After a long hiatus away from the blog, we're back! We've just completed a glorious draft of the entire book. It began as a photo book, expanded to become a history book, and expanded further to become an examination of how architecture mirrors our essential (and often unexamined) beliefs. We're thrilled to have reached this milestone after so long and and we look forward to sharing it with all of you.

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“At this stage in our history when most forces at work in society are disssociative ones, diffracting our knowledge even further, dispersing our energies, fracturing our society, disrupting the ecology of our planet, dismembering our cities, the architect has the opportunity – and I believe the duty, though he seldom seizes it – of being a cohesive force, of providing wholes…As the mechanization of life and man proceeds on its relentless course, we need to reaffirm that which the machines would atrophy in us – the human spirit.” – Arthur Erickson

The Pitfalls of Linear Narrative

Chapter Two: Styles & Movements (excerpt)

In studying the history of architectural style there is a great temptation to impose a narrative of linear progression – from the primitive to the sophisticated, from the plain to the decorated. This approach began with Alberti and others in the Renaissance, but was set forth definitively in the early 1700s by a German art historian, Johann Winckelmann. By refining the theories of his contemporary, Abbe Laugier, Winckelmann established a narrative in which one style follows another in succession – a series of broad formal movements or architectural traditions, some logically derivative of their predecessor, some in opposition or rebellion to the immediate past, and a few seemingly independent. For this and other contributions, he is considered the father of art history.

Winckelmann’s version became canonical and this way of thinking remains pervasive today even though it has frequently been discredited by archaeology. Since Winckelmann, there has been a tendency to construct a progression from the primitive to the sophisticated, often delineated with a graphic family tree, starting with a lean-to or hut made of mammoth tusks or branches and culminating with the style that was au courant in whatever culture constructed the narrative. But architectural evolution, like biological evolution, is misrepresented by such an approach. While a straightforward chronology is more easily grasped and certainly more easily memorized, unthinking reliance on this idea of linear sequence limits our understanding. To examine the forces of history requires intelligence and insight, not simply rote memorization.

The shortcomings of this approach can be illustrated by a few simple examples.

Canadian architectural histories often availed themselves of Indian villages in order to illustrate primitive stone-age architecture - Huron villages in Eastern Canada, Haida villages on the West Coast. Regrettably this rather tenuous narrative was contrary to archaeological and historical evidence as far as the West Coast was concerned. The primitive “stone age” village of the Haida was not at all stone age. By the time white men first started recording these stone-age villages, the Haida had been using trade-acquired metal tools for about a century and a half, and had developed craftsmen who were expert in using them. There is no evidence that this type of construction on the West Coast pre-dates the arrival of metal tools – hence, we are not dealing with stone-age technology.

Fortunately, we have a West Coast “Pompeii”. Ozette, a 16th-century Indian village, was preserved by a giant mud slide. At the time of its demise the community had been in existence for about a millennium and a half. The village made use of copper and, more unexpectedly, iron. The iron in the village was not of European manufacture, but bore a strong resemblance to the kind of iron in use in the 15th century among the primitive Siberian tribes or in the 14th century by the northern Mongols. Even before European contact, North West Coast Indians were well acquainted with rude iron, and expert at working with copper – hence, by definition, not stone age.

Another truism of architectural categorization is that the degree of refinement, or the decorative sophistication of workmanship, is used to classify art and architecture in terms of the maturity and evolution of a style. The development of Haida art belies this theory. Even a cursory examination leads one to the immediate conclusion that the older pieces are executed to a greater degree of refinement and decoration. Some would explain this away with references to the pernicious effect of increased contact with the dominant white culture.

The other difficulty with using the primitive-to-sophisticated model is that even in Europe historic evidence belies it, whether viewed over centuries or over decades. The sophisticated Roman use of reinforced concrete was not equaled until the early 1900s. (In fact, knowledge of concrete disappeared during the middle ages and was only redeveloped in the 1700s.)

In terms of short trends, the primitive-to-sophisticated, plain-to-decorated approach is not even applicable in a modern Canadian context. If one examines Canadian high-street shop fronts from the early 1900s and compares them with the equivalent in the 1930s the latter are less architecturally sophisticated, and certainly less decorated, than their precursors.

