAIC), Adeline Lai, Don Chan, Dennis Selby, Ingolf Blanken Barbosa, Luc Melanson, Stanton Hung, Sara Kasaei, Ashley Ortlieb, Fang Hsu, Bruce Yung, Candace Lange | STRUCTURAL Read Jones Christoffersen | MECHANICAL Integral Group | ELECTRICAL Smith + Andersen | LANDSCAPE DESIGN ARCHITECT SWA | LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT OF RECORD Durante Kreuk | CIVIL Binnie | SURVEYOR Butler Sundvick | INTERIORS Mitchell Freedland Design | CODE LMDG Building Code Consultants | ENVELOPE RDH Building Science | GEOTECHNICAL Thurber Engineering | ACOUSTICS BKL Consultants | SUSTAINABILITY Integral Group | WAYFINDING Bunt & Associates | CONTRACTOR Ledcor Group | AREA 24,619 m2 | BUDGET $347 M | COMPLETION Spring 2021

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