Development Buzz: The Most Daring Architecture to Ever Grace Vancouver

really? people like you are why vancouver is so boring and stuck up.

Ok Mr. shannon, I’m going to have to punch a few holes in your logic and bias…
You either never traveled outside of Vancouver, or if you have, you have not paid much attention to other cities’ architecture and planning perspective (no offense by the way).
There is no such a thing as a “Vancouver-style” architecture, because we don’t have a “tradition” or long history, so we have had to adopt other places’ design in the past, and that will probably be the case way into the future. Even the architecture style of suing wood and and glass you see in West Vancouver houses is in reality a Nordic style of design, which comes from a place with history (actual long history with a tradition of building in Nordic climates…check the Viking long house).
also, we do not adopt the Dubai type of architecture, because there is no such a thing as a Dubai type of building. Dubai is a poor case of a Developing Country adopting modernist architecture in a context which is totally not fit with glass-building developments, because it is a hot, humid and sandy environment, unlike Vancouver. The style of buildings we have is a late development of modernist architecture and cheaply produced and stacked on top of one another in the past 20 years in and around DT, which is fine by me, as it created a real housing market and brought more people into the CBD.
This building proposed for Howe and Beach is a great design, because it is innovative, and really at the end of the day, we Vancouverites really lack a desire for great design and innovation, and that is not just confined to our buildings, but to our lack of fashion sense, our passive nature, lack of ambition and also lack of opportunities to advance in one’s career within the city they’re living in. That’s why most of our young people go overseas and to the US to prosper and see the world.
Having a building like this will add another great piece of design like Shangri La, stating that we are an up and coming city, and that we want to wake up and become an actual city that is world class like Sydney, NY, Tokyo and London. I think we deserve to be there, but there are those living here who want this place to remain quiet, uninteresting, unimaginative etc. Are you one of those people? If yes, then please excuse me, as everyone is entitle to their own opinions.
P.S a lesson in great urban design: a heterogeneous skyline is more interesting than a homogenous one…for you can have a great urban architecture only if your skyline is diverse and varied. 

this is not the design by big, the building is much lower and much smaller. no triangular extrusions either.  

Mr. Brian…   You need to wake up and smell the coffee.. The world is changing and if Vancouver is to keep up with the rest of the world, we need to change for the better.  Bbehnia11 couldn’t have explained it any better with a 200% support from myself.  We build thing here that are shortsighted and inefficient.  Look at our Canada line… What a piece of crap that has been criticized by other cities as a joke…   All the stations that can only accommodate 2 trains and now they are having a overcrowded issue even if they run more frequent trains.  Prime example of shortsighted and if they need to expand the stations, guess what??  Cambie street will be ripped up again to destroy business at that corridor…  Look at Montreal’s subway and it was built over 10 plus years ago with underground connections to everywhere and their station platform is a concourse and not our little crap platform that is too short..  People who don’t want this city to change should move east to the suburbs..

Hey man, don’t drag the Canada Line into this.

While I admit the stations are small and aesthetically sparse, they have been designed to be extended to accommodate another car WITHOUT ripping up the street.

It’s also an automated system, which means that they can easily run more trains and increase the capacity. In fact, it’s not running anywhere near to its ultimate capacity right now

I am originally from Montréal, and I can tell you they can only WISH they had a train going to their airport. It’s easy to bash, but Vancouver is the only place in North America to be expanding its metro system so ambitiously.

Can’t wait for the line down Broadway to UBC!

I’m not sure if you know about Koolhaas’ works that well, otherwise you may have chosen not to quote him here. He is very much for interesting big architectures like the CCTV building in Beijing, which would NEVER happen in a place with such mediocre architecture (Vancouver).
I also don’t know if you know what “Vancouverism” is all about. It is not about grand architecture, but about a specific type of urban planning which you see in and around Downtown Vancouver and some of the other areas in the city. Vancouver is one of the only cities in NA without a highway/freeway system running through its CBD, its streets are narrower on a general level, and it’s public bus system is a bit better than some of the other similar sized cities on the continent. It’s a city where people pretend to care about the environment and every building is built with “some space” and detachment between it and other buildings to “preserve” a view corridor to the sea and the mountains, because people feel the sense of self-entitlement to be able to see the mountains and the sea in a place which is foggy and rainy 275 days a year!
It’s a place where people go to the waterfront, the parks on the edge and the grouse grind to do sports, and is termed “an alternative” urbanism…this is Vancouverism. Architecture of the place is only secondary, if not tertiary.

Sorry Shaun, I made a mistake. I think you were actually agreeing with me…stupid me I did not read your comment carefully before replying. My bad! I agree with you by the way.

I want this to be built now!

Style is mere fashion and the ubiquitous podium tower that is the “Vancouver style” (more a “style” of urban planning than of “architecture” in my opinion) has long outlived its intellectual merits.  Vancouver’s downtown remains a backwater enclave of sterile and overpriced dwellings that so effectively destroys the soul and passions of a cosmopolitan population that is forced to live just like everyone else:  get your coffee at Starbucks, your drugs from Shoppers, have dinner at Earl’s, and then retire in your shoe box condo for the night looking out the same Kawneer window wall system (poor man’s curtain wall) that is cladded on every single tower in this city.  And quite frankly, I am tired of having friends visit from out of town and asking me why every tower in this city looks the same and why it’s so boring.   

I welcome the work of an international star architect in Vancouver because it will influence developers to begin thinking about the “architecture” of what they are building.   Architecture expresses the identity of a city’s population by affecting how they live and how it allows their culture to progress and bloom.  Vancouver, with it’s cosmopolitan and dense population, should be expressed in an architecture and urban planning of vibrancy and diversity.  Instead, what we have today, are green-washed neighbourhoods sedated by a cold sterility. 

good points but remember “Modernist” refers to the box-like glass and steel structures ala mies and corbu…this is not “Modern architecture”