This idea of progress in a single direction, rather than as a series of recurring cycles, is bequeathed to us by Judaism through the early Christian church, a subject to which we will return in a later chapter.

Ultimately, the era and culture that a building was built in is one of the best pieces of information available in determining its style. Though the Gothic and Greco-Roman Classical styles have returned in cyclical fashion, there is usually a not-so-subtle variation in each iteration. In general, architectural styles are like the hem lengths of women’s skirts – cyclical, with each iteration claiming definitive primacy.

[Next post: St Paul's Indian Church]

The Yale Hotel

Second Empire Blues


Originally named the Colonial, the name was changed to “Yale Hotel” in 1907. The neighbourhood was on the edge of the False Creek waterfront industrial area, the CPR yards with their locomotive sheds and roundhouse were nearby, and most of the clientele were rowdy railway men. The Yale was then at the centre of the notorious Yaletown nightlife, which attracted pimps, whores, and opium addicts. (The term “junkie” is derived from the Chinese Junks that were reputedly bringing opiates to the North American ports on the Pacific.)

Yaletown was named after the town of Yale by the Fraser canyon, once the largest city in Western Canada. Yale was founded as a HBC trading post, but soon became a gold rush boomtown and afterwards a railway boomtown. What remained constant was the violence, whores, saloons, alcohol and opium – one of its more polite appellations was the Sodom and Gomorrah of the Northwest. When the railway was completed, many of Yale’s houses were dismantled and brought to Vancouver, along with the Chinese, white, and Indian workers. Yale had been renown for its hard-drinking rowdy workers, and its tough-fighting whores. Both retained their recreational culture with its predilection for alcohol and opiates when they relocated to Yaletown, then outside of Vancouver proper.

The hotel has a distinctive appearance – the mansard roof and the second-floor round-headed windows mark this blocky building as Quebec-style Second Empire. The term mansard roof derives from the architect François Mansart (1598-1666), who gave his name to, though he did not invent, the distinctive roofs that have a flat upper part and steeply pitched sides. The Second Empire that the style references is the Second French Empire, the Bonapartist regime of Napoleon the third (1852 to 1879).

The Second Empire style was chosen for the new additions to the Louvre, and spread from Paris to the Canada in the 1870s when the style was faddishly popular. The Quebec provincial legislature building and Montreal City Hall are perhaps Canada’s best known example of the style at its purest. Hollywood has created associations between the Second Empire mansard roof style and “haunted houses”, as it was the style of the Bates Motel in Hitchcock’s “Psycho” and subsequently became the choice of horror film art directors.

Stylistically the Yale descends from the grand mansard-roofed hotels of Montréal, like the Windsor. The Yale, a downmarket descendant, is in the style of the workman’s hotels that could be found near the railway yards in cities across the country. Across Canada, the mansard roof became associated with hotel accommodation, and the alcoholic joys of the pubs which they usually contained.

After an incarnation as a biker-frequented stripper bar in the 1970s, the Yale re-invented itself as a blues bar. It was the residence of Robbie King, keyboard player of great repute, as well as Long John Baldry, one of the founders of English rock and roll. Long John Baldry discovered and nurtured many musicians who would later become pop stars, such as Rod Stewart, whom he found busking on the street, and invited him to his band. One of the first openly gay pop stars, Baldry brought many a musician out of the closet and up to his room.

The current denizens of Yaletown are yuppies rather than the waterfront working class of the 1880 to 1940s, but fortunately the Yale’s clientele are blues lovers of all classes and races. As of this writing, the Yale is closed for a 12-month heritage renovation; we shall see how much of this historic building remains.

[Next post: The Pitfalls of Linear Narrative]

Hotel Europe

Vancouver's Flatiron


Vancouver’s signature “flatiron” building is the Europe Hotel at 43 Powell St. Built in 1908-09, eight years after Queen Victoria’s reign ended, it is still characteristically Victorian in both its appearance and location. Built for developer Angelo Calori by architects Parr and Fee, it was located in Vancouver’s old Victorian city centre – Gastown. At the time of its construction the CPR was already creating a new downtown a kilometer to the southwest, at what today is Georgia and Granville.

