I once visited a exhibit of designs of cities done by architects in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. After looking at the designs done by people from all over the world, I decided that architects should never be allowed to design cities.

I like where Trevor Boddy is going with this 'Dialogue of Cities' anti-conference. He is right: The World Urban Forum's collection of politicians, lobbyists, environmentalists, social cause types, and planners will contribute zero to cities in general, and Vancouver in particular.

However, my suspicion is that Boddy's little party will be just as undemocratic as the WUF, maybe moreso.

The WUF, I believe, is free and open to the public. Can the same be said for The Dialogue of Cities at MOA?

The problem with many architects in Vancouver is that they give us projects that are architecture-friendly, but not people friendly.

Let's start with Arthur Erickson's SFU campus or Robson Square. Yes, the coupling of concrete with greenery with bold angles makes a statement, and provides good fodder for architecture coffee table books. But what about the people that use these facilities?

Are the students at SFU getting the same kind of collegial environment as, say, Western Ontario or Guelph or U-Michigan?

At the end of the day (and especially during the rainy ones), concrete is cold and impersonal and uninspired. No wonder the kids downtown are all hanging out on Robson Street instead of Robson Square.

But at least Erickson and his ilk were visionaries.

In Yaletown, we have a forest of non-descript, colourless highrises. Worse, in the suburbs we get the Yaletown-knockoff -- essentially a Yaletown tower set next to a Skytrain station.

Some park designers are hell-bent on public art at the expense of swing sets and slides. No wonder kids don't want to spend time in Vancouver's parks. They may be esthetically pleasing, but they're boring.

Then there's the soccer stadium. We now have a collection of architects and civic leaders campaigning against what would be a strong addition to an otherwise underwhelming downtown waterfront. No, it's not a concert hall or a theatre or an art gallery, it's a sporting stadium. And you know what? People like sports. A Whitecaps game is a fun place to unwind for a working stiff. The location would make it accessible to all of the region. And yet it's about to go the way of the Vancouver Grizzlies.

You've made some great points, Observer. And Robson Square and SFU are good illustrations. Their design ethic is beautiful, but that's not all that needs to go into the mix is it.

In debating campus design, it's often been remarked that for all its cutting-edge design SFU has (or had - not sure where the numbers are at now) the highest campus suicide rate of any PSE institution in Canada. Many have suggested co-factors such as geographic isolation as well as the post-modern design of the campus; it has no gravitational centre, no "people gathering" ethic, and it reinforces ambient feelings of individual isolation, dislocation, and alienation with one's surroundings.

...It makes great sets of Sci Fi t.v. series tho...!

That's why I'm in favour of what UBC is trying to do with its "University Boulevard" and "University Town" projects. It suffers from some of the same design probelms as SFU. Nothwithstanding some of the obnoxious and underhanded politics & personalities that have been part of the whole endeavour (within both the for and against camps), it is going to result in a better campus in the long-run, and will only enhance Vancouver's status as a world class education and research hub.

nightbloom
I take it that wouldn't include knocking down a lot of trees to improve the 'view' though, would it?

nightbloom
Also meant to excoriate you for that odious phrase 'world-class', sorry, I should have done it in one post. Most of the rest of what you've written does make sense although I'm convinced the suicide statistics could be as much the result of living in a cloud as from any architectural associations.

Well, ahem, since burning them down didn't work, a little unscheduled clandestine landscaping seemed to be in order ... (just kidding)

nightbloom
Where you been, man - cutting trees? LOL. Did you see my comments on the latest incident of papal hypocrisy?

I saw it, but I didn't see how you arrived at the "hypcrisy" conclusion in the case you raised. I posted an in-depth reply, which delved into the background of the Marciel Maciel case, but the thread is gone now. There's a lot more wrapped up in that case than meets the eye, and Benedict acted in an appropriate and non-partisan manner.

A pattern is establishing itself with the new Papacy - hard-liners on either side (ultra-conservatives and ultra-liberals) are disenchanted with the middle path he seems to be charting - but the silent majority is pleasantly surprised. Notice Andrew Sullivan's chafing at Benedict's statements at Auschwitz. Even though the statements fall within the norm of scholarly interpretation of the nature of the Holocaust, it just isn't good enough for Andrew. Nothing short of a complete duplication of the NYT Northeastern Seaboard liberal mentality and worldview is acceptable.

