Townshift Reflections

Surrey's Townshift: Suburb to City international ideas design competition had the potential of leaving a powerful and visionary legacy for how to intelligently transform the suburban landscape. Unfortunately, it fell short of the mark. Erick Villagomez critically analyzes the competition to see what lessons can be learned. By Erick Villagomez, re:place magazine Although there are a number of opinions and debates stirring about the future of the metropolis, it is generally agreed that the suburbs are the main battlefield where success or failure will ultimately be determined.  Occupying the vast majority of the urbanized landscape and home to what most believe to be the main sources of our urban ills, these are the locations where - despite a lot of thought and effort - the least progress is being made. For a number of reasons - from the economics of housing affordability to the persistent cultural beliefs surrounding the primacy of private property - the suburbs are still growing and, despite a slight hiccup due to the recent economic downturn, are showing minimal signs of stopping. Within the North American architecture and urban design professions the best venue we have for tackling such complex issues are design competitions. These competitions offer us the opportunity to explore new visions and inquiries free of everyday constraint, such as politics, client demands, etc.  Of course, the "free" quality of design competitions has also led to its fair share of overly simplistic pie-in-the-sky proposals pushing aesthetic agendas above all else. But this doesn't take away from the merit of these undertakings insofar that they are intended to push boundaries and generate discussion. Offering the opportunity to truly explore diverse and potentially radical options for transforming our cities is particularly important for the suburbs, since this is a very complex settlement pattern requiring a profound questioning of how we dwell within the landscape. Municipalities are often consumed with the politics of the suburbs, and have therefore neglected to ignite change. This gives designers who enter competitions relating to re-envisioning the suburban landscape a rare chance to showcase the value of our creative field to the public through rigorous, intelligent, and visionary proposals. The launch of the Townshift: Suburb to City international ideas design competition late last year held a lot of significance.  In a region known not for holding design competitions but rather for having a pretty sophisticated urban design culture, Townshift offered local talent the chance to tackle the significant issue of suburban re-envisioning right here on our doorstep.  Held by the City of Surrey - arguably the boldest regional municipality over the past few years - and the organizers of Vancouver's FormShift International Design Competition launched early in 2009. The incredible possibilities and hype surrounding this competition was only matched by the disappointment of the winning and shortlisted proposals chosen. For those of us truly invested in the future of our cities and seeking rigourous and thought-provoking visions of suburban transformations, the let down of TownShift's results was a bitter pill to swallow. Riddled with minimal (if any) analyses, explicit disconnections to the surrounding landscape and urban systems, and simplistic assumptions harkening back to the Corbusian planning era that ultimately created the suburbs as we know them, "conservative" is the most polite term I've heard used to describe the winning and shortlisted projects. As such, it's worth a critical attempt to explain the positive and negative aspects the competition, in the hopes of learning from this experience and ensuring that only the positive aspects are carried forward in the future. As a means of better evaluating the outcome and uncovering any potential biases it's worth quickly examining the basis and structure of the Townshift competition brief.  As explicitly stated on the website, the competition was created in order to seek out innovative ideas for five of the six established Town Centers: Guildford, Fleetwood, Cloverdale, Newton and Semiahmoo.   To be more specific, the "aim of the competition is to "Shift" thinking and opportunities for each of these "Town" hubs towards more intense, public-minded and productive urban futures" as well as to "to generate innovative new thinking about suburbs transforming towards sustainability in an era of increasingly expensive energy."  Furthermore, and most importantly, it was meant to "open up a dialogue" with the general public and city-building professionals about how the suburbs can transform for the better. To be clear, these are all great intentions and . Insofar that the City of Surrey (and competition organizers) took it upon themselves to be self-critical and attempt to generate public interest in the future of the suburbs, they should be commended for their bravery. Their decision to explore options by attempting to capitalize on the creativity brought about by the design competition format should also be well-recognized. On the strength of these forward-thinking aspirations, the competition brief asked entrants to engage any scale. That is, one could look at a single Town Centre, all of them, or anywhere in between.  This was an excellent inclusion and is a valuable aspect that must continue in future design competitions. I say this because this simple idea is at the forefront of the way urban systems fundamentally work; that is, as a series of interacting elements that have effects across a series of nested scales. It goes without saying that a building sits on a lot.  Many lots form a block. Several blocks make a neighbourhood. A number neighbourhoods make a city...and the scaling continues.  This recognizes that any intervention at any scale necessarily affects another. The strength of this approach lies in its ability to engage a vast array of interconnected themes - ecological systems, land-use, transportation, and cultural history - a specific design proposal.  The effects of this way of thinking are seen in all the works of all those currently considered at the forefront of the field - from the Transect of the New Urbanists to the provocative architectural projects of the Office of Metropolitan Architecture - each of which is founded on acknowledging the urban environment as a complex system. Ironically, the progressive decision by Townshift organizers to give entrants the opportunity to seek relationships between different scales was contrasted with the highly specific requirements for each Town Centre site.  The Fleetwood site, for example, required the proposal of a new entry sign with a footprint of no more that 5 metres by 5 metres on a given site, with the requirement that the words "Welcome to Fleetwood" be clearly visible on the design. According to the brief, the problems of Fleetwood could be "summed up in the two key signs at its north and south ends."  It goes without saying that such targeted demands fundamentally compromise the integrity and basis of the competition, outlined above.  After all, are the problems of Fleetwood really about signage? Is this truly reflective of the types of serious issues facing suburbs like Fleetwood? Could the inclusion of such signs really transform Fleetwood "towards sustainability in an era of increasingly expensive energy?" Absolutely not. Although not all Town Centre requirements were so overtly counter-intuitive, each one was very specific and biased towards a specific product and site. The result was that entrants were left with two inherently contradictory and competing choices: to fall in line with a set of requirements for each Town Centre based on some very debatable assumptions, or to actively engage the crucial problem of the typical suburban landscape as outlined in the brief through addressing different scales. Doing the latter, however, would certainly bring into question some of the assumptions about each Centre, but would certainly lead to a more critical (and interesting) debate about the ways we can change the sprawling landscape of Surrey's suburbs. This awkward situation points to another important lesson: that competition organizers have to balance their own agendas with the broader aspirations of the ideas competition. Every design competition is held with specific motivations in mind and this is nothing to be ashamed about. However, overly specific requirements tend to neutralize the development of  ideas and counteract the creative potential that design competitions offer. Finding equilibrium is essential to opening up a meaningful debate. Another key component of any design competition is the jury selection since the choice of the winners is ultimately their responsibility.  Most successful competitions are composed of a fine mix of people with different backgrounds (i.e. landscape architects, developers, citizens, architects, artists, etc.) and from different locations. This attempts to balance local biases and agendas with "impartial" views by outsiders, while ensuring a number of different perspectives in the debate for who is/are  chosen as the winners. To their merit, Townshift organizers attempted to find this same balance by choosing a small but intelligent group of local and international professionals for their jury.  A more acute look at the jury members shows a strong architecture bias and it would have been a great benefit to add a little more diversity to the group, particular since there were only a handful of jurors. So, for example, ensuring that a strong urban designer be present as well as the inclusion of someone with a deep community/citizen understanding of the different Surrey Town Centre contexts - outside of the political context - would have done wonders. But, that said, looking at those chosen - and the strong quality of their work - one would have never guessed the decisions they ultimately made. The "conservative" nature of the winners points to the fact that, for whatever reason, the jury members fell short in highlighting exemplary, thought-provoking visions of what we can do with our suburbs. Rather, they opted for "safe" choices that took the questionable requirements of each Town Centre at face value. Given the sheer number of entries - well over one hundred - it's hard to believe that those chosen were, in fact, the most exemplary. This leads directly to the final piece of the puzzle - the entrants.  Although many people tend to focus on the structure and organization of a design competition as the main factor relating to its results, submissions can be analyzed to understand the current state of the "field" and their ability to respond to the issues asked of them. Given that the public wasn't given access to all the submissions for Townshift, we will have to rely on the winning and shortlisted proposals - which, nonetheless, should be a relatively good indicator since they account for about 15% of the total entries. Based on the latter, it seems safe to say that the vast majority of entrants ignored the progressive idea of rigourously engaging different scales and made the conscious decision to blindly follow the specific requirements for each Town Centre - despite the fact that they clearly fell short of truly addressing  the problems associated with the suburbs. So, what this tell us about the way we - architects and designers - are thinking about the (sub)urban environment? In choosing to lose sight of the larger context, entrants took the easy way out - falling back into the tired and outdated routine of aesthetically-driven makeovers weakly washed by the popular catch-word of our times - density - as a means of automatically portraying an image of "sustainability".  To add insult to injury, the public realm - the cradle of vibrant communities and cities - clearly took the back seat to visually compelling imagery and building forms. Reflecting how little we've learned over the past half century, proposals were set amidst ill-conceived, vacuous (non-designed!) public spaces tragically populated by Photoshopped people pretending to have a good time. This might prompt the typical "but this was an architecture design competition, so beautiful buildings should be the focus" response. This mentality is both wrong and dangerous. As we speak, the borders between disciplines of all sorts are eroding to embrace multidisciplinary practice. Within design, the distinction between architecture, landscape architecture and urban design is crumbling (if it was ever really there to begin with) with collaborative architectural practices taking an active role in shaping the urban environment through thoughtful proposals that engage the complexity of urban systems at all scales. The New Urbanist and Office of Metropolitan Architecture, mentioned earlier, are just two examples of many. This interdisciplinary approach makes sense since complex systems work based on inter-connectivity not isolation. It is, in fact, the segregation-based, simplistic mentality that architects should work (and think) only about singular buildings within the borders of their lots that created the dysfunctional suburbs to begin with. As such, it's clear that continuing to endorse this model doesn't help our field in any way. In fact, it is catastrophic to the little integrity we have left after contributing wholeheartedly to creation of the impoverish urban landscapes we inhabit.  By keeping us safely sheltered from actively engaging serious real-world issues, we hurt ourselves. As a field, we designers constantly flaunt our ability to think outside the box, bend the rules and take risks. Struggling to show our creative value in a world thrown into a tail-spin by increasingly complex issues, we are supposedly educated to think critically about everything we do and work hard to develop intelligent concepts. We also have the rare graphic sensibilities to visualize these concepts to share with others. As such, we should collectively feel disappointed at ourselves for the outcome of the Townshift competition. Anybody even casually perusing the shortlisted entrants would be hard pressed to find something beyond the mainstream, let alone something that sparks an interesting dialogue. In taking the safe route, we failed to provide the creativity and "new thinking" about the suburbs asked for by the organizers?  And for this, we have only ourselves to blame. This brings forward a significant issue that must be taken seriously as we look ahead: if the architecture and design fields can no longer be counted on to generate innovative and meaningful solutions - or, more importantly, meaningful questions - to serious problems, then we are asking to fade away into irrelevance. The fact that the winning and shortlisted Townshift proposals didn't recognize the value in designing the public spaces they created injunction with their buildings as well as the resistance to look outside their respective sites to larger scales, is extremely troublesome. But in the end, it's well known that great expectations always bring the real possibility of intense disappointment. Despite Townshift's inability to live up to it's potential, let its well-meaning aspirations inspire other municipalities to be equally as courageous and continue to use design competitions to explore creative visions. After all, it's really the only format we've got and only through learning from both our successes and failures can we move more confidently into the future. Towards this end, the Townshift group is holding a 'Where do we go from here?' discussion on March, 29th at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Newton (12666 72nd Ave.), starting at 6:00 pm in Room 1205 of the Cedar Building. This will involve several community leaders from the Town Centres, developers, and City Council. I encourage you to attend and voice your opinion about the successes and failures of the competition. *** Erick Villagomez is one of the founding editors at re:place. He is also an educator, independent researcher and designer with academic and professional interests in the human settlements at all scales. His private practice - Metis Design|Build - is an innovative practice dedicated to a collaborative and ecologically responsible approach to the design and construction of places.