The shape and siting of buildings, and the particular geometry of street grids and building heights, took distinct patterns in different eras. (Today, much of it would fall under the auspices of city planning.) The flatiron shape, a wedge-like structure nestled in the acute angle between two streets, is quintessentially Victorian. Although initially motivated by necessity, the distinct shape gained a romantic cachet with the 1903 publication of Alfred Steiglitz’s beautiful photo of the Flatiron Building in New York City. The six-story Hotel Europe is one of the few Vancouver flatiron buildings built after the shape had become popular. The flatiron buildings along Water and Cordova streets were erected earlier – the result of street grids colliding, rather than of style or aesthetic reasoning.

In a Beaux Arts siting pattern, an “anchor building” would rise up above the surrounding architecture, placed to facilitate vistas in a sort of Western feng shui; viewed from a block or two away, the lower buildings in the foreground would form a natural proscenium. But here at Maple Tree Square, four- and five-story buildings share roughly equal status. The uniform building height and the lack of building vistas make the square typically Victorian.

The hotel’s restrained exterior ornamentation and flat brick walls distinguish it from the more decorated and ornate building style of the older Victorian buildings that surround it. The lobby’s interior design – ornate white tile, golden trim, and marble work resplendent with ostentatious brass fittings – places the lobby firmly within a traditional Victorian architectural vernacular that was prevalent in London and the Channel ports. This style can still be seen today in the oceanfront hotels of Poole, Brighton, and other channel ports.

The use of ironwork pilasters to create the large windows on the bottom floor is typically Victorian; these large windows would have been impossible without the structural iron and steel frames which reduced the load-bearing function of masonry.

The Hotel Europe was one of the earliest reinforced concrete frame structures in Vancouver. It was built by the Ferro-Concrete Construction Company of Ohio, which had built the first sixteen-story-tall concrete building in the world six years earlier in Cincinnati. The hotel advertised itself as “Absolutely Fireproof and Strictly Modern”. Rightfully boastful of its fire-resistant construction, it was the first “fireproof” hotel in Western Canada. The fireproofing was a French invention invented by Joseph Moniers. François Hennebique patented the invention in 1892 and used the catchphrase “plus d’incendies désastreux” (no more disastrous fires) to advertise the steel-and-concrete combination. The technology was instantly popular between 1892 and 1902, over 7,000 such buildings were built in many different countries and its reputation spread.

The Great Vancouver Fire had occurred just a generation earlier and drunken patrons causing fires with their cigars were a ever-present danger in the hotels of BC; the fireproofing made the Europa a particularly attractive Vancouver hotel. Perched at the intersection of two street grids, it now stands at the intersection of two neighbourhoods: trendy, tourist-friendly Gastown, and the deep dark Downtown Eastside. Today, it is the building’s beauty which has made it into one of Vancouver’s iconic heritage structures.

[Next post: The Yale Hotel]

Asian Fusion and the Bungalow

Chapter Five: Oriental Fusion (excerpt)

The most pronounced influence is usually the one that is so ubiquitous as to go unnoticed. The bungalow is the best example of total asian-western fusion. It is total fusion in the true sense: the style is so fused that one cannot easily separate the occidental from the oriental elements. The etymological roots are Gujarati from Hindustani, bangla, meaning belonging to or being derived from Bengal.

Originally a bungalow was a dwelling of bent bamboo and thatch , on a raised plinth, erected by lower cast Bengalis. The English first noticed it in 1659; by the 1790s, the British were mass-producing them by the thousands for British military officers and administrators. The Anglo-Indian bungalow was a veranda-fronted, one-story structure raised on meter-high brick supports or other wood or masonry plinths. Elevating the bungalow on plinths was primarily to deter ant and snake bites. My own experience living in the tropics has given me a deep understanding of the need to distance ourselves from nature’s venomous little creatures. Canadians exist with the constant presence of the forest - either visible from our windows, as in Vancouver, or a short drive away. We coexist with the mosquito, black fly, wood tick, water moccasin, rattlesnake, etc. so we cannot fully appreciate the effect that Asian snakes and insects had on the British, coming as they did from an environment largely free of biting creatures. Under British rule the bungalow spread across India, Pakistani and Burma and became the basis for the planning of New Delhi in 1911.