I both cases, a highly subjective a priori conclusion - (i.e. Benedict = bad) - has been reached before a fair reading of the context and content of the statements have been attempted.

nightbloom
I could care less for what Sullivan says. There is no way that Benedict can justify letting the German people off the hook as 'victims', period.

Whoever wrote that speech should be fired. You must surely understand why it's hypocritical of the Church's main spokesman to try to provide a justification for the Second World War and Germany's role in it as a case of victimization by the Nazis.

Surely you know enough about Pacelli and the rest of the history of that period to know that the Church is culpable in that area too - although that was not the main thrust of my argument - which was, really, simply to address the content of Benedict's speech at Auschwitz.

I'll look at what Sullivan had to say though.

nightbloom
by the way, the discussion on that thread isn't closed, I just checked. CLick views and scroll down - you obviously haven't read what I posted re Benedict and Auschwitz

No, I think Benedict did the right thing staying on message, not endorsing present-day political analogies, and speaking only in general terms about his responsibility "as a son of the German people". From the blast of overheated hyper-ventilated air now issuing from the Northeastern Press in the U.S., you'd think the poor guy had come out as a Holocaust Denier or something. His reference to the Nazi attempt to kill "the taproot" of Christianity sums up his entire approach to the issue. Remember, this is the same theologian who too the unprecedented initiative of declaring the Hebraic Covenant as co-equal with the Christian one...i.e. essentially a prior arrangement for which Christ's mediation is not required. I know you don't subscribe to any of this, but if you know anything about Christian history you'll recognize what a radical step that is.

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nightbloom, what message do you think that was?

Read that speech again. I've checked Sullivan in the interim and can't say I disagree with his analysis of the rest of the speech.

If Benedict had wanted to stay on a real message he would have acknowledged the historic responsibility of the German people for their actions, coerced or not. Had he done that, it would have been courageous and ground breaking - instead he copped out and blamed Hitler.

I won’t even bring up Pacelli for the moment since I'd call that old news. This was fresh, dyed in the wool hypocrisy of the most blatant kind; worse in a way because he probably doesn’t even understand why it is so offensive.

Time for the church to grow up and for Benedict to recognize where he came from. Most young Germans I know have done so - why can't this old man.

I'm sorry, it just wasn't good enough.

No, I disagree entirely. What you really want is for your voice to issue from Benedict's mouth, just as Andrew Sullivan does.

I've read enough of Ratzinger/Benedict's writings on the subject to know where he's coming from on this.

Anyway, let's keep this conversation on the other thread.....the "Dialogue for Cities" folks probably aren't too interested in this.

Papacy Shmappacy!

From Colin: "I once visited a exhibit of designs of cities done by architects in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. After looking at the designs done by people from all over the world, I decided that architects should never be allowed to design cities."

I am sure Jane Jacobs would have agreed!

As a planner I also agree, and would say that planners have made mistakes too!

What any city designer/planner needs to do first is recognize that they do not have all the answers. In fact, everyone is a designer and planner; and as many people as possible should be informed, interested and take part in city planning and design.

I was in a Faculty of Environmental Design (U of C) for 2 years and few, if any, of the student architects and even some professors, have any idea of the elements that make up a city!

Mostly, for architects, it seems to be about ego!

Every noticed how in the drawings they always have people lounging outside their buildings on the plaza’s but in real life they all look like windswept hinterlands?

One university did things differently, they built the buildings, let the people walk around for a semester and then built the paths where people mainly walked.

Any architect wanting to design a city should first do a case study of Brasilia

http://gosouthamerica.about.com/cs/southamerica/a/BraBrasilia.htm

Doxiadis' visions of immense and grandly-designed megacities, divorced from the earth around them as self-contained worlds of millions, rising above (or sinking into) the landscape or the sea, always struck me as potentially nightmarish to live in.

Depending on density, I suppose, and how much of a natural ecosystem was built to enhance human life within human masses of that size; but it was the inhuman scale of the vision that was most disturbing; the relegating of the individual to a corpuscle, like something in the famous science fiction story The Machine Stops (which George Lucas' first film THX-1138 was partly based upon).

The drawings were beautiful (they were on display at Habitat Forum in '76 ('74?); the engineering still unattainable, I'd think but y'never know these days. Certainly emulated, but never on a truly Doxiadan scale. But as with Brasilia, the spaces could be incredibly bleak. I've been at SFU as a student and still get up there now and then, and was there back in '77-'80 as well; Great drawings, some striking lines (the Main Library and the spaceframe of the mall are archetypal, as opposed to derivative) and some failings (the AQ, the buildings west of the Rotunda. The gardens of the science complex are super-nice and there's some nice terraces on top of the Classroom Complex (now the R.G. Brown bldg I think); but overall it's a rat's maze, socked in with fog and people too crowded to do anything but push each other aside, overworked and without a social life, having to commute at least two hours a day instead of interacting with an academic environment.

