Vancouver

Vancouver is an amazing city for lots of reasons. I guess I expected it To be somewhat overwhelming, but it wasn’t at all. There are a ton of nerdy architecture/urban design issues that I could talk about, and I’m sure I will…eventually, but for now I’ll just focus on one very small space in the city…Granville Island.

I didn’t have the best first impression of Granville Island. I went there on a Wednesday morning around 10 am, and I felt like I was in a deserted Disneylandish place. It was raining. No one was around, and the only thing open was a gift shop where I could have bought stuffed moose (a REALLY BIG stuffed moose). So anyway, I left.

Later on I ran across a book called Towards an Ethical Architecture about the work of Gregory Henriquez, an architect in Vancouver. Clearly this excited me (see my first post)! Browsing through the book, I learned that Henriquez designed Arts Umbrella, and the False Creek Community Center, both on Granville Island.

So I went back. This time on a Sunday afternoon. The Island was buzzing. School kids and bums alike were performing on the sidewalks. The Public Market was crowded with flowers and food from every corner of the world. Inside a small theater someone was rapping while his band, consisting of a fiddle and a few drums provided a beat. Just outside the theater Irish dancers were rehearsing with their instructor, and next door in the community center, a kick boxing class was in session. I know this all still sounds a bit Disneylandish, and maybe it is…but then take into consideration the fact that this in all going on underneath the Granville Street Viaduct in an area that was previously an industrial waterfront!

The whole issue of deindustrialization and the resulting vacant and contaminated spaces haunted me and a lot of other architecture students (especially in that last year)! It was so refreshing to see such a space that had already been dealt with…successfully!

 

 

False Creek Community Center

 

 

 

 

Arts Umbrella

Dancing With Myself

Lately, I’ve been sort-of sluggish in the evenings, only to gain a second wind around midnight. Tonight is different. My body is slowly winding down after a satisfying evening of dancing with myself, capturing a skyline at dusk (my nice way of saying that I was too late for the sun), and thinking about lots of things like:

I should change my attitude at work, no matter how much I hate log veneer, and Highlands Ranch.

“Manhattan is an accumulation of disasters that never happen.” I didn’t think of that, Rem Koolhaas did. I thought about it a lot though. It’s a quote from Delirious New York, which is on my newly acquired reading list that I received in the mail from my future professors. I get excited whenever I get mail that isn’t junk, but I was really excited about this one. I jumped up and down..for homework!

I’m going to be so old by the time that I get married, my bachelorette’s party will consist of me and my girlfriends inviting the chip n’ dales to play bridge with us, and it’s going to be so fun!

I need to have a few really bad hair days so that I don’t hesitate to chop it all off on Saturday morning. I’ve never been one freak out over cutting my hair. What’s with this unfamiliar anxiety?

I should sketch more often.

Dancing is so fun (just not so much with other people)!

1,000 Square Feet

The current issue of Dwell features a few amazing apartments that are less than 1,000 square feet in order to illustrate just how useless 40,000 square feet of a 41,000 square foot megamansion might be. I happened to be escaping my own 1,000 square foot apartment while I read the article at a coffee shop down the street. I started thinking about where I live, and why I like it. I have found that the greatest advantage to living in a small space is that I am more likely to make use of the neighborhood I live in, which is really a pretty cool neighborhood. Instead of a few thousand of square feet filled with my own boring stuff, I have a few square miles filled with interesting people, with things that are familiar mixed with things I’ve never seen.

Ethics and Architecture

I guess you could call me defensive, but I prefer passionate. Here is my most recent example…

Today, while discussing architectural education, someone mentioned an ethics class that they had taken…that it was clearly not part of the architecture curriculum because, “there are no ethics in architecture!” I think there are ethics in everything, and I think that connections to ethical issues are abundant in the fields of architecture and urban design. If they were not, I would not want to be an architect. I even made the mistake of admitting to my boss during a review that, “I’m not in it for the money” (yeah, guess who didn’t get a raise).

We create our cities and towns and little dirt roads, and our cities and towns and little dirt roads create us. There are obviously many other forces that continuously mold and re-mold us. Perhaps architecture is one force with momentum that is unrealized, or often disregarded by its own creators, the architects. Eventually, I want to become an architect that is fully aware of social, political, and economic issues that I am affecting, and that are affecting me, even if it means that I’ll spend as many hours researching as I will designing. It’s not that I like doing research, it’s that I want to research what I do. I have to; I’m not a very good bull-shitter.