Vancouver City Council

On Rize (Or Forcing A Luxury Highrise On A Neighbourhood That Really Doesn’t Want It)

April 5, 2012

UPDATE: This disastrous, precedent-setting development was passed by our City Council, dominated by supposedly “green” Vision Vancouver, in a 9-1 vote. It was not sent back to design; only vague requests to the developer to make it smaller and less ugly were uttered.

When your friend runs for political office – Sandy Garossino

October 31, 2011

My friend Sandy Garossino, running for a spot on Vancouver City Council

Early readers of this blog are probably wondering what happened to it. Yes, it’s more political now and ostensibly less focused on pure design, but I’m not sure I believe in the existence of “pure design” anyway.

Yikes. They want to put this thing downtown.

February 20, 2011

Above is an artist’s rendering of the new mega-casino planned for Vancouver. Those three towers jammed up against the stadium in that awkward manner are the “entertainment complex” hotel towers, where presumably you can rent by the hour.

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. ____________________________________

Vancouver City Council

On Rize (Or Forcing A Luxury Highrise On A Neighbourhood That Really Doesn’t Want It)

When your friend runs for political office – Sandy Garossino

Yikes. They want to put this thing downtown.

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