November 9, 2016

Another Turncoat Debate – Nov 17

Turncoats* #3: We Got This

turncoatsvancouver_november_2016
The technocrats have triumphed! More than ever, cities are shaped by an expanding army of specialists who, confounded by an onslaught of economic, demographic and environmental pressures, robotically approach city making with a kit of technical solutions. When was the last time you were inspired to linger in one of these formulaic places? What happened to the vision? It’s time to put the responsibility for city making back in the hands of the original generalists: the architects!

The Panel

Leslie Van Duzer, Bruce Carscadden, Neal Lamontagne, Mitchell Reardon
 
Thursday, November 17
6 to 9 pm
Dudoc Vancouver
1445 West Georgia Street – View Map
Attend Event
* Turncoats is a shot in the arm. Framed by theatrically provocative opening gambits, a series of debates will rugby tackle fundamental issues facing contemporary practice with a playful and combative format designed to foment open and critical discussion, turning conventional consensus on its head.

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  1. One of the best talks ever on TED is Kunstler on the tragedy of the suburbs. Most TED talks are best scanned in the Interactive transcript format, but this piece is worth listening to in its entirety. He has a comedic delivery and only stumbles once the whole time.
    One of his funniest diatribes is against the Boston Civic Centre – designed by I M Pei, and others – a dismal architectural turkey.
    We don’t necessarily need architects to design our urban spaces. Most of it is not rocket science. Safdie’s design of the Central Library is commendable; though obviously a pastiche. The best part is, of course, the outdoor steps (unfortunately often infested with smokers). Is a set of steps architecture?
    Should architects, esp., those of the landscape persuasion, throw stones at those who are technical experts? Should someone skilled with berms and benches think themselves superior to engineers. Calatrava is, I think, the only architect who is also an engineer. He is not robotic. He is not a technocrat. He is one in a million. Landscape architects? …
    The piece of architecture that flipped my mind was Foster’s Reichstadt – the concept; the symbolism; the execution. That is work of the highest order.
    Here’s what’s needed for a useful public space: benches, shelter, sun and shade, a place to get food, toilets. Getting rid of vehicles and putting in a fountain are a plus. It might be formulaic because it’s not that complicated.
    Much as I like architects, even bad ones, too often they’re overkill, esp. when it comes to building houses. You’d think that after the millions of houses built since the beginning of time there would be enough blueprints to go around – that it would be the job of a residential designer to tweak the final plans. Why use a CA when a bookkeeper is the right tool.

    1. Safdie’s VPL? You’re joking, right?
      That animal didn’t undergo even the slightest hint of architectural discourse. But the model did do the mall crawl. What architect or urban designer ever agreed with Safie’s hubristic comment that he “gave Vancouver a history” by facetiously applying a Roman Coliseum façade? This despite 6,000 years of Coast Salish architecture and culture, a strong influence by the English Arts and Crafts movement and American Craftsman houses, our few Art Deco gems, and a Modernism influenced by Japanese Zen.
      Only when you get past the cartoonish and immature PoMo gladiator façade treatment do you see some honesty with a pure library functionality radiating into the soaring atrium that captures light and sends it deep inside.
      And the “amphitheatre” cum plaza? Pathetic. If you really want t understand the qualities that define the best outdoor public spaces and the worst without leaving the comfort of your armchair read Jan Gehl’s works, or ‘City Squares’ (edited by Catie Marron), or ‘Places of the Heart’ by Colin Ellard.
      Library Square is not of high enough quality wit appropriate functions and geometry to be called successful.
      Regarding architects vs bookkeepers, most of the thousands of hideous homes out there are designed by builders with a peel ‘n stick attitude and a backpocket booklet of stock plans representing and architectural pastiche of international styles.

  2. This is a very important issue for Vancouver and all the other super expensive cities that are all so carefully planned, to be expensive by design.
    “To this day, Tokyo is often described as a collection of villages. The American writer Donald Richie, who lived there for much of his life, described “the feeling of proceeding through village after village each with its own main street: a bank, a supermarket, a flower shop, a pinball parlour, all without street names or numbers because villagers don’t need them. Each complex is a small town, and their numbers make up this enormous capital.” Others believe this image of Tokyo is romantic and distorts our understanding of what Tokyo is all about.
    According to Metabolist architect Kisho Kurokawa, Westerners misunderstand Tokyo as informal and illogical because of their dualist notion of the city as divided into polar opposites: Urban and rural, formal and informal, order and mess. But Japanese culture, says Kurokawa, accepts that mess and order are inseparable: “The open structure, or receptivity, is a special feature of the Japanese city and one it shares with other Asian cities.” This is why the Japanese are so tolerant of urban forms that the West would see as “irrational” or “messy” — neighborhoods develop and slowly integrate with the larger urban system on their own terms. Tokyo was built with loose zoning rules to become a fantastically integrated mixed-use city, where tiny pedestrian streets open up to high-speed train lines. ”
    https://nextcity.org/informalcity/entry/when-tokyo-was-a-slum
    “There were more housing starts in Tokyo than in all of California or England.Here is a startling fact: in 2014 there were 142,417 housing starts in the city of Tokyo (population 13.3m, no empty land), more than the 83,657 housing permits issued in the state of Califoria (population 38.7m), or the 137,010 houses started in the entire country of England (population 54.3m).
    Tokyo’s steady construction is linked to a still more startling fact. In contrast to the enormous house price booms that have distorted western cities — setting young against old, redistributing wealth to the already wealthy, and denying others the chance to move to where the good jobs are — the cost of property in Japan’s capital has hardly budged. …
    A private developer cannot make you sell land; a local government cannot stop you using it. If you want to build a mock-Gothic castle faced in pink seashells, that is your business. …”
    http://www.valuewalk.com/2016/08/tokyo-rent-control/
    Over planned and over priced Vancouver needs a massive overhaul of it’s controlling bureaucracy, if it really wants to be a city that is affordable. The planners and the permit departments and the high costs they all create are the problem. Sure, buildings should be inspected and approved by the fire department and perhaps the health department too but not much more.
    Vancouver really has to ask itself if it really does want to be an expensive resort with resort styled waterfronts, leafy avenues for wealthy homeowners and a sorry hell-hole of depravity to sate a guilty conscience. This is what planning has created. We can go to Woodwards and feel good about improving the lives of those wretched souls that are now housed and partly subsidized by the uber expensive condos and then we can head over to Alberni for an al fresco lunch and we are shopping on Rodeo Drive.
    Tokyo is a form of anarchy in planning and it’s affordable.

