October 12, 2011
Vancouver towers from Wikimedia Commons
[Update: see post on this topic on the Vancouver Lights blog. Also see this critique of glass highrises by Lisa Rochon in the Globe and Mail.]
Apologies that this is such a long post.
October 4, 2011
A classic piece of westcoast modern architecture is back on the market again.West Vancouver—which actually lies north of the rest of the city and on the other side of the harbour—holds most of the city’s best modern architecture.
September 28, 2011
Hiyao Miyazaki, one of my favourite filmmakers, is the Japanese director of the animated movies Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke and Totoro. Of all his films these three are favourite, probably because they are the most Japanese in their aesthetic.
September 13, 2011
(All photos here are of New York. Photos of Vancouver to be appended later.)
The building at left is by Gehry. Shot is taken from the Highline promenade.
August 31, 2011
Recent radio silence has been the result of being either too busy in the city, or too unbusy and computerless while on various islands.
Today I learned that the term dog days is very old, a translation from the latin dies caniculares.
August 17, 2011
1976 Greenpeace launch at Jericho Beach Wharf, with seaplane hangars behind in the Moderne style
Goodbye to another old Vancouver landmark. While the loss of the wharf is sad, the greater loss actually happened about thirty years ago: the demolition of the old beachside military hangars behind the wharf.
July 24, 2011
“The natural landscape is as important as the architecture,“ says Edward M. Jones, of Jones Studio in Phoenix, who built a contemporary house in Scottsdale, Arizona, for Tracy and Lou Ann O’Rourke “The boulders have been there for an eternity, and the saguaros are often very old, so you don’t move them just to build a house,“ says Jones.
The Pilgrimage Church in Neviges, Germany
These were listed among the world’s ugliest buildings, aggregated from various rankings in Forbes, Virtual Tourist and Oddee.com. Quite apart from blithely ignoring the complexity of the question “what is beautiful,” which philosophy has attempted to deal with for centuries and has only made more unanswerable, this list is pretty odd.
July 20, 2011
If you’re in Vancouver on July 28, and are interested in the vernacular modernist architecture of our region, buy a ticket for this event. Ouno is hosting this fundraiser to benefit the completion of the film Coast Modern by my filmmaker friends Gavin Froome and Mike Bernard.
July 7, 2011
In this area of Los Angeles. two-car garages are mandated on each lot, by code. This garage was converted by Dry Design as a studio and possible living space in West L.A.
