A lot of writing about houses, architecture and cities pretends it's all about bricks and mortar. We get paragraph-by-paragraph walk-throughs, elaborate descriptions of interiors, and the low-down on the latest features, but too often, the human story of the shaping of where we live gets lost along the way. Yes, the physical facts are important in understanding our built environment, but in the end it is people who shape our dwellings.
This week's column is a chance to recognize some of the key people whose passion, ideas and dedication have improved our houses and housing. Those selected are a diverse bunch: a graduate architect couple with a design practice that does not respect boundaries, be they geographic or those of design disciplines; an under-heralded City Hall staffer who has quietly worked to get social housing built in Canada's most expensive city; and a high-end condo developer with a heart and an eye for detail.
Stephanie Forsythe and Todd
MacAllen, Design Entrepreneurs. Vancouver has no finer exemplars of how the practice of architecture is changing than these partners in life and partners in design. They met while architecture students at Dalhousie in Halifax, and except for a few early projects -- Todd
MacAllen, 40, helped construct some houses they had designed for Gulf Island sites, while Stephanie Forsythe, 36, advised on the glass colours used on the undulating walls of Bing Thom's landmark Aberdeen Centre in Richmond -- their entire career has been collaborative projects.
Forsythe + MacAllen Design Associates have produced rural houses that question the tired clichés of rain-coast design, and they have received prizes in two key international design competitions -- one for the northern Japanese city of Aomori, and another for housing the homeless in New York City.
As successful as these have been, more cash and more ink has been generated by their sister company, Molo Design, which has built from an all-glass tea light to a full line of similarly bold ideas for the domestic objects that brighten our daily lives.
One of their most impressive recent creations is their own residence, a loft space above an anonymous shop on Venables Street east of Clark Drive. With a dramatic view of downtown from banks of windows, they built rooms, designed a magical blue floor covering, and constructed custom built-ins at a fraction of the price that most Vancouverites pay for their living room furniture alone.
"It is great to be back in a real neighbourhood again," says Mr. MacAllen of the superficially scruffy mixed industrial and housing zone that has also attracted 2006 Ron Thom Award for Architecture winners David Battersby and Heather Howatt, who both live and work nearby. Previously, Forsythe and MacAllen had lived in a Yaletown live-work loft, but the artificiality and constant change of that too-new neighbourhood rankled.
Design entrepreneurs of the first order, Forsythe + MacAllen are precisely the kind of 'cultural creative' pioneers this city needs to evolve from its current over-reliance on natural resource harvesting combined with the harvesting of real estate development sites. Making it new is what they are all about.
Cameron Gray, City of Vancouver Housing Centre Director. Cameron Gray may have one of the most difficult jobs in the entire city, heading up efforts to create social and affordable housing in a city where everyone habitually blames everyone else for our growing housing crisis. Getting low-cost housing built in Vancouver means wandering into squabbles between all three levels of government, and being caught between the conflicting mandates of poverty organizations and real estate developers.
With his long time service to the City's housing centre, Mr. Gray is true to his last name in being a neutral or almost invisible player in helping put together some of the most important housing deals --ones where others tend to collect the credit, especially when they prove to be successes. These include the Woodward's re-development, the rooming house renewal program for the Downtown Eastside, and the city's contribution to the Salvation Army's Belkin House, which received a rave review in this column last fall.
Unusual for the current generation of city hall staffers, Gray has stuck his neck out by standing by plans for social housing -- either a hostel for recovering addicts or senior's housing -- in the heart of Point Grey, on Dunbar Street. Let's hope his good works are recognized by political support to help surmount current NIMBYism. Even better, let's hope he extends these efforts to other Vancouver districts, then shames sister municipalities on the Lower Mainland who are not currently pulling their share in housing our poorest and most vulnerable.
Ian Gillespie, President, Westbank Projects Corp. In sheer audacity, scope and attention to design detail, Ian Gillespie is without peer in Vancouver's development community.
Mr. Gillespie and partner Ben Yeung of Peterson Investment Group have staked out the highest of the high end of Vancouver condo development. Three of his towers have been rewarded with some of this city's highest housing densities, but also its highest levels of public amenity and design finesse, thanks to architect James Cheng: the Shaw Tower finished in 2004, the Living Shangrila tower which now is starting to rise above Georgia Street, and most recently, the waterfront Fairmont Pacific Rim, like Shangrila a hotel-condo hybrid.
Ian Gillespie's personal and business skills were best demonstrated last year with the successful pre-sale of the Woodward's redevelopment condos, a project inconceivable in other cities with less enlightened and less relentless city-builders.