downtown

Post-mortem on the old Eaton’s building: an interview with Cesar Pelli

March 2, 2015

The TD Bank building and Eaton’s building by Cesar Pelli, photo © Michael de Courcy, mid-1970s

This is not a true post-mortem, since Cesar Pelli‘s 1973 Eaton’s building has not actually been demolished—and how rare it is to be able to say that in Vancouver, now one of North America’s capitals of demolition.

“We are all Canucks” until we riot, apparently. Then it’s the work of a “handful.”

June 16, 2011

“Hockey’s over-the-top fandom (and the same could be said for the Olympics) seems a frantic expression of what the post-modern metropolis and its high-rise ghettos lack and even deliberately negate — a human-scale community in which individuals feel purposeful and acknowledged.”

“In the absence of any shared collective progressive principles, the BC elite longed for a new solidarity forged from of this “fighting collectivity” of Canucks fans.

“The murals in restaurants are on a par with the food in museums.”

April 17, 2011

Above: db Bistro, now closed. Overrefined corporate decor, dreary and visually bleak. New York in the 80s?

“The murals in restaurants are on a par with the food in museums.” ~ Peter de Vries, 1977

Vancouver is overrun with restaurants blighted not just with notably bad art but also with a type of generic commercial decor that makes you want to throw cutlery.

Application to the City of Vancouver to develop an abysmal chasm for purposes of facilitating public reverie

March 29, 2011

“Application to the City of Vancouver to develop an abysmal chasm for purposes of facilitating public reverie, contemplation and longing.” Makes me laugh every time I look at it. By my friend & Vancouver artist Aaron Carpenter.

Interiors in the new Vancouver Convention Centre

June 17, 2009

The new convention centre, an entirely self-sustaining carbon neutral building, is more impressive than I predicted and is proof that environmental sustainability can actually coincide with beauty.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

The foghorns which used to seem so romantic

January 26, 2009

This is the odd fog inversion Vancouver has been under for most of January. Anyone living close to the harbour is now seriously over the supposed charm of the foghorns, which blew approximately every forty seconds all night long, every night for weeks.

Categories: Ouno Design News, Uncategorised

This blog is a long, somewhat messy photo essay on the history and politics of design. Design's socio-historical context—that is, the constraints and influences on the way we make objects, dwellings and cities—seems too often ignored. We no longer know where our styles, tastes or objects really come from, and this damages our creativity and sense of meaning. Historical knowledge is so fugitive in the New World, with everything so decontextualized in the rapid flow of commodities and images. Don't even get me started on tumblr and pinterest. As Fran Lebowitz said, "Designers now, they all have these things called mood boards. I suppose they think a sense of discovery equals invention. It would be as if every writer had a board with paragraphs of other writers—'Oh, I'll take a little bit of this, and that, he was really good.' Yes, he was really good! And that is not a mood board, it is a stealing board." As for the sort of design I'm personally interested in, full disclaimer.....read more ____________________________________

To read about my book project on Vancouver's UN-Habitat Forum event of 1976 concerning just and sustainable urban settlements, click here. Few know that Buckminster Fuller, Margaret Mead, Mother Teresa, Paolo Soleri and Maggie & Pierre Trudeau, along with many thousands of others, came to Vancouver in 1976 to talk about better, safer, fairer and greener cities worldwide. In fact it was the founding conference of UN Habitat, an agency built around a foundational document called The Vancouver Declaration. My book is about what happened that year and is a snapshot not just of Vancouver but of how people around the world began to view cities and themselves differently in the wake of, among other things, the first oil crisis. ____________________________________

downtown

Post-mortem on the old Eaton’s building: an interview with Cesar Pelli

“We are all Canucks” until we riot, apparently. Then it’s the work of a “handful.”

“The murals in restaurants are on a par with the food in museums.”

Application to the City of Vancouver to develop an abysmal chasm for purposes of facilitating public reverie

Interiors in the new Vancouver Convention Centre

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