Building Evolution

[caption id="attachment_7213" align="alignleft" width="290" caption="Photo courtesy of City of Vancouver (media centre)"][/caption] How do current practices of planning and regulation affect the evolution of buildings and cities? Erick Villagomez looks at the nature of urban evolution over history and offers the development of Olympic Village as an interesting point of reflection about the pros and cons of contemporary methods of directing the city form. By Erick Villagomez, re:place magazine Many factors contribute to the evolutions of cities.  Historically, the gradual unfolding of the built environment was very organic with only a handful of large-scale infrastructure and civic building projects controlled by governing bodies.  As such, the transformation of the majority of the urban domain was left largely in the hands of its citizens - who played a pivotal, bottom-up role in incrementally shaping their respective towns, building by building, in direct response to changing economic, social, and environmental forces. The past couple of centuries have seen a lot of these practices change, however, with governments and specialized "experts" exerting more and more control over the form and look of cities at all scales and beyond the straightforward aspects of making cities safer, healthier places to live. Sadly, most of these attempts have been more detrimental to our urban landscapes (and planet) than anything else, with only a handful of "planned" strategies, particularly at the building-scale, providing lessons worth potentially replicating in the future. The negative effects of this top-down method of city governance is not only due to the nature of the system itself - one that institutionalizes outdated values of the past as building regulations, that are difficult to change after implemented - but also due to the smaller-scales within which planning departments are exercising their authority. This is due to the fact that it is at the smaller scales, such as individual buildings, interior spaces, etc., that can and should be allowed to respond to the changing urban forces. [caption id="attachment_7233" align="alignright" width="290" caption="Photo courtesy of City of Vancouver (media centre)"][/caption] With this in mind, it's worth looking more critically at noteworthy small-scale urban experiments instigated by municipal planning departments as a means of understanding the advantages and disadvantages of our current urban planning process.  Luckily, one such example lies at our doorstep in the new South East False Creek neighbourhood of Olympic Village. Aside from the much-publicized technological feats of the development, one of the most significant achievements was the subtle transformation of the standard apartment building in direct response to strong ideas of about the public realm. Most, if not all, of us have been in apartment buildings and are familiar with how they typically work: one enters a lobby that extends from outside to the center of the building, where the elevator and stairway are located. Residential units are accessed through an ill-lit  "double-loaded" corridor where apartments are entered laterally along both sides of this central circulation path. Each level is a repetition of the one below to some designated height limit. This building type - with its circulation spaces deeply hidden within its belly - was (and is) the physical manifestation of economic efficiency. From the developers perspective, this architectural organization combines the maximum number of income-generating units - which inevitably require access to natural light for safety, indoor quality, and marketability  - with efficient construction methods. From the money-making perspective, this architecture makes perfect sense and most , if not all, municipal regulations to-date have encouraged the proliferation this building type as an acceptable form of housing and urbanism. Of course, these same regulations are based on a simplistic understanding of how cities work - focusing on lot-by-lot developments irrespective of their implications on the public realm and/or workings of the city as a whole. The typical apartment building type - and neighbourhoods they form in aggregate - is so pervasive that we take for granted the effect of their circulation patterns on the urban landscape. To be more specific, we've forgotten that these corridors, cloaked in residential units, are effectively an extension of the public realm into the building and that something important is lost when we create buildings that sever this relationship. It is precisely this negative consequence that the City of Vancouver intended to change in the development of Olympic Village, by attempting to balance larger public realm issues with the bottom line.  This was tackled through the addressing the specific circulatory design of the apartment buildings and changing the relationship between corridors and their surrounding streets, from the inside out. What did this entail? [caption id="attachment_7232" align="alignleft" width="224" caption="Photo courtesy of City of Vancouver (media centre)"][/caption] Well, the City very simply and elegantly required "extroverting" the circulation spaces to show human activity within.  This was achieved by breaking away from the traditional building type model and introducing glass wrapped elevators and stair towers at corners, mid-floorplate and corridor ends. Not only was this intended to increase the safety of streets and building interiors, but also to animate the public realm that would now have a new strong visual connection to those circulating within. Furthermore, these elements were designed and located with sightlines from around and within the site(s) so that their physical expression, and light at night, would serve to provide constant orientation to the urban explorer. A brief walk down the one of the streets within Olympic Village will clearly show the powerful neighbourhood-scale results of such an understated design move - much to the benefit of the adjacent streets. The result is the creation of a unique urban apartment neighbourhood with an unusual degree of visual permeability. However, the introduction of this seemingly simple design move required a number of intermediary steps in the form of bylaw changes and relaxations on the part of the City, not the least of which was the creation of new allowable floor area (Floor Space Ratio) exclusions that ensured that developers were not being punished for the added inefficiency of this design change. As mentioned earlier, the existing regulations - with their roots in the values of decades ago when public realm issues where not of any concern - have over time have been fossilized through bureaucratic processes and are exceedingly difficult to transform. To the credit of the City, they managed to find their way through the maze and come out on top. But I would be telling only a small part of the story if I stopped here because a number of lucky and timely events converged on the South East False Creek site in order to make this outcome even possible. First and foremost, the City owns the Olympic Village lands and have currently granted the design and construction managing developer - Millennium - a ground lease.  They will eventually purchase the land on which the buildings are built from the City of Vancouver, at which time the municipality will own the public spaces, community centre, affordable housing and Salt Building. Furthermore, and very importantly, the city acted as lender for Millennium's market for sale housing, market rental and commercial units.  The Salt Building was a unique building and did not involve Millennium.  Instead, the City hired the Vancouver Salt Company under a design, build, operate relationship. Similarly, Millennium was not involved in building the roads, parks, waterfront and plaza: each of which falls under the jurisdiction of the City. The ultimate result was that the City of Vancouver had the rare opportunity to wear several hats in the development of Olympic Village - from Regulator, Development Partner to Millennium, Development Partner to Vancouver Salt Co, Developer of public spaces, and just in the last year, Lender to Millennium - and so had the ability to exercise an unprecedented design impact within this project. This greater degree of control over the entire operation allowed for a "streamlining" of internal permitting and regulation processes, as well as more flexibility over all.  Yet despite this, they still encountered a number of internal conflicts that required a lot of time and resources to amend. Not only does this makes the replication of such a model virtually impossible under normal development conditions - where time equals money and dollar bills drive development - but it also shows an inherent problem with the regulatory system we've created to plan our cities: its inability to accommodate change and adaptation in a timely and efficient way - even when the municipality in question has an unprecedented amount of control and the clear result of their actions is a more humane and sensible urbanism! In the past, these problems were not encountered because authorities let bottom-up methods deal with small-scale changes (i.e. at the building scale and below) that responded quickly and efficiently to accommodate natural urban forces such as technological shifts and population growth. Instead higher authorities focused their attention more on large-scale issues pertaining to the overall health and safety of the city (i.e. infrastructure). These small-scale transformations, although incremental and insignificant individually, forcefully changed the urban fabric of when multiplied in large numbers. Our current regulatory framework, that seeks more and more control over the minutia of the built environment (even plant types in some neighbourhoods!) and stricter design guidelines eliminates this healthy evolutionary process and destroys cities from the inside out.  Vancouver is one of the biggest proponents of this form of over-regulated landscape, relying exceedingly on rare development opportunities to explore different and better forms of urbanism instead of allowing a more relaxed (and effective) form of urban evolution. This approach should be questioned especially as the pressures facing urban centres worldwide grow and with City of Vancouver's "rare development opportunities" - largely located in old industrial lands - dwindling with each passing year. As such, it's important that the City of Vancouver truly act as a worldwide model to other top-down planning organizations by reinventing themselves, and the faulty system we've inherited, to focus on recognizing (not ineffectively attempting to control) both overt and subtle changes that urban forces are affecting the built environment and directing bottom-up processes so that they don't spiral out of control.  This involves intelligently channelling the creativity that the latter generates.  In effect, we have to strive to balance top-down imposed methods at the large-scale of the city and neighbourhood with bottom-up self-generating design at the small-scale of building. So it would seem that the development of the Olympic Village truly holds a number of important lessons. But perhaps the most significant one is cautionary: that in the long run, urban planners must ultimately relinquish some control over the city in order to regain it. *** Erick Villagomez is one of the founding editors at re:place. He is also an educator, independent researcher and designer with academic and professional interests in the human settlements at all scales. His private practice - Metis Design|Build - is an innovative practice dedicated to a collaborative and ecologically responsible approach to the design and construction of places.

