The Next BIG Thing

Vancouver House under construction (my photo)

Something I do each time I head north to visit my parents in Vancouver is to indulge in some architectural porn by checking out the latest new developments under construction. An especially striking example about to be topped off is Vancouver House, designed by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG). Prominently situated at the north end of the Granville Street Bridge, the 52-story tall tower morphs from a triangular plan form at its base to a rectangular one high above. From certain angles the top-heavy high-rise is positively unnerving, seemingly perched on a preposterously slender base. When completed, it will certainly stand out among downtown Vancouver’s indifferent gaggle of slender condominium towers.

Bjarke Ingels, the celebrated Danish starchitect, is only one of several international luminaries who have either made their mark in Vancouver or are about to.(1) In what seems like a blink of an eye, Ingels shot to fame in the early years of this century, first in his native Denmark and then quickly worldwide, with notable commissions in China, Norway, Estonia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Mexico, the U.S. and now Canada. Named innovator of the year in 2011 by the Wall Street Journal and one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people for 2016, the erstwhile wunderkind is now a venerable 43 years of age. Some have characterized his work as “metamodern.” Ingels himself describes his approach to architecture as “pragmatically utopian” and “hedonistically sustainable.” His firm, BIG, is now indeed big, with over 400 employees occupying offices in Copenhagen, New York, and London.

Vancouver House rendering by BIG

As it nears completion, the Ingels-designed Vancouver House is clearly a special landmark. Despite its breathtaking form, I believe it suffers from an over-reliance on that singular gesture. The gravity-defying curve of its torso is an architectural one-liner. Or maybe not: Ingels has described his design as “almost like a weed that starts growing through the cracks in the asphalt and sort of blossoms when it escapes the turmoil of the city around it.” So, there’s a second take. And a third: Ingels further rationalizes his design for Vancouver House by likening it to a giant curtain at the moment of being pulled back to reveal the world to Vancouver and Vancouver to the world.

An article on Ingels by Kyle Chayka in The New Republic hits the nail on the head:

“Each of his buildings has a signature visual gimmick that plays well on Instagram and on photo-heavy web sites that make up much of online architectural media. In most major cities the firm has a project or three, suitable for housing metastasizing start-up offices, their employees, and floating cultural elites—buildings that are specific without being local, existing within cities but not of them.

“If all his plans go ahead, Ingels could leave as great an imprint on the world’s wealthiest cities as any architect alive today. The result will be a kind of aggregate BIG world, in which rapid change and flexibility take precedence over a textured sense of place and community, as architecture merges with brand building.”

As if to underscore Chayka’s points, BIG and the developers of Vancouver House—Westbank Developments—are partners on a second tower in Calgary named TELUS Sky. Assuming the role of the feminine opposite the masculine Vancouver House, the base of TELUS Sky is rectangular, gradually tapering as the building rises and inverting Vancouver House’s relationship with the street and sky. The façade treatments for both employ balconies detailed like giant disintegrating pixels intentionally devoid of articulation, resembling nothing if not assemblages of ginormous Lego blocks. Vancouver House and TELUS Sky are yin and yang, a design conceit divided by geography and circumstance, divorcing both from a more meaningful sense of place.

Calgary's TELUS Sky building by BIG

Westbank’s promotional materials pronounce Vancouver House as a “living sculpture . . . the most ambitious artwork [the developer] has commissioned.” Westbank further claims the project will be the active core of a new waterfront neighborhood it calls the “Beach District,” envisioning it as a diverse and lively zone for living, shopping, hospitality, work, and cultural development. It certainly remains to be seen if the soon-to-be reality matches the promise of Westbank’s big (pardon the pun) talk.

Detail view of the facade (my photo)

One true measure of the project’s success will be how Vancouver House fares at the sidewalk level, a function of how it will meet the streets that bound it at its base. In addition to 388 residential units (the penthouse selling for a reported $20 million), the program includes 60,000 sf of retail and restaurant space and 80,000 sf for commercial offices to be housed in a trio of low, wedge-shaped buildings nested among the on- and off-ramps of the Granville Street Bridge. It’s unclear from the published plans and renderings how pedestrian-friendly the bases of those buildings will be but presumably they will include features conducive to walkability. BIG does consider the undersides of the bridge and its ramps to be integral parts of the project, and accordingly has factored their presence into its design, envisioning them as canvases for art, among other things.

Street scene from below the Granville Street Bridge. Note the "Sistine Chapel" artwork under the elevated roadway (rendering by BIG)

Vancouver House looms over the Granville Street Bridge (my photo)

The arrival of BIG on the Vancouver scene marks a coming of age of sorts for the city where I was born and raised. Critics have lambasted Vancouver’s homegrown architects for failing to push design boundaries and instead favoring tried-and-true, formulaic responses tuned to address the exigencies of the local real estate market, the city’s building design review panel, and the municipal land use code (which includes restrictive view cones intended to preserve vistas of the North Shore mountains from south of the downtown peninsula). The fact is Vancouver’s urban environment is probably better today because and in spite of the generic banality and proliferation of the podium towers the city has become famous for. The public realm has been strengthened by their well-defined street edges, the large and diverse resident populations they house, and the workspaces and shopping and entertainment opportunities they have accommodated. The established urban fabric is now ready for the introduction of idiosyncratic and iconic additions to its skyline. Vancouver House will be one of these. 

(1)   Sir Norman Foster’s Jameson House opened its doors in 2011, while Herzog & de Meuron, Kengo Kuma, Ole Scheeren, and Robert Stern have projects in the works that promise to rival Vancouver House for architectural drama.