A Tour of Vancouver

CS-02 A tour to look at how Vancouver is related to its part of Earth.

The by-line of this article is hard to word. I am trying to simply describe looking at the city in its place in on the coast of what is now called Canada. We cannot assume that most of us include the biosphere properly in our thoughts or respect the character of life and consciousness that Nature created in their actions. To include what is Nature in its collaboration with human will, differentiating between what harmonizes and what is contrary, is facilitated with a gentle mutual recognition of the natural world within each of us.

Whew.

Some of you may say, "It's not complicated. Only you are." Alas.

It is complicated because our language and culture do not include some things that are simple. The difficulty of titling this post, and others that I have and will post, is compounded by the factor of belief. The cultural realm — the public sphere — does not accept some aspects through available language and tradition, so that recognizing them includes contradicting the evidence of their absence. Facts and experience for one person can be taken as belief or delusion for another. We have that a lot in politics these days, for example. Belief becomes irrelevant as experience replaces it.

The tour and the views that I am intending to point to values that many of us do not see. And, if we do see it, the value is not appreciated? How is that not just a subjective point of view and actually true? And finally, once it is appreciated, we can begin to rebuild our approach to the way we make our environments as architecture.

I am going to elaborate on such values in terms of this upcoming tour that is part of the RAIC Conference 2024 taking place this month. I will be sharing the honour of guiding 30 architects along this quest to see differently with Dr. Simoogit Saa Bax Patrick R. Stewart. It is named Contemporary Issues in the Vancouver Context Tour, which was chosen a long time ago before the evolution of the tour began. I would rename it The Biosphere and Spirit of the Place where people live in the traditional Skwxwmú7mesh territory at a Squat called Vancouver. Calling it a 'squat' refers to it being on unceded land. That may be seen a bit harsh, but it makes the point. The local Squamish Nation has traditional stories of their demise down almost to the very last person twice before. The coming of the Europeans is a third time. One can imagine this phase as another deluge in their 10,000 year culture.

The walk will be around the downtown, facing two large bodies of water and a large park that form 3 of the area’s sides. The fourth leg of the tour splits the downtown peninsula through the intense city urbanity on both sides of the road. We begin and end in the middle of that fourth leg at the Sheraton Wall.

This is a composite of online maps and others that shows high tide line in 50-100 years. The blue line is the current high tide shoreline.

The essence of the walk is to experience, to feel, and to learn what this place is, despite the Machine Ages City, by passing through it to places that retain interfaces with the spirit of its place. We can feel what this place can be, is and was, wherever the changes that have come have not irreversibly damaged it. There is a clear difference in what we may feel Vancouver to be when experiencing the water, sky and forest that form the biosphere all around it, remembering that it was continuous throughout the entire territory that the GVRD occupies. The difference is, in fact, stark. It is easy to sense it.

The questioning that I would apply to this realization is, why does this city need to so utterly reject the spirit of the place, its biosphere and its nature? Why must the biosphere be erased where people take over the land? And how can architects harmonize and utilize that spirit, which is essentially love, to prepare architecture more truthfully and more fully? It is not only about better appreciating it, we need to integrate with it, and transform how we practice. This is the necessary new, just as in the late 1800s, when the need to express science and technology began to dawn and some architects felt that need acutely. Simple CO₂ mitigation and climate crisis responses are borne within this.

I may not have the writing skill to express a reason for all this. I have sometimes read that we have mastered our Machine Ages technology. But if that technology and our culture demands astonishing circumstantial damage to the world then how is that mastery? Only if we take it in the narrowest way. How we use nature to provide materials, food and energy is quite brutal. Engineers are very keen on efficiency and the elegance of the solution. But that is not done in humility in harmony with the life of our landscapes. A civil engineer has humility toward gravity and the technical limitations of materials by which structure and elements are formed, but gravity and physical properties cannot be killed. The birds and the insects, the trees and the swampy land, the clean water and air, have been expendable. These are protected more often now, but only in low value places. It is much like when we send ‘low valued’ people to low value places.

Can architecture exist within a relationship with nature that considers it a dumb expendable quantity? I have said before, and it is detailed it in my doctorate, that it can only be the architecture of concealing, or negation — but not in the spiritual sense of 'neti neti' — it is destruction. That does not mean architecture is impossible, but by this approach it vibrates in a catch-22 state, where its presence is in terms of its concealment. That sounds complicated, but I can give examples.

One is the Inukshuk. It is on the shore facing out to the Salish Sea, facing it through English Bay. The fact of its presence is clear and it is a grand expression that supports our life. Who is facilitating that it is there? It is a greeting and a marker of a people and culture that consolidated tax-funded policy and entrenched law has been erasing. That is a strange cocktail of cultural forces indeed. Its cultural place–ment is a concealing revelation.

That vibration can be exciting. A new John Ruskin writing today would be able to describe the intense power and the fierce rightness of domination that we express with our built environment now. It is not without a certain wisdom in its character. The immense energy and weight bound up in a Brutalist concrete Paul Rudolph building does have grace and a certain knowingness. Daniel Libeskind presents his work as a kind of crystalline speculation that balances a kind of equity but is nevertheless demanding of the place, using technological power and materials in a righteous excessiveness. Dumb shining glass towers like gargantuan pieces of jewelry that still reflect the foundry and the smelter of its metal and glass line city streets like so many trophies of the spoils of a war. Is it against nature? Many architects feel the contradiction, but the profession is steadfast in its 19th century foundations, and in being so, it verifies that this is all OK. We sign our contracts and neglect ground breaking change that is possible even within that old format.

Passing through the streets of Vancouver between the tall entities we feel like an ant in a jeweler's showcase. Come to the shore at Third Beach and we feel small there too, while we feel that the immensity of the world is ours. The city is dimensions of immensity. The natural world is immeasurable immensity.