Juhani Pallasmaa: Architect of the Senses

With the recent visit of Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa to the UBC School of Architecture (SALA), many in Vancouver's architectural community had the pleasure of joining the seventy-three old award winning architect for an evening's presentation of his work at the Vancouver Playhouse. By Sean Ruthen Every so often, a visitor to our urban shoreline has the ability to rouse us from our architectural slumber, such that our eyes are opened to the events of the world beyond our young city, to highlight the possibilities and opportunities that we may miss if we fail to adjust our architectural outlook. In recent history, one can count on their fingers the amount of visitors who have had such an effect - the people that thronged to hear Tadao Ando speak at the Chan Centre in 2005, as well as similar crowds to hear the late Arthur Erickson speak - all those present knew that they were being part of something that was ‘more than meets the eye’ (pun fully intended). For those fortunate enough to have been at the Vancouver Playhouse this past November 2nd, all were able to witness just such an architectural event. As part of the ongoing Arthur Erickson Lecture Series, Finnish architect and former professor Juhani Pallasmaa presented ‘12 Themes in My Work’ (as chosen by others he confessed) to a capacity crowd. In his two hour presentation, the good humoured Pallasmaa gave an inspirational presentation of his life’s work and philosophy, beginning with two quotes by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. As he posited, phenomenology and architecture have a link through the senses, and so as a point of departure he stressed the importance of this school of philosophy in his work, and the effect it has had on the body of work being presented over the course of the evening. One of his prefacing quotes summed up his comprehension of his life’s work: “Shortly before (a man) dies, he discovers that this patient labyrinth of lines is a drawing of his own face.” As presented, the ’12 Themes' are a visage of his own unique architectural expression - different but similarly idiosyncratic to that of his fellow countryman Alvar Aalto, and imbued with the curiousity of the philosophers, artists, and poets who for ages have sought to understand the structures of the mind through the truth of the senses. Following these opening remarks, Juhani emphasized the importance of his writing as a way to test his ideas throughout his career, and then as an aside remarked how he had just been told by one of the lecture’s organizers that one of his books had recently been translated into Mandarin and Farsi (he didn’t know). Along with his Encounters: Architectural Essays (2005) and The Thinking Hand (2009), The Eyes of the Skin (2005) is revolutionary in its ambition to overthrow the hegemony of the eye, what Pallasmaa calls the ocularcentric paradigm, with a total perception of our physical environments through our senses. So profound an impact has this remarkable book had that its teachings have been incorporated into architectural design studios the world over, espousing the relationship of humanity to architecture as an act of sensual totality, much in the same spirit as the architecture of Peter Zumthor and the already mentioned Alvar Aalto. It goes without saying that Pallasmaa’s influence has been far-reaching, whether disseminated through the numerous lectures he has given the world over, or in his writing, influencing the likes of Steven Holl and the Patkaus. To purport a theory of architecture that dethrones the eye is almost as unimaginable as suggesting a form of music in which the ear plays second fiddle, yet such a paradigm shift in our increasingly facile and flat modernist expression in the West, the result of too many years of accountant’s architecture designed by P3’s and committees, is exactly the usurpation that could rouse our imaginations to a new philosophy of the built environment, transcending discussions of fashion, computer technology, and even sustainability (which itself has become a new fashion). It is a new beat from a new drum, and as made evident by the full-house assembled to hear him speak, it would appear many are listening. Not since Gaston Bachelard has such a sophisticated thinking mind had such a radical shift in mindset mid-career. For Bachelard, a natural scientist who became a phenomenologist, he turned his scientific precision inwards to explore the notion of oneirism, or the dreams by which we comprehend our waking perceptions, all posited in his extraordinary book ‘The Poetics of Space’. Similarly for Pallasmaa, his early work was epitomized by a rationalist ‘Constructivism’ which epitomized the national architectural style of his day, itself a curious combination of Japanese jointery amalgamated with the functionalism of the International Style. It would be later in his life however when Pallasmaa would find his own distinct voice, casting off technology and fashion for the simplicity of craft and tactile exploration. And for all his wisdom and learning, in the end he confesses that his understanding of the relationship of architecture to culture to be one of uncertainty and insecurity, as it is left to our senses to assemble it into the coherent narrative we call history. And so then to the ‘12 themes’ of Pallasmaa’s work, with the architect giving examples from his largest buildings to his most intimate sculpture, from the graphic design he did as a youth to the large corporate and civic projects of his later career. In the order he presented them, the 12 elements are: 1. continuous line 2. penetration 3. circle and arc 4. joint 5. touch 6. material and colour 7. scale 8. light 9. landscape 10. stairway 11. column 12. time As would be expected, the projects selected to demonstrate his 12 themes draw upon a rich body of work, ranging from the very personal – his father’s gravestone – to the very public. For the ‘continuous line’, he marvels at how Matisse was able to capture the essence of a woman’s form through a few curving lines. As an example in his own work, Pallasmaa presented an artist’s summer house that he designed for the continuous line of the horizon seen from the house’s living areas, combined with the arc of the sunlight that annually plays upon the house’s southern exposure. As an example of ‘joint’ he presented a summer pavilion he built next to the Villa Mairea in 1968, where he created a structure around a connection, reminiscent of Mies’ Barcelona Pavilion in its modular elegance. The fifth theme in his presentation was one he felt to be far too absent from modern architecture – 'touch'. And so he presented a collection of door handles, which he humourously referred to as a building’s handshake, exhibited at the 1991 Venice Biennale. In an other exhibition, he covered the entire exhibit space floor with four inches of sand. Tactility, he reminded us, is an experience that we have at one to one scale. For ‘colour and materiality’, Pallasmaa showed us a public space in Helsiniki painted with a Mediterranean colour palette, which he discovered has the uncanny effect of drawing his Finnish kin ‘out of the forest’ as he put it, as they believe they’re in southern sunnier climates. For the seventh element – ‘scale’ – Pallasmaa showed a series of paired images, with one image large and one small – a massive Helsinki development next to a design for fireplace implements, a phone both paired with a monumental bank office block he did in Moscow (for which he said then president Yeltsin gave him ‘a big box of money’). The smallest scale project he ever did was a design he did for a gold coin commemorating Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, with his largest being the aforementioned International Moscow Bank Headquarters (1990), comprised of the bank and its offices, as well as a shopping arcade and public plaza. In both cases, he pointed out, the design problem starts the process of exploration from the same origin. It is not surprising that Pallasmaa holds the eighth theme –‘light’ – as sacred, believing no other element able to evoke an emotional response, whether grief or ecstasy, so intensely and definitively. As an example, he presented to the audience a project that perhaps represented one of his proudest moments – when five of his architecture students had their design selected for the Finnish Pavilion at the 1992 World’s Fair in Seville. With Pallasmaa as their captain for overseeing the construction of the design, the professor and students realized a splendid pavilion of materiality and light, for which Juhani did the interiors. A more recent addition to Finland’s architectural legacy, Steven Holl’s Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Arts in Helsinki, completed in 1998, is another powerful evocation of 'light', as well as a fitting example of the ‘landscape’ theme, as Pallasmaa was commissioned to work with Holl to realize the museum’s exterior spaces. For the ‘stairway’ theme, the architect has done many studies of stairs in numerous media, though he refers to these sculptures as ‘architectural objects’. Along with a stairway turned on its side and sculpted in ice and snow, Pallasmaa’s fascination with this architectural object reminds one of the impossible staircases of M.C. Escher. But it was the final themes, ‘column’ and ‘time’, which provided the elements for what he believes to be his most profound project to date – the Driveway Square he did for the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. With the campus having originally been designed by another renowned Finnish architect, Eliel Saarinen (it had seen recent additions by both Rafael Moneo and Steven Holl among others), so was Pallasmaa asked to contribute, providing a scheme to sew together an amalgam of disparate spaces in the centre of the campus. His charge would be not a building however, but an entry court and public plaza, in which he used a combination of the Fibonacci series with a sundial, as defined by the path of the sun across the plaza. Six columns of decreasing heights, made from glacial materials indigenous to the site, define the project at the end of a T-intersection. The layout acts as both a sundial and astral calendar, prompting one astronomer friend of his to exclaim that he had created a ‘dashboard for the universe’. But the most humourous moment in the design came when Pallasmaa attempted to have a manhole in the plaza relocated. Being told the cost to do so would be exorbitant, he first thought to put a reproduction of one of Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings upon it, instead deciding to engrave the distance beneath the manhole that one would have to travel to reach the other side of the planet (12,000 kilometers) and where one would end up (the Indian Ocean). In the end, the audience was left with his sense of playfulness, of mystery, and a sense of awe at the accomplishments of this humble man. Ending his presentation with two quotes from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke and two images, one a painting of quiet introspect, the other a graphic image from the climax of a Peter Greenaway film, his inspirational words, especially of the importance of drawing - that the hand draws the mind and not the other way around - all of this wisdom is sure to stay with us for some time. As introduced by Kasian president Don Kasian, Christopher Macdonald, and John Patkau, this event will surely be remebered as one of the highlights of this year's Arthur Erickson Lecture Series. *** Sean Ruthen is an architect working, living, and writing in Vancouver.

