News and Features
Designing Vancouver's Future
By Michael Harris published Jul 6, 2012
Matthew Soules was designing a leisure palace until the recession bankrupted his dreams. At 36, Vancouver’s most progressive architect finds himself returned to the drawing board
Portrait by Carlo Ricci
For a couple of years Matthew Soules ran his architecture firm out of a bedbug-riddled 12th-floor apartment in the West End. To formalize the space, he tore down the dun-coloured curtains and for lighting arranged a series of fluorescent tubes around the floor (à la Dan Flavin). Looking up from the sidewalk, some thought he was growing marijuana; others, that he was running a boutique porn studio.
Today, Soules is caretaker of the famed B.C. Binning House. He gives occasional tours of the compact masterpiece, which crouches, crumbling for lack of restoration funds, amongst a row of sparkling West Vancouver mansions. But mostly he's left to marinate in its atmosphere. On a recent visit, we tour through the single-level home, with its wonky angled walls, its cramped studio, and those multimillion-dollar views. We disregard the "Do Not Touch" signs and chat our way around its memorabilia. Soules is handsome and bright-eyed, with sandy hair and a winning way of expressing ideas as though they have just occurred to him-when they actually result from lengthy research. There's a definite irony to him having charge of a heritage home, for Matthew Soules is our most forward-thinking architect.
Certainly, he's listened to his forefathers. While completing a master's at Harvard, the 25-year-old Soules spent a summer working at Arthur Erickson's firm, going for lunch twice a week with the only man to build houses in this region more important than the Binning one. After graduation, he jetted to Rotterdam to intern for starchitect Rem Koolhaas. Next, he flew to New York and interned for I.M. Pei (he who designed the Louvre's glass pyramid).
But Soules (a West Van High grad) returned to Vancouver in 2006 determined to start something of his own; his hometown was due, he figured, for a massive correction. We do plenty of self-trumpeting, but Soules agrees with Koolhaas that this city has become an enemy of urbanism. Crossing the garden of the Binning House, he jiggles a cocktail and begins: "Our density is all about cramming people in, but that does not make a place metropolitan. Look at the supposedly dense Concord Pacific land-it's a vacant place to live. We have invented a kind of pessimistic density where people don't get thrown together in exciting ways; it looks like a city, but the life is suburban."
How to start a revolution? Soules accepted a post at UBC and started work on the sort of projects every architect begins with. Eighteen months in, while finishing a boutique dental office, he was invited along to an informal meeting with the Aquilini brothers (owners of Pizza Hut, the Canucks, and a sizable swath of downtown). He was now 32-an infant in architect years-and no serious connection was forged. But someone else in attendance, Robert Wilson, called a few days later with a not-so-modest proposal.