The building materials were altered to brick and slate when the bungalow reached Britain. Just as in India, entire suburbs, such as Bungalow Town in Shoreham, were erected. The Arts and Crafts movement appropriated the bungalow and imbued it with Ruskin’s ideology: honest materials, honestly treated. The British Arts and Crafts bungalow seemingly referenced a bygone age of English heritage – the fact that it was an Indian design in a new English iteration did not detract from its public appeal as a nostalgic return to rustic old English craftsmanship. Nationalism was in vogue and the bungalow was somehow associated with the England of yesteryear.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, one of the primary luminaries of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, died in a bungalow (1882). H. G. Wells extolled the lifestyle cachet of the bungalow , “fruit of the reaction of artistic-minded and carelessly living people….a fashion with a certain Bohemian-spirit class”.

In Vancouver, the most important popular expression of the Arts and Crafts movement is the “Craftsman bungalow”. The wood bungalow, with its low horizontal lines, spacious front veranda, and broad gabled roof, is excellent for Vancouver’s months of winter rain, but not well adapted for the high snow load back east. As a result, the bungalow enjoyed greater popularity in Vancouver than in any other Canadian metropolis. Today the bungalow is the most widespread and popular style of house in all the countries of Anglo-Saxon origin.

Now, Canadian companies in China are marketing bungalows built out of Canadian wood as luxury housing for China’s business elite. The fusion is complete.

[Next post: Hotel Europe]

The humble bungalow.

MacMillan Bloedel Building

Brutalist Skyscraper


Arthur Erickson’s MacMillan Bloedel building is béton-brut Modernism as it was meant to be: honest and functional. Its unselfconscious monumentality bespeaks economic confidence; at the time of construction in 1968, MacMillan Bloedel was the pre-eminent firm dominating the forestry business. In a manner unthinkable today, forestry and mining were the business of the province. The solid bedrock of the BC economy generated high income jobs for the uneducated rural working class, paying the equivalent of professional salaries in Montreal and Toronto. Fallers in the interior often had incomes exceeding that of university professors back east. MacMillan Bloedel spent what at the time seemed an extravagant sum: $9.5 million, roughly the 2010 cost of an executive condo in the Shangri-la.

In many ways the Mac Blo is structurally the opposite of the International Modernist Miesian block’s central core and hung glass curtain wall. Here, the walls are solid and load-bearing, a structure seldom seen in tall buildings since the birth of the skyscraper. The concrete shell dictates a completely different kind of interior from that of a regular office tower. In Erickson’s words “it completely counters the impermanent, jerrybuilt aspect of the modern office building epitomized by hung ceilings and flexible partitioning on the inside and the curtain wall on the outside.” The load-bearing walls allow a column-free open-plan interior – rare for an office tower – with solid floors and ceilings. The spaciousness of the interiors far exceeds any business tower build by Frank Lloyd Wright. Erickson’s unconventional load-bearing window walls opened new possibilities in office design.

Indeed, the building exudes permanence and solidity. Its exterior walls start with a ten-foot thickness at the base and taper down to one foot at the top of the 27-floor building. This has drawn comparison to the shape of a great rainforest tree – a thick solid trunk at the base, tapering skyward – but however apt, this comparison was not premeditated by Erickson. The walls are poured-in-place concrete left raw in the béton brut style (which takes its name from the French for “raw concrete”). Poured-in-place concrete has a more irregular and textured appearance than the usual pre-cast concrete; this augments the appearance of solidity and monumentality, and the resulting visual artifact of the construction process is seen by Modernists as laudable “truth to materials”.

This is a seamless fusion of classical proportion and Modernist aesthetic. From the classical tradition comes a simplicity of form; clean, gently tapering vertical lines recall the doric order, and each monolithic rectangular mass is in the proportion of the “golden ratio”, which reflects ratios in the human body and in nature. From Modernism comes a stark rectilinearity, and béton-brut monumentality in its most undiluted form. With elements from each tradition and some common to both, the building’s conception seems to have emerged organically from both traditions. Like the Museum of Anthropology, its references to past architectural forms are implicit rather than stuck-on cutesy postmodernist decoration.

While definitively béton brut, this is a unique one-of-a-kind building. Often overlooked in architectural literature, it stands among the great buildings of the late 20th century as a monument to the genius of Vancouver’s greatest architect.