Performing Infrastructure

[caption id="attachment_5542" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Edmonton's Gallagher Park at the 2009 Folk Music Festival"][/caption] With growing national interest in funding infrastructure projects to kick start our lumbering economy, Sean Ruthen considers another type of infrastructure requiring funding - Performance Infrastructure. By Sean Ruthen, re:place magazine At the end of 2008, the then president of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, Paule Boutin, wrote a letter to each member of the hundred year old Institute, asking that they in turn write to Prime Minister Harper and his two ministers Jim Flaherty and John Baird, to ask that the pending federal budget devote a significant amount of funding to national infrastructure. The federal government had been treating the subject with much rhetoric at the time, especially following in the footsteps of Obama’s new administration and its best intentions to kick start their economy, devoting colossal sums to infrastructure in a size not seen since the great public work programs of the Great Depression. Jane Jacobs reminded us in Dark Age Ahead that the stock market crash and ensuing Great Depression of the 1930’s was not the result of any one thing, but the combination of many things simultaneously going awry, including a massive coal miners strike in the late 1920’s. Arguably, the manufacturing sector today is the ‘coal-mining’ equivalent of our modern age, and with unemployment presently sitting close to 10%, we run the risk of a critical mass pushing us over the edge into another depression. So when, I ask, is this infrastructure money that has been pledged going to appear? How and where will it reveal itself – will it be schools and universities, roads and parks, or will it be delivered in some as yet to be determined form? In the US there is the ARRA – the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act – which is showing some signs of finally getting off the ground (read a recent Architectural Record on the subject here), though very slowly, but where is the Canadian equivalent? I wrote these letters at the request of the RAIC president, and reminded my elected representatives that unemployment was 25% during the darkest days of the Great Depression. At the time of my writing these letters I had borne witness to massive cutbacks in both my workplace and profession, on par with the devastation surely being wrought on the manufacturing and auto industries. Mr. Flaherty and Mr. Baird wrote back to me within four months, though as of this writing, I have not heard back from our prime minister (though his communication’s personnel wrote to tell me they’d received my letter). Mr. Flaherty’s form-letter reply was humorously apologetic for the delay in getting back to me, an indication at least that his communications staff had a calendar in their office. He/they wrote to me of the deficit the country was about to be plunged into, as by this time the party had finally given up on the mantra-like ‘Canada’s banks are in good shape’, and to be sure since then the official deficit number has most likely moved again to some new staggering sum (much like the recent provincial budget coming in at a whopping $3 billion). Mr. Flaherty seems to have recognized that my concern was the loss of jobs across Canada, as he pledged in the letter to help those in what he called ‘industries in difficulty’ - forestry, manufacturing, and the automobile industry to name only three. Specifically, Mr. Flaherty assured me that the government was “taking immediate actions to build infrastructure. We will start construction of roads, bridges, public transit, broadband Internet access, schools and social housing, in every region of the country.” Overall, the letter read much like one of his prepared statements, which he finished with a couplet: “Together we made the right choices when times were good. Now, when times are difficult, together we can continue moving forward with confidence.” Mr. Baird’s response was less formal and more to the point. He explained that the then upcoming budget had a new plan called the ‘Building Canada Fund’, to the tune of $33 billion. Of that, $12 billion would be spent over the next five years, including $4 billion for an ‘Infrastructure Stimulus Fund’ over two years, $1 billion for a ‘Green Infrastructure Fund’ over five years, and another $1 billion for something called the ‘Building Canada Communities Component’ to be implemented over the next two years. After visiting the 'Communities Component' of the BCF website, I found that the second phase had just closed for new projects with 470 under review. Building types included convention centres, museums, and libaries, along side highways, public transit, and water treatment facilities. By now, we have all heard much of the need for ‘infrastructure’, whether its building new roads and parks or maintaining what has already been built, as though we’re old seasoned pros since the Great Depression, and we need simply to blow the dust off the old public work programs and build new schools and bridges. I would then like to propose another type of infrastructure, something I call ‘Performance Infrastructure’, which I purport is necessary in order that any society be able to truly call itself civilized. With thousands moving to cities each day, it would be a shame to discover that this urban phenomenon is wholly without any soul. Like a light bulb going on over my head, this epiphany happened upon me during this year’s 30th anniversary of the Edmonton Folk Festival (and, coincidentally, the 40th for Woodstock). For what better example of Performance Infrastructure than 20,000 people, orderly and civil, occupying the side of a ski hill for four days in the heart of a busy metropolis, all run by volunteers. The city’s festival organizer has discovered a gentle balance between civic pride and an entrepreneurial spirit, providing without a doubt one of the most profound public services in Western Canada (he is also organizer of the Calgary Folk Festival). One could then imagine the collective gasp when it was discovered that the Edmonton Folk Festival would be receiving no funding from the federal government’s $100 million Marquee Program, which sponsors festival all across the country. Why Calgary and Ottawa festivals received funding  (even the Cloverdale Rodeo) while the Edmonton festival didn’t can only be guessed at, though it is not a stretch to imagine that having the NDP take one of Edmonton’s longtime Conservative ridings in the last election most likely had something to do with it (the Calgary Stampede got a whopping $2 million). And so this year, the Edmonton Folk Festival demonstrated that the show can go on, despite the federal government’s snub. My proposal to Mr. Baird and Mr. Flaherty then is this -  give some of the infrastructure money to the arts, and let the dog actually wag the tail for once. Otherwise, how can one budget to spend $1 billion on infrastructure building without knowing what is to be built? Be explicit, committing to community involvement for indoor and outdoor performance venues, as well as funding other public places where people can gather to partake in the arts. This seems to be something that other places, including Quebec, seem to get, while our current federal and provincial governments seem to be missing the boat altogether. Great public spaces are the result of the partnership between  governments teamed up with community spirit, some recent exemplars including the Millennium Park in Chicago and the High Line running through Chelsea in Lower Manhattan. While our province is now officially running a deficit, we do have some things to show for it - for being $3 billion in the hole, we now have the $2 billion Canada Line to our airport, and a close to $1 billion trade & convention centre, on top of a new highway to Whistler. When you add in the new Golden Ears bridge (also $1 billion), the building of infrastructure is practically all we’ve seen in the Lower Mainland since the announcement that the five rings were coming to town. And now its time to pay the piper, so with education and health care having been systematically dismantled over the last decade to mere skeletons of their former selves, it will now be our other cultural institutions – our libraries, museums, galleries, theatres, and performance halls - that we are being told are the ones to pay. Closing libraries and cancelling arts funding is I think to sacrifice the very thing that government is meant to safeguard in the first place. These are the storehouses of humanity where our values rest, they are the seeds of our societies, and the blueprints for our children to know such human traits as benevolence and compassion. Literacy informs us, enabling us to imagine the existence of other consciousness outside our own, such that we can enter social contracts with each other. Freedom is just one such social contract, and with freedom comes the capacity to create art, much as the thousands sitting on the side of the hill in Edmonton’s