What’s “secret” about landmark buildings, you ask? Fact is, Vancouver has never paid much attention to its architectural heritage, and even most lifelong city dwellers know little about the better examples that mercifully remain.
Vancouver has an unenviable reputation as a knock-em-down city (a single structure, the Lions Gate Bridge, makes it into Volume I of Harold Kalman’s A History ofCanadian Architecture from Oxford University Press). An example of a grand building that fell to the wrecking ball was the Greek-style, neo-Classical 1917 Pantages Theatre in what is now the Downtown Eastside. However, her well-loved Spanish-baroque sibling of 1927, the 2,800-seat Orpheum Theatre (entrance on Smithe Street, at Seymour Street, Downtown), survives. The Orpheum boasts a large yet intimate and lusciously appointed auditorium, and lavish lobby with balconies and staircases well suited to people-watching.
The Marine Building (355 Burrard Street, Downtown) is a massive Art Deco affair completed in 1930 and arguably the finest structure in Vancouver. Built to celebrate maritime history — particularly the English and Spanish discoveries of the Pacific coast — it features, on its exterior, an extended frieze of decorative waves, seahorses, and marine fauna.
The lobby is equally impressive, with a terra-cotta and tile display of ships’ prows and billowing sails. The marble floor and clock over the Burrard Street doorway display the signs of the zodiac in traditional design. The no-expense-spared attitude (the building was entirely and authentically restored in 1980) extends to the elevators, with ultra-ornate metal doors and interiors of mosaic wood paneling. When it was built at this prime waterfront location, one of its architects wrote romantically: “The building . . . suggests some great crag rising from the sea, clinging with sea flora and fauna, tinted in sea-green, touched with gold, and at night in winter a dim silhouette piercing the sea mists.”
Still on the landmark theme, Vancouver City Hall (453 West 12th Avenue, Central Vancouver, 604-873-7011) remains a major cubic state-ment, dominating the central city south of the downtown peninsula. A leftist friend finds it monolithic; I like it. Really a perfect pile of hard-edged geometric blocks, the building features fine Art Deco-Moderne detailing. The interior, particularly the lobby and stairwells, is rich in stone, brass, and woodwork, lovingly applied. The Council Chambers, too, are worth investigating — a suitable blend of tradi¬tional and modern.
From the 1930s on, Vancouver architects — innovative by reason of being west of the mainstream at that time — adopted Modernism and Internationalism. The period from that point through the early 1970S is widely seen as the city’s Golden Age of Architecture. Buildings generally opened up not only to the natural elements, but also to the human. Among the most celebrated structures of the period is the BC Electric Building, now the residential Electra (at Burrard Street and Nelson Street, Downtown). This twenty-two-story tower is noted for its tapered, lozenge-like appearance, and the curtain of glass that floods the interior with natural light. The scale-like decoration up the side of the building was once green and blue, the choice of artist-designer B.C. Binning.
Binning was a key figure of this period, and his home, the B.C. Binning House (West Vancouver), is one of a number of wood-frame, flat-roofed, open-to-nature homes on the North Shore and University Endowment Lands said to be exceptional expressions of the International Style and its regional variant, the West Coast Style. A prominent architectural writer recently chronicling the woes of the Toronto design scene wrote: “The hippest thing in Toronto design these days is Vancouver Modernism of the 1950s.”
Another Modernist masterpiece is the MacMillan-Bloedel Building ( on the northeast corner of Georgia Street and Thurlow Street, Downtown). It was designed by Canada’s premier architect of recent decades, Arthur Erickson (see “Arthur Erickson”). Built as headquarters for a since-dissolved BC forestry firm, this concrete giant features deeply recessed, waffle-effect windows, creating “a powerful image,” writes Harold Kalman in his History of Canadian Architecture.
Erickson also designed the Museum of Anthropology at UBC (6393 Northwest Marine Drive, 604-822-5087, www.moa.ubc.ca). On a ledge overlooking Howe Sound, the MOA is formed by a series of reinforced concrete frames, or posts with crossbeams, inspired by native longhouses. The result is a spectacular space for the best of the remaining historic totem poles and other Indian artifacts.
Still at UBC, the 1992 First Nations House of Learning and long¬house (1985 West Mall, 604-822-8940, www.longhouse.ubc.ca) deftly combines traditional Indian structures with West Coast Modernism. The Chan Centre for the Performing Arts (6265 Crescent Road, 604-822-9197), something of a cylindrical vessel teetering on the edge of a rainforest, is equally popular with the public.
Returning to the more distant past: the Europe Hotel (Alexander Street and Powell Street, Gastown) is Vancouver’s premier flatiron structure. Another centerpiece is the Waterfront Station (Down-town), incorporating the 1913—15 terminus of the Canadian Pacific Railway. With its broad, columned façade, it’s a successful expression of Beaux Arts Classicism.
For Vancouver basic, amble by a collection of roughly twenty-two nicely tarted-up wood-frame houses on the south side of Nelson Park, off Thurlow Street (West End). Saved by the sheer bloody-mindedness of local activists, this city-owned collection of houses, known as Mole Hill, functions as subsidized housing and a nice sample of what the neighborhood looked like in the early twentieth century. A few of the houses including those at 1114 and 1120 Comox Street — have been painted their period “heritage” colors.
The Architectural Institute of BC now hangs its hat at the Archi¬tecture Centre on Victory Square (440 Cambie Street, Downtown, 604-683-8588). In the early 1900s, what was then known as Court¬house Square was the city center and hub for events such as a visit by the future King George v. It’s since faced hard times, and the city is encouraging restoration and new housing. Take a walk through Victory Square — a park, really, so watch out for the sleeping bodies. At the northeast corner, you’ll find a cenotaph honoring Canada’s war dead. From the north, the flamboyant brick-and-ochre Dominion Building overlooks the square. Just east on Pender Street, at Beatty Street, stands the former Vancouver Sun and Vancouver Province news-papers building — a shapely tower, once topped by a golden globe. The two dailies are now housed in an uninspiring monolith on the waterfront.
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