[Next post: Asian Fusion and the Bungalow]

Vitruvius and the Aesthetics of Classical Architecture

Chapter Three: Classical & Neo-Classical (excerpt)

Much of what we know of Greek architecture comes via Roman writing, notably that of Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, usually referred to as Vitruvius the Architect. The oldest complete copy of Vitruvius’s “De Architectura”,usually translated as “On Architecture”, dates back to the eighth century and is a copy made by the monks of a Saxon scriptorium in Northumbria, England . This ten-volume work encapsulated most aspects of Greco-Roman design, extolling Greek theories of proportion which he mostly derived from the writings of Hermogenes. He postulated that there were three cardinal requirements of a building: firmitas, that it be structurally sound; utilitas, that it have practical function; and venustas, that it be aesthetically pleasing. Vitruvius’s ideally proportioned forms were derived from the ideal geometric forms discussed by Plato in Philebus. Plato claimed that these forms were “eternally and absolutely beautiful”. Roman architecture spread the Greek concept of proportion and its resulting aesthetic throughout the Roman Empire and thus it formed the basis of Western Architecture.

While we have retained the classical aesthetic forms, contemporary man has lost an understanding of the aesthetic philosophical principles that created classical architecture. Beauty was seen as being in harmony with the perfection of nature’s laws. The ultimate classical standard for beauty was not something subjective. Rather it was thought that if something was truly beautiful it would be objectively beautiful, that all intelligent and sensitive human beings would see an objectively beautiful thing as being beautiful. The laws of nature represented the gold standard for both beauty and goodness. In revealing itself to us, nature, rightly and objectively understood, demonstrated the meaning of good and beauty. Mankind’s duty was to live in harmony with our “ruling principle” – the native intelligence that is at the core of our capacity to reason. This essential “ruling principle “ that directs our human nature was seen as coming directly from the ruling intelligence of nature. Thus each person was a microcosm of the macrocosm which is divine reason. The evidence of this divine reason was in the laws of nature, which were seen as perfect.

Man’s moral nature was seen as linked to the great nature that produced us, as if a holographic fragment of it. By observing great nature, Man was to see the proper way of interacting with life. Beauty, human morality, and the laws of nature were seen as a harmonious continuum. The sacredness and beauty of life was defined in man’s integration and connection with the universal intelligence, the active principle of nature. The natural world of Greco-Roman classical culture was seen as being composed of two principles, the active and the passive. Ordinary matter was passive, and a finer form of matter referred to as pneuma (breath) was active. Pneuma, the finer matter, was the breath of animation, and everything in nature was a mixture of active pneuma and static or passive ordinary matter. Pneuma was associated with the soul, which was not seen as being immortal. Classical thinking was hierarchical – the finer and more active being superior to the grosser and more passive. The human mind was seen as the active superior and the human body as the passive and subordinate inferior. Everything was seen as interconnected and interdependent within a matrix of greater nature - that benign universal intelligence which was divine reason.

The essential nature of humanity was seen as being intrinsically social. Thus an individual’s life, when lived in harmony with the laws of nature, was free of self-interest and was dedicated to the greater good of the community. An individual’s first duty was social – to act and interact appropriately with their community and for the benefit of their community. This appropriate and natural interaction was described as virtue. The injunction toward virtue was not the commandment of some supernatural authority. It was seen as being the direction of great nature, not the directive of a great god. This injunction to virtue was seen as a logical and rational conclusion that any honest man would arrive at were he to subject himself to a process of careful and reasonable self-examination. The parameters of this self examination were seen as primarily social rather than, as in present times, existential and psychological.

The primary function of a building was to be a contribution to civic beauty. The building’s commercial or personal functions were seen as subordinate to the building’s primary function, which was civic and social. Architecture was to serve the community first, and the individual or business uses were secondary and subservient. Architecture was seen as being objectively beautiful to the degree that it exhibited sacred geometry, and the harmony that is evident in nature. In Vitruvius’s time the sacred proportions of architecture were based on the measurements and intrinsic proportions of man, and a man was based in and measured himself by his community.

Vitruvius's work endured: fifteen centuries later, when “On Architecture" was rediscovered during the Renaissance, it was the sole authority on Classical architecture.

[Next post: MacMillan Bloedel Building]