Inside Vancouver
Jeff Wall on Vancouver's Last Good Building
By Jeff Wall published Nov 1, 2011
It’s not just Fred Herzog’s talent that let him photograph our city so beautifully. His Vancouver was less ugly and disappointing than our own
Until about 1970 there was something called old Vancouver, that city still characterized by the wooden houses in which most of its inhabitants dwelt, houses built on a restricted number of plans and patterns, the Beaux-Arts stone architecture of its most prominent structures, the British gardening of private and public spaces, the not-yet-complete infill of urban space, the low streetscapes of shop fronts with their canvas awnings over the sidewalks, the wide streets free of heavy automobile traffic, the articulate and tasteful street signage.
For many reasons, that all began to come apart in the ’70s. A combination of land speculation, urban zoning and rezoning, accelerating suburbanization, as well as new standards of taste in building types and materials has resulted in the disappointing city we live in today. Vancouver in 1950, 1960, or 1970 had a real beauty. There were many very commonplace structures, of course, but almost all of them conformed to acceptable norms of building type, use of materials, size, shape, and order. Part of the reason for this is that there were relatively few such building types and most structures were put up in accordance with them. And since the types were so common and familiar, there was little need or impulse to innovate. The resulting structure, whether a single-family home of the kind preserved at Mole Hill, a corner grocery store with a few apartments above it, a gas station, an office building like the Vancouver Block or Nat Bailey Stadium, had a gracious air of appropriateness. Most of that has been swept away.
Today, whatever you can say about Vancouver, you cannot say that most of its buildings are gracious and appropriate to their settings. They are vulgar, cheap, ugly, and even ridiculous. I will not go on to belabour this account with descriptions of corner malls, “po-mo” corporate headquarters, “maxed-out” fourplexes on lots previously fitting one house, and so on. Nor will I bend over backwards finding justification for all this in the “eco-density” apologetics so popular with many wise civic elders. None of them seem to notice the density of disappointment and the envelope of depression that’s been created by the total abdication of leadership by politicians, patrons, and professionals in architecture, planning, and urbanism, the hapless capitulation to institutionalized civic ugliness.
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Just the one sentence, "the density of disappointment and the envelope of depression that's been created by the total abdication of leadership by politicians, patrons, and professionals in architecture, planning, and urbanism, the hapless capitulation to institutionalized civic ugliness", sums up the reality that barely anyone acknowledges in this city. Unfortunately, I don't see any relief in the near future as we continue to scrap everything with any inherent quiet and modest beauty. Instead the buildings increasingly are infused with insipid cheapness and incite no wonder no fun and no inspiration. Not to mention the endless bumps and circles our side streets are being festooned with, while the major arteries are clogged morning til night.. Let's add several more 100 thousand people and their cars while we're at it. Yes, an excellent article by Jeff Wall. I hope you continue with this kind of critical thinking.
Excellent read. Thanks to Jeff Wall and VanMag.
Also, for your information, the article generated a discussion in a street photography forum:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/onthestreet/discuss/72157627947871246/