river valley this last August were themselves a work of art. Similarly are the 250,000 people that partake of Vancouver’s Celebration of Light every summer likewise a unique work of social interaction. It would appear that our provincial and municipal politicians are then simply following the lead that our federal government took a year ago. In an article written in the Globe and Mail last October, entitled “Culture matters, even to ordinary Canadians”, the author Mark Leiren-Young recounted a story of Sir Winston Churchill’s finance minister wanting to cut arts funding during WWII. He is said to have replied: “Then what are we fighting for?” I would hazard a guess that the term philistine has been used on one or two occasions to describe our current government(s), especially due to our current prime minister calling arts and culture a “niche issue”,  in turn prompting Margaret Attwood to pen a witty rebuke of our first minister. History has time and again demonstrated moments immediately preceding great civilizations' declines, where definitive signals have sounded that the end is about to arrive, most often delivered in the form of marauding Vikings or barbarians. While our present age is a tad more civilized than many in history (such that we can have ‘revolutions’ now on a weekly basis), these upheavals in the past have resulted in the decline of some of humanity’s more noble moments - we should not be so arrogant to think we are immune (the Greeks called it hubris). The idea of democracy born from ancient Athens is an ideal our present western democracies attempt to emulate, though often falling short, and much as historians recorded the words of the great statesmen of that time, so did they record their civilization’s darkest hour, when plague, starvation, and war stripped away all their greatest achievements. One of those first signals of decline in Athens was when they closed the theatre. I recount this only because I believe we presently have reached a critical mass in the way we see our world – ecological, economical, digital - as well as in the way we cultivate ourselves. Our present day notion of democracy is now simultaneously a business transaction, with economic activities in the world market influencing each nation’s own cultures more than ever. It is in such moments that history may beget a great voice like Pericles or Churchill to lead us from the nadir. Without such a voice, we run the risk of entering a new dark age. For any government to cut arts at a time of economic downturn, while perhaps justifiable when set against health and education, is simply to propose a statistical and obvious outcome of economics, much like other governments have used classical economic theories to justify an HST, or a 700 billion bailout. There is no heroism here, no bravery to look at how it could be done differently. And then it is to add insult to injury to allow casinos into our communities, and then deny those communities the funding to promote activities for families and artists to offset gambling and its associated vices. Finally, it is worth remembering that in such dark economic times, it has always been the arts that make us forget our troubles, catharsis as Aristotle called it. Perhaps Mr. Harper’s communications people could gently suggest to him that our nation could use a distraction from the long trail of blunders and missteps that have recently become typical of the government’s fiscal mismanagement's. I do not mean to suggest that our prime minister is wrong in regards to the direction of his current federal policies, but that he is perhaps on occasion misinformed, as I believe he was when he decided to cut funding to festivals like the Edmonton one. The darker implication is that like a collapsing house of cards the provinces and municipalities are now following suit, as Ontario’s HST move prompts BC to do the same, and our provincial government slashes funding to the arts, literacy, and tourism. So where does the buck stop I ask when it comes to infrastructure? My guess is we will shortly find out, especially when the Olympics have packed up and moved on in April of 2010. Then we will see if there’s anything left in the coffers for both ‘niche issues’ and ‘non-niche issues’ alike. By Sean Ruthen *** Sean Ruthen is an architect working, living, and writing in Vancouver.

Canada Line craziness: An adventure on the rails

[caption id="attachment_5296" align="alignleft" width="290" caption="Thousands wait outside Waterfront Station for a free ride on the Canada Line."][/caption] Article and photos by Leszek Apouchtine, re:place magazine The first day of the Canada Line saw thousands of people line up at many stations, while other stations sat practically empty. My journey started at Waterfront station at 1.30pm - a half hour after the first trains opened to the public. I disembarked the Expo Line to discover that it would not be any easy transfer to the Canada Line. I followed the crowd outside the station to the only entrance that was open, which was on the west side of the building. There crowds zig-zagged in the open plaza, went a block down Granville, then turned the corner and went at least another block. I would later discover, from a rider named Janine, that the wait was about two hours. The Vancouver City Centre stop did not look much better, as it wrapped around the Sears building. Apparently a lot of people were looking for a free ride. I bypassed the Yaletown stop and walked across Cambie Bridge. There I found the lonely Olympic Village station, where except for a couple police officers there was no sign of life at all. Out of pure curiosity, I decided to see how this compared to the Broadway station, just a few short blocks away. There again a line-up wrapped around the side of the station and disappeared into the distance. I knew where I was heading. After a bite I made my way back down to the Olympic Village station, which was still dead empty at about 2.30pm. I spoke with a volunteer there who had heard the crowds at Waterfront were estimated to be at about 10,000 people. I'm not sure how accurate that estimate is, but I'm sure it was not far from the truth. I easily boarded a train here, although it was quite full there was still a decent amount of room for the handful of us who were waiting. The air-conditioned car was quite roomy and allowed space for bicycles and luggage (not that anyone was brave enough to try to squeeze either on the train today). It was shortly after this that I started talking to Janine, who as I mentioned before had been waiting at the Waterfront station for about two hours. I was lucky to bump into her, as Janine is an old friend of mine from Toronto who I haven't seen for 10 years. But that's another story. I was feeling quite smug that I had dodged the crowds, and thought I would be quite clever again by getting off the train at Aberdeen - surely that wouldn't be as busy as the final two stops in Richmond or the stop before it at the casino. That was obviously underestimating the crowds that would gather at this busy shopping area in Richmond. I had to go downstairs and would have to get in line to ride the train back to Vancouver. Although nowhere near as bad as the line-up at Waterfront or City Centre or even Broadway, there were a few hundred people in a huge semi-circle waiting to get in the station. I hate line-ups. [caption id="attachment_5297" align="alignright" width="320" caption="A welcome sight - Sea Island Station was practically deserted."][/caption] I walked to No. 3 road and hopped on a soon-to-be-defunct 98 B-Line and exited near the airport. I could have easily taken the bus close to my home, but I was determined to get back on the Canada Line. During a 20-minute walk I passed the Templeton station, which is a mysterious station that is as much in the middle of nowhere as you can be in Richmond. Surrounded by a parking lot and empty land it was surely not very busy either, but unfortunately for me it was on the far side of the busy and very pedestrian-unfriendly road that leads into the airport. In the distance I saw Sea Island station, which was closer to a pedestrian crossing and decided to head there. Just as empty as Olympic Village, there were only about five other people waiting for the train, which was about to arrive in two minutes. This train was busy, but obviously not full of travellers from the airport (again, no luggage in sight). Just like me, these people just wanted a free ride and to see what all the fuss was about. I rode it into Yaletown, where I was once again greeted by a line-up of people waiting to get on. So, day one was a success and showed that the city really is excited about this new transit option. Now the interesting thing will be to see if ridership stays high when the novelty wears off. Even more interesting will be to see if another new SkyTrain line is indeed in our future or if we take a lesson from this expensive and disruptive project and seriously consider quicker and more inexpensive transit projects, such as light rail. *** Leszek Apouchtine is one of the founding editors at re:place.

