May 15, 2019

Our Falling and Rising Towers

A certain synchronicity: Just as Vancouver House on one side of the peninsula is being completed, the Landmark on the other side is finishing demolition.

One day an infrequent visitor to the city will be driving down Robson, looking for the eponymous Landmark tower to find a destination.  And it will be gone.  Truly, WTF.

 

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  1. Out with the old, in with the new.

    Gold mining in the modern era !

    It’s BC’s new gold: real estate – now properly monetized with 20% foreign buyer tax, 1% annual vacancy tax and 2% non-resident / sat family annual “speculation” tax (or 0.5% for Canadians) .. plus GST, PST, property transfer taxes, CACs, DCCs, surcharge taxes if over $3M etc ..

    Affordability, of course is not the result here.

  2. I used to live a block from the Landmark, and had the odd drink in its rotating tourist trap. I guess the building had its points—it did punctuate Robson, give it a literal landmark—but to my taste it was an eyesore. Beige concrete had its one brief vogue in the 70s, and good riddance to that. I have all sorts of concerns about glass condo towers, starting with their energy waste, but aesthetically, I’ll take the least imaginative green-glass box over those 1970s concrete bunkers, any day. I suppose whatever replaces it could theoretically prove worse, but I doubt it.

    I look forward to moving back to the West End soon, and of all the changes, this will be one of the most welcome. Now if we could just give that Soviet old-folks home on 1600 block Barclay a coat of paint, I’d be content. Thing looks like a prison block.

    1. Perhaps you should be a bit more concerned about the jobs it took with it, rather than the aesthetics. Not to mention the tourism industry hit in a city with a shrinking pool of hotel rooms (conventions don’t book the neighbourhood-killing AirBnB). You could also worry about who exactly is going to buy those condos that are replacing the hotel.

      1. Yes if we put a new tall build it should be replacing a single family home. 29th skytrain station comes to mind.

  3. The Landmark will be missed – more for it’s nostalgic as opposed to aesthetic qualities. However I wouldn’t personally lump it in with the wonderful concrete social housing project east of the community centre along Barclay.

    Vancouver has a long and cherished relationship with exposed cast-in-place concrete structures (Law Courts, MacBlo, Museum of Anthropology, etc) but they do need to be power washed and clear breathable sealer reapplied regularly in this climate. That social housing project deserves the same TLC.
    We’ve all seen how successful a coat of paint wears on exterior concrete – the problem with the Soviet’s concrete structures was that the one coat of garish paint was never to be reapplied again.

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