The spectacular spaces - the Rotunda roof, the Rotunda, the Main Mall, the AQ Garden, the decks of the CC and Education Bldgs - are empty of people, and the Mall and AQ in particular hit with wind and wet despite the cover available (should be temporarily glassed-in for the winters, panelled at least with windbreaks).

People space it's not. It was an architect's wet dream for a politician's pet project (which backfired on him when it produced leftist radicals) and sure it's classic international stle concept architecture and all that, or whatever it's defined as, but it's a social and cultural disaster as an education space, a space for intellectual community.

The narrow hallways are where all the people are; and they're separated, above and below, by the huge square of the AQ. Crowded, even when wide, and again without much in the way of social space except for the new coffee shop by the Archaelogy Museum and the two lifeless cafeteria spaces by the stairs. The Library is no longer a refuge of quiet but a sea of people yakking on cell phones and workshopping Power Point bulleting for business projects.

And all that's because there's been this emphasis on building office, lab and classroom space (in rougly that order of priority) as opposed to giving some concern for the social and psychological well-being of the product, er, consumer, er, student. The widget. The Maggie Bentson was built by the STudent Society with the intent of being something like SUB at UBC, which despite its looming mass is a big success; but the Admin took over the Maggie Bentson for various student services, including the Registrar and Financial Aid, which used to be in Strand (now peace and quiet for the execs). There's some student society space still, and other non-uni orgs and stores, as well as a food fair; but SUB it's not.

It's a factory, not a community. And it was designed that way, and located that way, and underserviced with housing (deliberately) that way - and also underserviced with parking lots despite the emphasis on commuting and, now, living at home so you can afford the extreme tuition (to pay for all the new office and lab buildings).

Vancouver, to me, is full of architectural atrocities. Many relatively recent ones so bad that the original abomination, the Toronto-Dominion Tower at Howe and Georgia, where once had stood the splendour of the second Hotel Vancouver, and the demolition of the Birks Building at the same time, and the Devonshire and Grovesnor not long after. The old Edwardian uptown was blitzed, with basically only the Bay, the Vancouver Block and the Orpheum left of the old main buildings on upper Granville. Sure, a lot of what got torn down was crap; but the quality of what went up to replace what had been in those key cases was a great loss, and yet now seems fairly banal when compared with other new bits of the city.

Bland glass towers, all alike but for subtleties of shade and shape - the same grey-green glass, infamously forced onto the upper third of the otherwise-sublime (I think so) Wall Centre - repetition of bland motifs, steel trim, jutting bits of steel on some. Coal Harbour and the off-streets in central downtown have lots of residents; do you see them on their streets? What's with that anyway? Of course, such people drive to where they want to go, and nightlife isn't good for high property prices (not in Canada anyway).

The new Vancouver may be shiny, slick and all that - attractive to absentee condo buyers for its quiet and clean nature - but it's without life, without street life, without a skyscape or streetscape worth the name. It's not just architecture that's at fault, of course (licensing by-laws, the various music by-laws for non-licensed establishments etc) and of cour attitudes. But as far as architecture goes, I'd almost say "hands off" to the city and let the architects let their fancies run free, as should have happened with the Wall Centre.

My own pipedream, if I had Bill Gates' or Paul Allen's money, would be to raze the south block of Pacific Centre and rebuild the second Hotel Vancouver.....now that's architecture. Call me old-fashioned if you want, but evocations of the past glories of human existence are so much more visually appealing than the sterile walls of glass and concrete that are dehumanizing what was once a very tasteful and not ungraceful (if soot-grim) Edwardian City.

And could somebody please paint the MacBlo waffel with bright colours, or at least a pastel parfait or a big complex mural or something, and tell Erickson his "concrete is the marble of the future" is a bunch of b.s. The ancient marble buildings of Athens were, by the way, painted in garishly bright blue and red, and were not the shining white columns; naked stone is naked stone, and naked concrete is, well, naked concrete. But I guess it's like serialism in music; shove it down our throats enough and we're supposed to find it beautiful (even though we really don't, ever, except for maybe the Webern Quartets).