In Focus: The Built Landscape

Statement and Photos by Sean Orr I’m not a photographer who readily predetermines defined areas of focus or themes, however since I always have my camera with me, those areas tend to reveal themselves with any change in my daily routine. Ergo, after getting a new job in the downtown core, my focus has shifted away from the back alley bricks of Gastown and towards the curious spaces found in the CBD. Those places where rigorous landscaping mirrors the city’s frontier with nature, where office workers are channeled through terraced concrete zones, forced to smoke their cigarettes on the periphery of massive structures. I very rarely take photographs of people, but something about the menacing wide open spaces created by the built landscape create a tension I am drawn to. I recently discovered the work of Anthony Hernandez at the VAG and his aesthetic has informed my own. [nggallery id=12] Sean Orr is perhaps most widely known for his outspoken views expressed on the local bog Beyond Robson, where he deconstructs the daily news in a column called Morning Brew. He’s also active in the local music scene as a singer in the bands Taxes and Kidnapping. But it is photography where his passion lies as his 6000+ photo stream on the popular photo sharing site Flickr attests to. Orr’s recent show at Hotel Gallery saw the release of a self-published photo-book called Pretty Drifted. His previous solo outings were at Antisocial and Dadabase, and has shown in group shows at Misanthropy, Midtown, Butchershop, Little Mountain, The Peanut Gallery, Access, and at the Cheaper Show. Sean has been wandering this city for a decade now after dropping out of third year geography, and has been using photography mainly as a means of understanding how the city affects his psyche, and conversely how the psyche affects the city. He describes his recent photograpghy as, “the semiotics of the city of Vancouver; its materials and built environment, speak in a hidden language, readable to those who drift around, camera often in hand, ducking in and out of back alleys and brick buildings”.

Vancouver’s Evolving Shoreline

[caption id="attachment_4934" align="alignleft" width="290" caption="SEFC - riprap "amphitheatre" offers direct access to the water of False Creek."][/caption] By Erick Villagomez, re:place magazine All photos courtesy of PWL Partnership As you ride leisurely along the newly constructed south-east shoreline of False Creek - sun beaming and salty air licking your face - it is easy to take the significance of this newest addition to Vancouver's public realm for granted.  Although visions for the 80 hectares of SouthEast False Creek (SEFC) have ebbed and flowed for well over a decade, it was with the awarding of Vancouver's 2010 Olympic bid in 2003 that pressure to move forward to transform this derelict industrial area truly took hold. As the site for Athletes Village, SEFC is to be at the cutting edge of sustainable neighbourhoods - demonstrating state-of-the-art practices in energy and water conservation, innovative infrastructure and transit-oriented development. Phase 1 will house 15,000 residents in a series of interesting mid-rise courtyard building.  Within this ambitious framework, the design of the public realm is to take front-and- center because the plans included reconstructing the site's 650m industrial edge.  Not only was this to be heavily showcased during the Olympics, but more importantly it was the final piece in making a continuous 28km public shoreline that stretched across the city. Given the significance of the undertaking, local landscape architecture firm PWL Partnership was asked to join the City of Vancouver and its large team of consultants to design the public realm.  With a wealth of experience designing several of the most successful pieces of Vancouver's waterfront, they were perfectly suited to take the lessons learned from past projects and create the newest iteration of our evolving waterfront visions. The differences between our newest addition to Vancouver's public sphere and the rest of the seawall are subtle but tangible.  Whereas other portions of the public corridor are treated as a series of open spaces connected by a bike-pedestrian throughway, PWL recreated the SEFC shoreline as a linear park that integrates bike and pedestrian traffic with a variety of adjacent outdoor rooms. Also, unlike other locations around the seawall where the interface with the water is markedly more urban, every chance was taken to allow people to engage the fluid edge of False Creek.  Whether through wonderfully structured rip rap or the stepped slipway of the "water amphitheater", people are finally allowed to get into close contact with the once polluted waters of the inlet. Embedded in this gesture are visions and untapped potential of how the water and city can coexist and open up exciting new possibilities beyond simply swimming.  Imagine kayaking from the North Shore into SEFC with friends to enjoy a coffee along its waterfront? In a city surrounded by water, why shouldn't water travel be given as must attention as any other form of pedestrian transportation? [caption id="attachment_4937" align="alignright" width="234" caption="SEFC - a constructed island restores a natural shoreline within False Creek and offers much needed habitat for wildlife.   "][/caption] In addition, the design for the SEFC shoreline also ambitiously set forth to introduce a strong natural edge that would co-exist with its urban surroundings.  The most visible example is the inclusion of an island constructed from layers of pebbles, rocks, boulders, beach logs and white-flowered yarrow.  As a creative method of fulfilling governmental habitat compensation requirements, this design feature - accessible only at low tide - effectively reclaims shoreline lost to industrial uses a century ago and adds a complex ecological edge for restoring fish and bird habitat. The positive results are already being seen, with schools of herring having been spotted along the island's rock edges for the first time in over 80 years, as well as the occasional visit from bald eagles.  All this right beside one of the densest downtown centers in all of Canada and just a few feet from swarms of whizzing cyclists and blissful walkers. Just inland from the island is a wetland park that will gather and filter stormwater flowing from the surrounding SEFC streets through a series of reed beds before flowing over a lowhead dam into False Creek after it rains.  Children will also be able to get their hands dirty with natural materials - such as sand and mud - before washing them with the potable water pumps they'll be able to use in their play area. The linear park is subtly subdivided into 3 areas corresponding to the historic industrial divisions of the original SEFC area - the rail yard to the east, the central ship yard and western works yard.  Each of these is reflected in the materials as one travels across its animated water front edges.  For example, lumber marks and brass plaques are seen along promenade's eastern side, while the slipway and oversized cleats are reminiscent of the ship yard.  Similar to Granville Island, the references to the site's industrial past maintain themselves as part of a contemporary urban space - living alongside distinctive white oversized lounge chairs, sleek metal swivel chairs, light pollution reducing lights, and solar-powered compacting garbage cans. As one uses the space, however, all the details and specifics described above fall by the wayside and you take stock of the rich and energetic cumulative whole.  Quite simply, the SEFC seawall park is a wonderful contribution to the spaces of the city and truly a step forward in the ongoing evolution of our waterfront. *** Erick Villagomez is one of the founding editors at re:place. He is also an educator, independent researcher and designer with academic and professional interests in the human settlements at all scales. His private practice - Metis Design|Build - is an innovative practice dedicated to a collaborative and ecologically responsible approach to the design and construction of places.

