An exploration of ‘punctuation,’ ‘iconic’ design in the city
Bob Ransford
Sun
Vancouver is better known for its quality inner-city urbanism than for its outstanding architecture. But an opportunity exists today to combine our understanding of what makes a quality urban fabric with some serious thought about the changing housing needs of an aging population and the planet’s threatened ecosystems to develop a unique Vancouver architectural language, especially in the design of housing.
A huge shift has occurred during the last two decades in Metro Vancouver in the type of new housing that is built, with the detached single-family dwelling giving way to multi-family dwellings. Last year, more than 70 per cent of the new homes built in Metro Vancouver were in multi-family, rather than single-family dwellings, when the reverse would have been true no more than 15 years ago.
I would argue that the architecture of housing has benefited, albeit slightly. Most would still be hard pressed to define a local architectural language.
In Vancouver‘s downtown peninsula — a stunning example of inner-city livability — there is a preponderance of glass and concrete residential point towers of largely modernist style. There is some coherence in terms of form, but little in terms of an architectural language that speaks with a uniquely Vancouver dialect. Looking at Vancouver‘s skyline or even studying a typical downtown streetscape, it would be difficult to define what distinct local influences inspired the architecture of most Vancouver buildings.
Missing, too, are landmark buildings that speak to their location or signature buildings that evoke the identity of their use.
Vancouver‘s director of planning, Brent Toderian, recently attempted to provoke a discussion about whether Vancouver needs an iconic architecture. He expressed his nervousness with Vancouver deliberately pursuing the design of attention-getting “iconic” buildings merely to make a statement on the world scene. His fear is that we might end up with “flavour-of-the-month” architecture with a short “shelf-life”.
Instead, Toderian suggested more risk-taking in local architectural design, increasing the diversity of architecture in the city by “punctuating” the pattern of our urban fabric. He compared the city’s fabric to a piece of prose in which punctuation marks, used carefully, can create a “clarity and legibility”.
“As the architecture of the city evolves, like a piece of prose, some special buildings can be commas, dashes, periods… and every once in a while, an exclamation mark where emphasis is truly needed or warranted.”
Toderian indicates that there is room in this “pattern and punctuation” lexicon for signature buildings that speak to the building’s use and landmark buildings that are part of the “mental map of the city”.
I share Toderian’s nervousness with iconic architecture or architecture that simply makes a statement. Instead of making a statement, architecture should make a place.
Toderian’s concept of pattern and punctuation is an intriguing one because it offers an opportunity to think about all the different opportunities for punctuation, while ensuring that we follow his caution that “the overuse of the wrong punctuation type in a city can be as wrong as it is in a piece of prose”.
Up until now, so little attention has been paid to the architecture of housing in our suburbs. A huge opportunity exists to apply this approach of pattern and punctuation to the architecture of our suburban neighbourhoods in the city and the region. Imagine applying this concept and truly leveraging the art, science and craft of architecture to the new homes that will replace the aging stock of largely nondescript single-family dwellings that still make up most of the developed areas of our suburbs.
U.S. new urbanist architect Andres Duany recently suggested to a Vancouver audience that standard plan books used to build so many cookie-cutter style suburban homes need to be updated with the great works of local architects popularizing outstanding design that would be normally commissioned only by the wealthy and making it available for repetition on a mass scale.
I’ve often wondered why we haven’t we been successful in creating an architectural “language”, if you will, that speaks with a uniquely rain coast dialect influenced by the cultural nuances that are unique to Canada‘s West Coast.
Some would argue that West Coast Modernism, which emerged among a small group of local architects in the early 1950s, including Ron Thom, B.C. Binning, Fred Hollingsworth, Barry Downs and Arthur Erickson, was born to respond to our local uniqueness. I am not a skilled architectural critic, but I understand that style to have been largely inspired by both the California modernist movement and by the organic architectural theory of Frank Lloyd Wright.
The West Coast Modernism movement may have spawned elements of a vocabulary, but the overall design spoke more to Modernism than it did to the West Coast. I believe an opportunity still exists to look at how the roots of traditional architecture — responding to man’s use of a building combined with that building’s response to its setting, climate, etc. — might be applied to the challenges facing a building in a raincoast region.
For example, in a rainy climate, a building should have large overhangs to protect the walls from pelting rain. Using indigenous materials for roofing, such as cedar, would dictate that the form of the roof should be pitched to easily shed water. However, a pitched roof is not in keeping with the Modernist style.
Therefore, the challenge remains to create a West Coast architectural language.
That language should speak explicitly to a commitment to sustainable design and eco-friendly building technology as applied in a residential form. Indigenous materials conducive to our temperate rainforest should be used to demonstrate how we have addressed the challenges of sustainable development and green building techniques and technology.
Perhaps an opportunity exists to adapt the arts and crafts style that is so prevalent here in the single-family home style and meld it with minimalist Asian influences to attend to our yearning for light, our need to shed and protect against constant moisture and to blur the boundary between sensitively functional indoor space and spectacular natural outdoor space.
In short, rather than concerning ourselves with the pursuit of iconic architecture in our inner-city, we should be developing an architectural language that reinforces our unique sense of place and makes that place special.
Bob Ransford is a public affairs consultant with COUNTERPOINT Communications Inc. He is a former real estate developer who specializes in urban land use issues. E-mail: [email protected]
