westcoast modern

West Coast cabin – Clayoquot Sound, B.C.

September 6, 2012

The cabin is probably the true vernacular architecture of British Columbia’s West Coast and other parts of the Pacific Northwest. Vancouver must once have had some of these buildings, thought rampant demolition and ugly development are doing their best to eradicate any trace of this architectural past.

Architect Ron Thom’s Boyd House is for sale

July 18, 2012

These photos of Ron Thom’s Boyd House are from the blog Architecture Wanted which provides a good introduction to this house. Also see a great post by Cam McLellan on his Vancouver Lights blog and an article in Western Living by the house’s current owner, Kerry McPhedran.

Dog days of summer, and cabins on the coast

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.

Local bank branch in 70s modern cedar

April 2, 2010

Look, Vancouver, Victoria retained its cedar modernism. You could have, too.

Bank of Montreal branch in James Bay, Victoria, BC. Too bad about the sign.

Categories: architecture, Canadian design, Uncategorised

Arthur Erickson & Japan – Journeys to the East

October 3, 2009

If you’re in Vancouver and are interested in Arthur Erickson’s ties with Japan (and by extension Japan’s influence on west coast modernism), it’s worth ordering tickets for this event now. It will sell out.

Categories: design, 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. ____________________________________

westcoast modern

West Coast cabin – Clayoquot Sound, B.C.

Architect Ron Thom’s Boyd House is for sale

Dog days of summer, and cabins on the coast

Local bank branch in 70s modern cedar

Arthur Erickson & Japan – Journeys to the East

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