In Focus: Van Refuse & Bricolage

Statement and Photos by Alex Witko & Courtney Hunt Our environment is increasingly becoming a landscape of which waste is an integral part. We tend to ignore it but refuse of many kinds is, and always has been, part of the human realm. The earliest civilizations threw garbage directly outside of their shelters. Ancient Greek dwellings have been unearthed only to discover many layers of trash, acting as foundations for later eras. In fact, it was not uncommon for wastes to be tossed right out the window of many western homes, well into the beginning of the 20th century. Despite modern efforts to provide better sanitation services, we find objects of unprecedented quantity being dumped to ocean floors, down canyon walls, and across our prairies today. In the last decade North America has experienced a fifty percent increase of municipal waste, while just a sixteen percent increase in population¹. Arguably, nowhere is this landscape more prevalent then in our cities, where concentrations of population and building inevitably lead to greater volumes of consumption and waste. Its waste, seemingly inseparable from the built form, is elemental to the city’s function. Full of activity, it is full of change, life and death. Buildings deteriorate and are demolished just as empty spaces are filled in elsewhere. Taking cue from our natural eco-systems, life thrives where there is death; where there is waste. Can a line be drawn between trash and our environment? If the topic of refuse is to be considered seriously we must realize it is not an object onto itself. Indeed the pulsing landscape of trash, in our backyards, strewn over the streets, or collected in a dump, is all part of a greater whole. This series of images represents two months of photographing and salvaging materials from the alleys of Vancouver. It is an indicator of a simple premise: The single most abundant local resource in our cities is waste. An ever changing landscape of refuse holds much power and potential. If we consider our cities as the primary source of waste we see another layer of the urban map, one which is unique - at once rapidly replenishing and always ‘new’ yet grounded in a specific location. This unique condition could lead to unique and untapped design possibilities for designers and dwellers. Tapping this potential, two new local practices have emerged: Organelle Design is small design, art and architecture collaboration. It’s work and research is steeped in found and off-the-shelf materials, from the building scale to a simple light fixture. It is dedicated to building a body of techniques and tactics to design with waste. BYO_! is a community rooted event that attempts to confront our wasteful ways and repurpose found objects. Over one weekend, friends and strangers come together to “build your own _____” with collected materials. It is a social mixing bowl of diverse talents and skill sets, where everything was completely free and you can walk away with something you made yourself! Look for more making and less wasting in future projects! [nggallery id=9] If you are interested in helping to organize or participate please contact us: organelledesign@gmail.com www.organelledesign.com

In Focus: Picturing Commercial Drive

Comparative images and statement by Jason Skladan Commercial Drive is dependant on its history. Much of the street has been built in short phases of financial success and subsequently renovated to accommodate changing needs. The first and largest of these building waves occurred in 1908, continuing until 1914, the beginning of the war. This wave of construction depends on the streetcar line that, in 1906, was extended up Park Drive (now Commercial Dr.) to First Ave. Before these streetcar stops were introduced, the Interurban Railway stopped only at Venables and Grant as it made its way down Park Drive. The first buildings, collected around these two initial stops, were mostly two and three stories with ground floor shops. Many shop owners lived either behind or above their stores in apartments or back rooms. The first city directories list real estate offices (selling the surrounding land), small groceries and hardware shops in abundance. Chain stores have always been a minority along Commercial Drive, where local, small, family-owned establishments thrive; owners here have a vested interest in the community as a whole. The small shop size has allowed this intimate character to persist. While a few large-scale developments have brought some ‘chain’ stores to The Drive, the fabric of Commercial Drive remains largely intact, unchanged and unchallenged. The original massing of this street, with a collection of two and three story buildings, apartments over shops and small-scale commerce, exists today as it did almost one hundred years ago. Of those buildings that survive, brick facades remain the most enduring; some wooden facades have been stripped of all detail, now unrecognizable, while others have been lovingly restored or maintained. The working class neighbourhood is reflected in the age of the building stock along Commercial Drive. These buildings, however, are under current pressure as this second suburb of Vancouver is undergoing gentrification. The future of The Drive is in question, while the present is intimately tied to this community’s past. This exploration was made possible through the work of Tammie Tupechka, from the Institute for the Humanities at Simon Fraser University 1. All of the historical images, and much of the historical information comes from A Pictoral History: Commercial Drive, 1912-1954 (1997). Part of a local initiative, “Our Own Backyard: Mapping the Grandview Woodland Community” this project captures the beginnings of Commercial Drive, making it accessible to current residents. Positioning these historic photographs against their modern counterpart brings to light the very static nature of the Commercial Drive streetscape. Many of these buildings are almost one hundred years old. Questions of longevity and the streets near future are immediately raised. [nggallery id=6] Jason Skladan is a recent graduate, with a Masters in Architecture from the University of British Columbia’s School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. Interests in urban form and design as well as architecture, and his love for Commercial Drive, drove his master’s thesis; concerned for the future of community along The Drive. This photo essay is an exert from his thesis. You can contact Jason at jskladan@hotmail.com

