News

Housing the homeless and affordability for the rest of us generates a lot of talk these days in Vancouver. A few -- a very few -- are also doing something about it.

One doing very much indeed is Gregory Henriquez, the Vancouver architect at the forefront of social housing innovation as a partner at the design firm founded by his father, Richard. Henriquez Jr. is the key designer for three highly original designs at the leading edge of social housing thinking -- not just for this city, but continent-wide: Bruce Eriksen Place; the Lore Krill Co-op; and the massive Woodwards mixed-use redevelopment.

All three projects are found in a handsome new book on the young architect's work to date, an amply-illustrated volume with the somewhat ponderous title of Towards An Ethical Architecture: Issues Within the Work of Gregory Henriquez.

As documented in the book's extensive illustration of these three publicly-funded housing designs and the diverse residents who have now moved into two of them, Gregory Henriquez is a wizard at extracting poetic architecture out of the thin gruel of the tight budgets handed him by city and province.

It is perhaps no wonder that he started out by studying poetry. After architectural studies at Carleton and McGill universities that tended to the esoteric, the literary and the theoretical, Mr. Henriquez got thoroughly grounded in the tough realities of inner-city social housing with his first major project, Bruce Eriksen Place, on Main St. near Hastings St.

This eight-storey block contains 35 studio apartments, each 430 square feet each, and is named after a pioneering advocate for housing for the poor and community improvement in the Downtown Eastside. At the architect's insistence, a large mural and conceptual art piece featuring painted words associated with the activist's causes covers portions of Bruce Eriksen Place's Main Street façade, its extended concrete frame a good neighbour to the 1950s Modernism of the police headquarters next door.

Bruce Eriksen died nearly a decade ago, but he set the template for Vancouver's subsequent advocates for our poorest of the poor -- ex-councillor Jim Green, the Portland Hotel Society and its offshoots, and most recently, the hardcore anti-poverty advocates who are pressing our now-nervous city's hot buttons by occupying empty buildings.

While my heart is with Eriksen, my mind knows that the cals by these advocates for social housing in the Downtown Eastside -- and the Downtown Eastside alone -- is doing neither the neighbourhood nor their cause any good by over-concentrating low-end housing in the only Vancouver district that does not resist its construction.

Towards an Ethical Architecture includes an interview with Downtown Eastside Resident's Association ex-president Jim Green who says Bruce Eriksen Place "has become one of the most significant buildings in the city because of...community involvement and because of Gregory's input."

Mr. Henriquez's design, business and technical skills are very much in evidence in the most successful of the three social housing designs in the book, the Lore Krill Housing Co-op on Cordova Street near Abbott St. The building was lauded by Vancouver's luxury condo-dominated housing developers as the best housing design of any kind in 2004.

The building deserves this praise because of its dedication to livability in its studio, one bedroom and two bedroom suites, plus the quality of its courtyard and architectural detailing. With one block of co-op apartments along Cordova St., and another wing set along the lane, the courtyard between them features dramatic raised walkways, plus a 'Figure-8' walking/jogging path and a sculptural fountain at court level.

Building on a decade of previous attempts, a 2004 public-private partnership between the city and Ian Gillespie's Westbank Corp. was selected, and the dense mixture of 200 units of social housing and many, many more units of condos is currently under construction.

While an extended sidewalk sit-down protest may have pushed the Woodwards project into finalization, more recent occupations of former Single Resident Occupancy hotels and other vacant buildings by poverty activists have had much diminished community support, and less political success.

Gregory Henriquez will publicly launch "Towards an Ethical Architecture" from 2:00 to 6:00 PM today [Friday, December 1] with an open-to-anyone fund-raising benefit at the Downtown Eastside's Interurban Gallery at 1 East Hastings Street. All net proceeds from sales of books and framed photographs from its pages will benefit the PHS Community Services Society for their good work amongst the area's needy.

A book about a community as much as about an architectural ego, Towards An Ethical Architecture shows that social housing can enhance any neighbourhood. Let's hope that plenty of residents in Mount Pleasant, South Vancouver, Kitsilano and Point Grey read the book.

It might just help them overcome their resistance to a more balanced distribution of housing for society's most vulnerable.

tboddy@globeandmail.com