Vancouver Special, or Why “The Best Place on Earth” is so Ugly:

Our cities are under siege.

There is no denial of this fact, that both in terms of residential and commercial architecture, many utterly hideous buildings are being built, and have been built in Vancouver, especially over the past twenty years. The largely placid acceptance of this by residents, not to mention the gall (or simple idiocy) necessary on the part of architects and construction firms to actually go through with such horrible projects, has made, I believe, a strong contribution to the unpleasantness of Vancouver’s architecture today.

What is it that makes these buildings so unappealing? It is a combination of poor design, with a lack of practical considerations regarding the utility of the building, and a choice of materials which are expedient, but often of substandard quality. Current residential aesthetic trends also favour materials for their cleanness of line, and newness; not only does this ensure that buildings in this style do not age well, but also when they are new, gives them an impression of being childish and toy-like. There is an obsessive attention to matching details, often making houses seem unduly fussy in appearance; accentuating the frequent cheapness of the materials. Another trend is the use of bright or jewel tone colours: red, blue, turquoise, and, in previous years, pink. Thus, houses on a given street will rarely match, which, when combined with the frequent selection of “off” colours that do not match the landscape, is a serious eyesore. Houses are also designed to maximize the space allotments for a lot size, resulting in square, bulky buildings, aptly known as “monster homes”, which do not allow for more developed gardens, or a great deal of privacy.

In commercial buildings, specifically towers, we find many problems similar to those of houses, however there are also some significant differences. For example, the material of choice for towers is often glass, leading to a clean aesthetic which, unlike in the case of houses, shows congruence between the nature of the building material, and its use. This, however, often poses practical problems, such as that of cooling the building in summer, which are insufficiently dealt with. Like for houses, the selection of ornamentation, or defining design elements often poses a problem. Trying to create a “distinctive” looking building frequently leads to stylistic clashes with the rest of the city, especially as such purported distinction usually simply means that a tower has the same stylistic flaws as a residence. A prominent international example of this is New York’s AT&T building, which attempts to reference neo-classicism, but does not take the buildings around it into account, and, with its conspicuous smoothness of form, subverts the organization of the cityscape. Equally bad are buildings, all too frequent, whose architects attempt to make use of a gimmick for the purpose of having a noticeable design. Some notable examples of this in Vancouver can be seen on the Downtown side of the Burrard Street Bridge. One of these is the residential tower which uses round windows along one side of a building with otherwise large, square windows. On the other side of the bridge, equally bad, is a building whose roof is dominated by a garish skylight which resembles nothing more than a witches hat. All too frequently, there is also the problem of colours on one edifice that are found nowhere else in a building’s district, thereby often hideously clashing.

A major tenet of modern art is that the creation of beauty is not a valid purpose in creating art. Instead, art must provoke thought and intense deliberation.

Unfortunately, this does not bode equally true for architecture. Unlike pure art, architecture also serves a distinctly practical purpose, and should therefore be designed with the goals in mind of improving both the aesthetic and functional aspects of the community that it exists in.

Although some may say that it is impossible to legislate taste, I would like to argue that the city already exercises strict control over what can be built, and many neighbourhoods in Vancouver already impose strict stylistic restrictions on houses for the sake of consistency. All that is necessary is to ensure that the requirements to be met are actually conducive to less offensive edifices, would be to make tacky ornamentation and ridiculous colour schemes forbidden, and to create some kind of incentive to not build the largest house allowable on a given lot size. Regulations of this sort would not be hard at all to implement, and would go a long way to improving the aesthetic qualities of Vancouver.