In the worlds of real estate and architecture, it is nearly always mistaken to extrapolate the future from the trembling present, especially in nervous times like these. Looking at Vancouver's forest of construction cranes and current frenzy for luxe, deluxe and ultra-luxe, it is easy to make a very wrong guess on where our condo scene will be in a few years.
Straight-lining from what is talked up as hot right now, one would think "starchitects" like London's Norman Foster or Miami's Andres Duany would lead the list of future condo designers here. But that is unlikely.
If our current downtown pattern holds, we'd continue to pile up sliver-skinny towers anchored by townhouse bases. That too is unlikely.
And, if some of the marketing hype is to be believed, our city will be encrusted with second and third homes owned by a golden global class of real estate nomads. But the peak of that influx has already passed.
An artist’s rendering of Concord Pacific’s eight-storey Smart Condo on Powell Street. All 90 units sold quickly. (BUSBY PERKINS + WILL ARCHITECTS)
Instead, a glimpse of the future of condo living in Vancouver may actually be found in an under-publicized project now under construction on one of the city's most troubled streets. It's impressive that Concord Pacific has chosen to build just off Main on Powell Street, in the heart of the Downtown Eastside. But the larger impact of this project is the powerful alternative it provides to our design-by-rote downtown towers.
Smart Condo tries to be both green and affordable, two qualities Vancouverites will demand ever-more of in their future apartment buildings. Until now, Concord Pacific has been the Mercedes-Benz of our condo developers — a quality brand, reliable if conservative, occasionally over-priced. Seeing the eight-storey Smart Condo lined up in Concord Pacific's marketing brochures alongside the glitzy penthouses of the Erickson and sister False Creek residential towers is like seeing one of those teeny-weeny micro-cars parked in a showroom next to a fully-loaded 2008 model SEL.
In coming up with a shorter and greener way to build condominium apartments, Concord Pacific engaged one of Canada's leading designers of sustainable buildings, Busby Perkins + Will Architects. Sensitive to the blocks of heritage buildings surrounding their site at the eastern entrance of Gastown, Peter Busby's team started from a study of late Victorian and Edwardian apartment buildings, seeking a way to build at similar densities as Yaletown, but at substantially lower heights, more in keeping with the character of Vancouver's oldest neighbourhood.
Now under construction on what was once the drug-plagued parking lot for the Number 5 Orange strip bar (the provincial government recently bought this building, and will convert it into much-needed supportive housing), Smart Condo has a net floor space ratio of 5.6, about the same amount of new building over existing site area as the much higher tower projects Concord Pacific has long built around False Creek. In the world of urban architecture, dense does not necessarily mean high.
The Peter Busby design is flush to its lot lines (the western edge will even include an old-fashioned light well), and takes the form of a tradition-derived south-facing "U." With maximizing natural daylight as their strategy to cut energy costs, this meant relatively more costly exterior walls had to be built than for a tower, but with benefits in streetscape compatibility and carbon footprint reduction.
Explaining the south-facing 'U' shape which organizes condos around an interior court, David Negrin, the former Concord Pacific vice president of development who put the deal together, says their team "designed the building to be split in the middle, opening up a courtyard, which brings light and breezes deep into the plan."
According to Mr. Negrin, the low land costs of the area and a cutback in otherwise mandatory luxury features meant the developer could reduce prices at Smart Condo by one third from those of Yaletown.
Concord Pacific's target market of younger and "creative industries" buyers who had otherwise been shut out of downtown Vancouver meant that brick was too costly for exterior walls, but expressed concrete floors and perimeter columns successfully evoke the scale of pre-Modern apartment buildings, without directly imitating them. They clearly found a market: all 90 units, ranging from 550 sq.-ft. studios to 1,100 sq. ft. two-bedroom (plus den) units have been sold.
A dramatic photo-montage of what Smart Condo will look like from the Powell Street side shows frankly contemporary architectural expression set into a package shaped more like our West End's much-loved Sylvia Hotel or Holly Lodge, than towers-on-platforms. Another comparison for this medium-rise format set flush to site perimeters (rather than stepping back) is to be found in our sister city of Seattle. By and large they have rejected Vancouver's skinny tower formula in their lively new near-downtown neighbourhood between Belltown and Seattle Art Museum's acclaimed sculpture park.
It is interesting that many of the developers who have built in Seattle are from Vancouver, varying from the tower formula they had used back home because Seattle's planners and local politicians required it. This news, plus Concord Pacific's market, architectural and urban design success with Smart Condo mean that recent proposals to remove existing building height limits for Gastown, Chinatown and the Downtown Eastside need to be questioned.
The debate increasingly focuses on a site near the corner of Pender and Abbott Streets. If height limits are lifted here, it will open the gates to a raft of further proposals for design-by-rote towers right across our heritage neighbourhoods.
According to Mr. Negrin, Smart Condo's different form and shape meant only a small reduction in profit, compared with the tower format Vancouver's largest developer knows so well. I am convinced that with a little more experience, these alternative formats will be made even more efficient by our ever-innovating real estate developers.
The reason for my confidence is another squabble I encountered when I moved back to Vancouver in the mid-1990s. Back then, architects and developers bent my ears with fierce complaints about how city planners and council were forcing them to build in what they regarded as an awkward and expensive tower-on-podium format. Now they want to hang on to this very same format in heritage zones where it clearly does not belong. Urban evolution is healthy — no, inevitable — and a richer range of building forms will make everyone happier and wealthier in the new Vancouver.
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