Vancouver Magazine

News and Features

Peter Busby's Green Mission

By Frances Bula published Nov 1, 2008

The greenest building that Canada's greenest architect has ever built is hard to find. It's on a Gulf Island whose name I've promised not to reveal, reached only after a ferry ride, several hours on the road, and then a boat trip across the glittering water on this breezy day.
It's hard to find, too, because of my own misconceptions. I make landfall, see a modernist cathedral of a house facing the shore, and think this surely must be it, this angular blue structure with soaring windows and a peak jutting into the ocean air. It looks so geometric compared to the other places in the ragged row, which range from unreconstructed shacks to Ye Olde West Coast Recreation Property. I knock at the door. No, no Peter here.
As I discover once I've been redirected, that is not the kind of house Peter Busby would ever build or live in. Vancouver's prince of starkly elegant temples of contemporary design lives in a 1960s cabin remodelled with local driftwood and rocks. It's painted deep yellow with barn-red trim, colours I've never seen on any of his Vancouver structures-not the alien-cocoon-shaped glass-and-metal SkyTrain station at Brentwood, not the severely beautiful concrete-and-glass Pivotal building at the north end of the Cambie Bridge, not the sleekly ovoid dark-glass Sheraton Wall Centre, not Bob Rennie's art-gallery-like condo of polished concrete, not any of their two dozen oh-so-modernist siblings scattered around Metro Vancouver. A carefully nurtured fig tree grows through a hole cut in the scuffed wooden deck.
A more careful observer would have seen the Busby touches immediately. The row of vertical windows along the front of this carefully recycled house has the rhythmic regularity of his urban designs. Inside, driftwood logs form pillars and beams, which create the same muscular sense of framing