Deconstructing FormShift

By Erick Villagomez, re:place magazine Spring is in the air and slowly, our dreary winter eyes are shedding their grey-stained patina to the exuberant energy and life blooming around us.  Wisely, the City of Vancouver and Architectural Institute of British Columbia are looking to capitalize on the spirit of the season through launching their jointly-sponsored FormShift architectural design competition. Unlike in Europe - where architectural design competitions are commonplace - we in North America rarely get a chance to see one unfold before our eyes, especially an "open competition" held by a local Municipality in which anyone can contribute.  The result is an active buzz of anticipation throughout the design community and public alike - the former scarcely being given the chance to share their talents with the masses, and the latter only occasionally being able to see the ideas of their local creatives. However, the excitement of this singular event - particularly one so well-publicized and well-endowed with a star-studded organizing body - often masks a critical look at what lies beneath the surface.  Given that the built world gives shape to the values, fears, and desires of those imposing order on it, scrutinizing FormShift gives anyone willing to spend the time a picture into the mind of the City of Vancouver. The easiest place to begin is to examine how the organizers' set the stage for the competition and look for discrepancies between how it is portrayed to the public and the reality of relevant data on its built environment.  In this case, the FormShift Context positions itself as a valuable process intended to address climate change as it relates to city planning.  More specifically, it speaks to a reduction in carbon emissions through properly planning density, transportation, and buildings (architecture). Importantly, included in this introduction is an explicit reference to - and legitimization of - the measures adopted by the City. Of particular importance is the recently adopted EcoDensity Charter whose agenda is specifically outlined for inclusion by each entrant - such as improving affordability,  reducing automobile use, and maintaining neighbourhood identity.  With this in mind, entrants - "...even ordinary citizens" - are asked to channel their creativity and talents towards developing a solution that will bring Vancouver closer to its sustainability goals. One begins, fairly clearly, to see discriminations when analyzing the overall structure and weighting of specific aspects of the competition.  In the case of FormShift, the entries are organized into three categories - Vancouver Primary, Vancouver Secondary and Vancouver Wild Card.  Although the general website descriptions are quite benign, upon looking at the "generic drawings" given to those who wish to participate, one begins to unearth several interesting features. Firstly,of the three categories available to entrants, both the Vancouver Primary and Secondary locations are directly related to mixed-use (commercial/residential) arterials.   Consequently, the winners of these two categories also account for 80% of the winning prize money.  This clearly demonstrates that these particular locations are significant to the organizers. [caption id="attachment_3638" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="CoV_zoning map (white = single family district)"][/caption] Interestingly, these arterial locations do not actually reflect the "face and form" of Vancouver as the competition media release suggests.  To the contrary, our "face and form" is represented by the single family district that covers over 60% of our land area (the light grey tone in the accompanying City of Vancouver's zoning map).  As we well know, these areas are characterized by the typical 33'x122' lots with low-density freestanding homes.  As such, these areas are also the largest carbon emitters and the crux of the City's climate-change woes because of the energy-intensive freestanding housing types as well as the fact that they tend to be the most car-dependent. The latter is reflected in the transit ridership map of Vancouver - and, interestingly, one can also see that the highest ridership often occurs along our mixed-use arterials as well.   Consequently, these very same single-family districts are only included as a part of the Vancouver Wild Card category - the least valued of the three. And it is also worth mentioning here that that City's general claims that locally "54 percent of emission come from buildings" is slighty misleading within context of the competition.  For not only is this percentage unusually high compared to the average 48% often cited across North America, but it is also very broad.  Not only does it group industrial, commercial, institutional and residential buildings (commercial and residential buildings, the target of this competition, typically emit 35% of energy-related carbon), but also, it includes the emissions associated with the maintenance and construction of buildings - the latter being the very basis of the competition itself. Furthermore, since carbon emissions are intimately related to energy use, the factors underlying emission trends are complex and include income, wealth and demographics, among others.  Thus, studies have shown that although smaller household use less energy per household they also use more energy on a per capita basis.  This is because each small household uses many of the same appliances (refrigerator, stove, television, etc.) as larger households.  In Vancouver, where many of the new EcoDense-type developments within the past decades have catered more towards households smaller than average family, one can see the conflict. So upon close examination, the focus on arterial development and its precarious relationship to carbon emissions stand in direct contradiction to values and intentions that frame the competition and, as such, opens the door to speculate as to the underlying motives behind the FormShift competition.  Why arterials? Are there particular corridors that are the apple of the City's eye?  If so, which ones and why?  And what type of development is being planned? That mixed-use arterials have been under municipal gaze is well-known to anybody familiar with the EcoDensity Charter and Initial Actions that explicitly target these locations as areas for redevelopment.  Yet when one considers that these same areas have some of the higher densities and  transit ridership in the city, this makes the City's  choice as locations for "EcoDensification" questionable.  Would it not be most appropriate that the target of such an initiative be those areas with the least density and transit ridership, especially given, as mentioned above, that these areas make up the majority of the city? Since I've explained Vancouver's politics of space and density in an earlier article, it would be more fruitful to speculate as to why arterials, in particular, are significant as a focus for the City's plans.  And with this in mind, it would be appropriate to cite the wonderful insights of urban journalist Grady Clay who - in his well-known book How to Read the American City - described how cities follow the path-of-least- resistance.  That is, he points out that municipalities consciously choose places for development that offer the least backlash - political and other. This is particularly true within the Vancouver context where our "great urbanism acheivements" - so highly coveted by planners worldwide - were achieved primarily by transforming unkempt and derelict industrial landscapes.  Yaletown, Concord Pacific lands, Coal Harbour, Granville Island, East Fraser Lands and our highly publicized Olympic Village are just a few of our "best" neighbourhoods that owe their existence to their industrial past and the fact that there were minimal opponents to their transformation. Some of these are great urban experiments, no doubt.  But that does not detract from the fact that they were born from the reality that their physical condition made it easy for planners to implement their vision.  After all, how many people would oppose the transformation of a deteriorating industrial wasteland a secure distance away from their residential neighbourhood? Several years ago, although it went largely under the public's attention, it was realized that Vancouver's speculative gluttony had eroded our industrial land base - one of the most heavily taxed by the City - to dangerous levels and that what existed had to be retained.  This realization necessarily re-triggered a search for land that would be suitable to satiate the land needs of local developers and keep our economic engine well-oiled.  Coincidentally, the development and release of Vancouver's EcoDensity plan quickly followed on the heels of this event - in the political timescale - as the construction began for the last significant industrial land planned prior to the Industrial Lands Strategy took hold - SouthEast False Creek/Olympic Village . Within this context, mixed-use arterial corridors offer a close second to derelict industrial lands for locations to develop with "minimal backlash" since they are often auto-oriented and their populations are largely transient - supporting a primarily rental market.  As such, local residents are less likely to create a unified front against outside development initiatives, and those that do go through are still kept at a "reasonable distance" from the  neighbourhoods of lower density single-family homes where the vast majority of the politically influential populations dwell. Taking this into consideration, one must truly weigh what will be gained and lost in transforming these corridors into the new condominiums typical to Vancouver arterial development.  As Jane Jacobs wisely pointed out, there is a great social value in retaining and refurbishing older buildings and one has to wonder at the ultimate effects of inducing the influx of a different, wealthier demographic to these corridors through the construction of new, large-scale developments (explicitly required by the Vancouver Primary category Site Drawing) will be.  Is this desirable - both from the emissions and social perspectives? What effect will the erasure of more affordable rental housing options have on the city? [caption id="attachment_3684" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="Vancouver mixed-use corridors"][/caption] Looking more closely at Vancouver's urban landscape, aside from a number of small scattered commercial intersections, only 11 significant mixed-use arterials exist throughout the city - as shown by this accompanying map. Through analysing the descriptions and drawings of FormShift's Primary and Secondary sites, it is clear that arterial locations in close proximity to the public transit and rapid transit (Skytrain) are the target of the organizers. As such, a reasonable assumption would narrow our field to Kingsway, Broadway, Fraser St., Main St., Hastings-Sunrise and Cambie St. Of these, Kingsway is probably the most vulnerable, for a variety of reasons.  More specifically, Kingsway's proximity to the Skytrain line make it very attractive to City planners, who favour locations within a 5 minute walking distance of the rapid transit line.  Furthermore, it is one of the most continuous mixed-use corridors in the city.  As such, it crosses several neighbourhoods whose large immigrant populations have less political clout and who - in keeping with Grady Clay's observations - would have a tough time forming a unified front against city proposals for the arterial as a whole.  As such, it would offer a path-of-least-resistance when compared to others - such as Main St., Cambie St, Hastings St., or Fraser St. - that are the focus of smaller neighbourhoods that can easily band together.  There are always exceptions however, and Norquay Village's fierce resistance to the City's most recent attempts to push Ecodensification development along their portion of Kingsway is a rare phenomenon in this respect. Lastly, and very importantly, the suburban auto-oriented quality of Kingsway is seen as unattractive to many in the city and several of the large parcel businesses - such as the El Dorado site and 2400 Kingsway Hotel -  offer large-scale development opportunities. However, its physical characteristics often belie the fact that strong communities exist around the arterial.  Unfortunately, the scale and function of Kingsway often act more as a barrier to the communities that live around it instead of acting as seam that brings both sides of the street together.  This makes it all the more susceptible by giving more substance to claims (true or false) that particular type(s) of development will change this situation. [caption id="attachment_3682" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="City-owned Properties (depicted with stars) near Broadway and Cambie (source: Vanmap)"][/caption] There is one other interesting speculation worth noting about the specific characteristics of the Vancouver Primary site. To be more specifically, locations with a rapid transit station within the same block are few and far between.  Consequently, the entire east block at Cambie St. and Broadway adjacent to the New Broadway/City Hall Canada Line Station is City-owned property- making FormShift a potential method by which the City intends to generate ideas for the development of their own site and potentially follow through with a pilot project (consequently, another method of following a path-of-least-resistance). One hopes that this is the case, since the scale of development explicitly required by the Vancouver Primary Site Drawing is quite troubling insofar that it requires amalgamating one block's worth of parcels and destroying a number of small businesses along the vast majority of Vancouver's existing mixed-use arterial locations.  Those, like Stewart Brand and Jane Jacobs, who believe that maintaining small-scale parcels increases the resilience of a city and its neighbourhoods should be concerned if this is, in fact, the type of development the City intends on supporting for our mixed-use corridors.  After all, how does assigning such a generic site condition and large-scale intervention speak to maintaining a neighbourhoods identity - as required by the competitions Context intentions - given that most of the unique qualities is embedded in its finely parceled urban structure? The last aspect worth considering about the picture painted by FormShift is the statement that this is a competition open to "even ordinary citizens" when many facts readily contradict this intention.  Historically, competitions that want, and encourage, citizen participation run at a minimal, if any, cost to the entrant.  The logic is straightforward: implementing a fee structure automatically excludes a particular demographic, thus being truly inclusive of the "ordinary citizen" necessarily means waiving any fees. The Vancouver City Planning Commission's 21 Places for the 21st Century competition held in 2005 and, more recently, the Vancouver Public Space Network's Where's the Square design competition are cases in point.  Both took inclusivity seriously and were held free of charge to entrants.  Their entries were submitted by a wide range of people - from architects and designers, to neighbourhood groups who were simply asked to spend the time to put together a proposal. Within this context, the $100 cost for "ordinary citizens" to enter FormShift is clearly suspect and presupposes a particular type of entrant - despite the inclusive tone of their document.  Given the nature of the task requested and the fact that the competition is co-sponsored by the Architectural Institute of British Columbia, one can easily assume that their true focus is on professional architects and the students associated with this profession. This fact is made explicitly clear in the blunder that saw the original registration form give only two potential entrant categories - professional architect or student.  The registration form was amended immediately after several interested entrants questioned the contradiction.  But this only serves to clarify what is implied in the cost - namely that despite saying otherwise, FormShift is not truly intended to be an event in which "ordinary citizen" entries are truly sought. So what does this analysis of the FormShift agenda bring to light? Beyond demonstrating that the the design competition is only partially about an environmentally/ecologically sustainable agenda and marginally about an inclusive process, this sadly highlights the cunning manner in which issues concerning planning and development are portrayed to the public in contrast to the hidden motivations behind them. This is not meant to take away from the idea of holding a design competition.  To the contrary, I wholeheartedly agree with those who believe that giving local designers and "the next generation" a venue to publicize their work is a great contribution to the visioning of our city.  Furthermore, I have no doubt that FormShift will deliver in showcasing a number of interesting, provocative, and beautiful concepts from some of our brightest minds. But to unnecessarily deploy sly methods of political imagineering ultimately discredits those using these tactics, undermines the intelligence of our communities, and only serves to propagate our transformation towards what many feel is the inevitable future of Vancouver - no more than a city of illusions. *** Erick Villagomez is one of the founding editors at re:place. He is also an educator, independent researcher and designer with academic and professional interests in the human settlements at all scales. His private practice - Metis Design|Build - is an innovative practice dedicated to a collaborative and ecologically responsible approach to the design and construction of places.

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