News and Features
Profile of Architect Gregory Henriquez - continued
By Frances Bula published Jun 1, 2011
Gregory Henriquez inherited his architectural zeal from his well-known father. But where Richard designs poetic buildings to suit their location, his son wants to create a more meaningful world
"With Gregory, there's a certain aesthetic rather than a style," says Gillespie. "It's quite bold." That's in contrast to his other favoured architect, James Cheng, who designed the high-end Shangri-La. "Jim is more about detail, subtleties, the way the light hits the building. With Gregory, there's a strength to his buildings, a permanency, a materiality." Woodward's has almost as much square footage as Olympic Village, but it's crammed into one block. Henriquez talked to homeless people, nonprofit groups representing homeless people, Downtown Eastside activists, local business groups, marketer Bob Rennie, folks from SFU, the city, potential tenants, and more. The result is a small city: a huge flatiron tower; a second, smaller tower with family social housing; a university fine-arts building with housing for singles with addiction or mental-health problems; a restored heritage department store; and a courtyard with a basketball hoop. It's a combination of big architectural lines and the smallest of thoughtful gestures, like providing sliding panels to cover the windows in the singles housing, since it's not uncommon for people with psychiatric issues to want to block out the outside world. Usually, they resort to tin foil or blankets; the panels gave them protection in a new and elegant way.
It was a once-in-a-lifetime project, Henriquez says. (He worried it would be the single Roman candle of his career.) Its success changed his life, bringing his company new business and his architecture new praise. City hall's planners admired the effort he put into ensuring the buildings complemented their tough and historic neighbourhood. With the flatiron tower, instead of just building another glass monolith, he screened the glass with a grill of rust-coloured metal that turned it into a visual echo of the terra cottas and vivid mustards of the nearby Dominion Tower. "It's one of the few examples of a tower in this city that is contextual," says Scot Hein, director of the city's urban design studio.
The project also brought him close to a group of politicians whose values align with his. He'd worked with Jim Green for years before Green was elected as a COPE councillor who made buying and developing Woodward's his main goal. Green tells this story about meeting Henriquez: "We'd asked 12 architects to come in and present their ideas on a housing project for street youth. I was there, and this young woman with a shaved head and a nose ring was at the other end of the table. She was the head of the housing committee. Everyone else talked to me, but Gregory came in and made his presentation directly to her. He never looked at me." Henriquez became the architect for what eventually turned into Bruce Eriksen Place, one of Green's favourite projects.
