Inside Vancouver
Design Clinic
By Ian Bullock published Sep 1, 2009
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For a women’s-only health facility on the Downtown Eastside, a pod of UBC architecture students has created a storefront pharmacy unlike any other
In July, after a year of construction and delays, a derelict stretch of Hastings just west of Pigeon Park finally shed its hoardings. What shines out today from the formerly forlorn spot is most unlikely: a gorgeously designed, extravagantly welcoming space appointed with sensuous materials—carefully finished woods, cleverly contrived lighting, concrete buffed to a sheen. What vanguard operation has adopted such a famously beleaguered location? An intrepid restaurateur out to one-up Chambar? A gallery drawing the moneyed down to the land of low rents? A no-fear boutique?
Lu’s is none of those. Beyond its tall glowing panels of glass and innovative lighting, it signals a fundamental rethink of how health services are delivered in the Downtown Eastside. Named for 85-year-old activist Lucette Hanson, Lu’s—a pharmacy that provides services solely to women—will reinvest earnings from its sales into social programs on-site.
No pharmacy like it exists in North America; so, in 2006, when parent organization the Vancouver Women’s Health Collective (VWHC) conceived the idea, its design was an open question. The group had found a 270-square-metre lot at 29 West Hastings, next door to the Army & Navy store. After teaming up with Inge Roecker, an assistant professor of architecture at UBC, they began the process of re-inventing what a pharmacy could be.
From the start, the group faced a major setback: after years of waning government support, the VWHC was in trouble. That’s when Roecker got inventive. The Stuttgart-born architect, who received her master’s from the University of Manitoba in 1999, used the opportunity to revive a design practice called clerestory lighting. Until the 1950s, many buildings in Gastown and Chinatown, including 29 Hastings, filled their clerestory (the top third of a storefront window) with prisma glass—heavy triangles of glass used to reflect light further into the building through a series of “light shelves,” or mirrors along the ceiling, the walls, and the top of filing cabinets and other furniture. “It was a pretty smart system,” Roecker says. “But as soon as electricity came, they boxed it off.” Sometime in the 1950s, a backlit Helen’s Cafe sign barricaded the clerestory, consigning the space to decades of electric lighting. In the power-challenged 21st century, however, Roecker saw a chance to revisit prisma.
It was at about this time that the VWHC ran into another problem. Back in 2005, the City of Vancouver, concerned with the growing number of so-called “methadone pharmacies” in the Downtown Eastside, passed a by-law preventing new pharmacies from opening within 400 metres of existing ones. The law targeted small-scale operations, facilities 600 square metres or smaller, because their numbers were mushrooming. Over 10 years, the number of small-scale pharmacies had leapt from two or three to nearly 20 in the 10-block radius around Main and Hastings. This was partly due to the rampant use of heroin in the DTES through the ’90s, partly opportunism. Methadone dispensing had become a lucrative business thanks to a provincial PharmaCare program that pays pharmacists $16.30 each time they administer the medicine.