    1. Prices in Tokyo haven’t budged due to factors not in play elsewhere: an aging and closed population and a massive property bubble implosion 20 years ago that still haunts Japan.

    2. Tokyo evolved primarily from railways that joined innumerable cities and towns that remained intact with their tiny houses on postage stamp lots, and apartments. It supports a population of 36 million, larger than Canada’s with a mostly low and mid-rise urbanism. That is a testament to the power, vitality and utility of transit.
      Tokyo has very high land prices, but housing remains relatively affordable because everyone lives on tiny parcels or in apartments. The housing speculation there doesn’t seem to be as prevalent as here. And with increasingly efficient rail transit (the expenditures on improvements are mind boggling), many families and individuals do not suffer with an inordinate share of the family budgets being consumed by car ownership.
      Vancouver banned freeways, which was remarkable in the early 70s when everyone else was kowtowing to their destructive power. But stopping them was only a half measure. It’s been almost a half century. Time to carry on building on that first step.

  3. One of the most important urban spaces for our family is swimming pools. We’ve gone to all of them.
    The worst is the newest and biggest – Hillcrest. We’ve gone a few times – no more. It’s an awkward, unpleasant space – already massively under sized.
    The hot tub is the worst. The old Percy Norman had the best – powerful streams that pummeled the kidneys as they should. Hillcrest’s buzzes the the upper part of the butt cheeks – ridiculous – and irritating. Who designed this piece of garbage?
    There’s no sense of refuge here – one of our primordial needs. Instead, there’s the feng shui faux pas of vehicles beaming their headlights into the structure while they park. If this were done at your residence, you’d be a nervous wreck.
    This city has best of class in a number of categories. Pools are not one of them. Two of the best are the outdoor ones: Kits, and Brighton. What would it cost to enclose these so they’d be available year round?
    A great pool should have a massive outdoor fountain attatched to it. This would clean the water and reduce the amount of pool chemicals used – toxic crap.
    It should have a lot of plants – using the guidelines of NASA to pick those most efficient for oxygenation – turning it into a kind of conservatory.
    The shower/change areas should be pleasant. The worst in the city is – they’re all bad. One of the worst is Kits. Dismal.

  4. The old Percy Norman had the best –” I was the architect for the old Percy Norman. Thanqxz, glad you liked it. Replacing it was just another example of oh so prevelant civic revanchism so popular today!

      1. Sorry, don’t know. Was only at the Percy Norman a handful of times.
        It should have been given heritage status. It had a lot of memories for people. Learning to swim; finding relationships; sharing play.
        It’s hard to stack that up against the BowMac sign playing peekaboo with Turds R Us – a fiiting tribute to motordom and consumerism. A plague on this caustic aesthetic and all vile billboards.

  5. Yawn.
    The history of architecture must now become more important than the history of architects. Jacques Rousseau
    I’m only radical because the architectural profession has got lost. Architects are such a dull lot – and they’re so convinced that they matter. Cedric Price

  6. Cedric Price also said: A greater awareness in architects and planners of their real value to society could, at the present, result in that rare occurrence, namely, the improvement in the quality of life as a result of architectural endeavour.
    Some architects are dull. Susanka comes to mind. She has found a niche and has written decent books, but she is the definition of dull.
    The same cannot be said for Bjarke Ingels. He is entertaining.
    Dull or not, what counts is product. Gehry’s Bilbao put that city on the map.
    Aga Khan award winer Bridge School in Fujian transformed a village – architecture at its finest – for about the cost of a Tesla X.
    Alok Shetty, at age 19 – before becoming an architect – designed a hospital. He matters.
    Throughout history, in the illiterate times before advertising and pr flacks, architects played a huge role in creating the hegemony of religions – the mind control of the masses through edifices. When the laity stepped into temples and cathedrals they believed in higher powers and the hocus pocus of priests. They became, in the parlance of used car salesmen, lay downs; ready to give away and bequeath their wealth.
    Maybe architecture school should trifurcate – a third faculty teaching just residential design – a shorter cheaper program, so that graduates don’t feel justified charging so much for services. There aren’t that many big jobs to go around and god knows we need better-designed houses. Skip the frou frou and git ‘r done, as Newfies are wont to say.

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