Architects and Architecture of Greater Vancouver
by Sean Rossiter
Some say that any work of human hands in Vancouver’s setting detracts from its natural splendor. But these opinions run in cycles. Captain George Vancouver, upon seeing Burrard Inlet in 1792, thought that it “requires only to be enriched by the industry of man with villages, mansions, cottages, and other buildings to render it the most lovely country that can be imagined ...”
The dust jacket of Alan Morfey’s Vancouver, from Milltown to Metropolis, published in 1961 to commemorate the city’s 75th birthday, shows a painting of Captain Vancouver’s statue at city hall in which the captain is pointing toward the city’s latest landmark, one of the most ambitious buildings attempted in Vancouver up to then, the three-year-old Main post Office. It appears to loom at the north end of the old Cambie Bridge, a rickety timber structure with a swinging centre span.
With the Downtown peninsula’s tallest structure in 1961 being the B.C. Hydro Building, the North Shore was almost entirely visible from city hall. Of course this cover was meant to depict the metropolis of the book’s title. Yet the entire middle ground, False Creek, was still an industrial sewer lined with mills. Vancouver may have been a metropolis, but it was also still a milltown in 1961.
Vancouver did not change much from the eve of World War I to 1966. “In 1913,” Morley wrote, “a photograph taken at Hastings and Granville Streets, looking south on Granville, was scarcely distinguishable in its main features from one taken today . . .”
Only 25 years later the same scene had been utterly transformed. In 1986 the north shore of False Creek was the site of Expo 86. If anything, Vancouver has only changed more rapidly since then.
Four building booms, two before World War I and two during the past 30 years, account for the Vancouver depicted on the cover of Morley’s book--and the city that, during the early 1990s, was the fastest-growing on the continent outside of the Sun Belt.
The most recent of these booms is the post-Expo 86 Downtown residential boom that continues to fill the empty spaces around the edges of Vancouver’s Downtown peninsula and marches northward from False Creek through Yaletown to Chinatown. It will replace the core’s onetime industrial areas with highly designed condominium towers that will house many of the 40,000 newcomers flooding into Greater Vancouver annually during the early 1990s.
Each boom had its outstanding architects--more often than not commercial architects working in well-established styles mastered elsewhere and brought with them to a place still under construction. While it was possible to say, as Morley did in 1961, that “Vancouver is the work of one human lifetime,” it is also true that it took that long for distinctive architecture to emerge in Vancouver.
That year, 1961, was the turning point. The history of Vancouver architecture consists of everything before Arthur Erickson and everything after. In 1961 Erickson and Woodrow Wilson “Bud” Wood were teaching a more design-oriented architectural approach at the University of Oregon. Erickson was already designing houses in Vancouver that he regarded as experiments; one, for example, entirely out of concrete blocks. Wood became perhaps the most important design mentor at the University of British Columbia’s architecture school over three decades.
Ron Thom, the outstanding designer in Vancouver before Erickson, was off to Toronto that year to build Massey College and thus become the first local architect with a national practice. Thom was a prot g of the most influential architect ever to work in Vancouver, C.E. “Ned” Pratt whose firm, Thompson Berwick Pratt & Partners, had by then become the dominant office in the city.
The founders of many of today’s important firms were either working for Pratt or about to work for Erickson in 1961. Five years later Simon Fraser University, the “instant university” designed by Erickson and his partner Geoff Massey on Burnaby Mountain, would for the first time utilize many of the city’s talents under the umbrella of Erickson’s innovative competition-winning scheme for SFU.
Erickson is the supreme cultural personality ever to emerge in this city. Such a figure is usually the culmination of a slow, time-consuming process of gradual development.
The first generation of Vancouver architects built Gastown and its immediate surroundings in the styles of the time, with the fire-resistant materials mandated by most North American cities. They consisted of load-bearing masonry walls--usually cut stone but brick when available--with heavy timbers used as interior columns and rafters. Most often the style was Italianate with hand-cut lintels and thresholds and elaborate cornices. The Vancouver master of this style was Nathaniel Stonestreet Hoffar, who held two degrees from Washington’s Georgetown University. Hoffar was the city’s first important architect. He built much of the 300-block of East Cordova (including the Army & Navy Store and the Home Block) and the Yale Hotel on Granville. Like subsequent key architects of major booms, Hoffar rode the one that ended in 1894 to considerable personal wealth. His descendants owned the shipyard on Coal Harbour where Vancouver’s first airplane, the H-I flying boat, was built. During the 1920s the shipyard became Boeing of Canada.
The next boom, “Vancouver’s Golden Years of Growth,” lasted from 1907 fo 1913. In those six years the financial district along West Hastings that persisted into the 1970s was largely completed. Toward the end of that boom, buildings constructed only blocks from each other successively claimed to be the tallest in the British Empire: first J.S. Helyer’s idiosyncratic 13- storey Dominion Trust Building at Hastings and Cambie and then W.T. Whiteway’s 17-storey World Building of 1911-12 (now Sun Tower) at Beatty and Pender, financed by Louis D. Taylor, publisher of the World and, the city’s longest-serving mayor.
Whiteway, from Newfoundland, was an important early century architect in Vancouver. Among his works is The Landing, formerly the Kelly Building, begun in 1905 and rehabilitated by Soren Rasmussen in 1988.
As is still the case it helps for an architect to have steady work from a developer J.E. Parr & Thomas Fee, the most prolific architects of the pre-World War I boom, built The Orillia (1903, demolished 1985); the Manhattan Apartments on Thurlow at Robson (1907); the first reinforced- concrete structure in Vancouver, the Europe Hotel (1908); the Vancouver Block at 736 Granville (1910) and many other white-tiled buildings along Granville Street. Their patron was W. Lamont Tait, a lumber wholesaler, for whom Parr & Fee did one of the first mansions in Shaughnessy Heights, “Glen Brae” (1911), now the Canuck Place Children’s Hospice (renovated 1993-95 by Downs-Archambeault) .
Even then, when architects in a city that saw itself as a future Liverpool of the Pacific were imitating Europe, there were the beginnings of a local--or at least regional--style. Carl F. Gould was a Seattle architect who had mastered that city’s terracotta material--glazed tiles formed into classical details with weather-resistant qualities appropriate to this climate. When the worldwide collapse of lumber prices in 1910 ended Seattle’s boom, Gould and other architects travelled the short distance north to Vancouver where higher prices persisted because of B.C.’s access to British markets. Gould’s Rogers Building (1911-12) at 470 Granville is one sumptuous example of what architects from a more sophisticated city could do in booming Vancouver.
The foremost talent to come north--indeed the supreme talent of Vancouver’s pre-war boom--was Woodruff Marbury Somervell. Somervell came to Seattle from New York in 1904 to supervise construction of a cathedral, stayed to build several hospitals and a dozen-odd homes on the U.S. Register of Historic Places, then brought his romantic Mediterranean styles to Vancouver in 1910. Sugar king B.T. Rogers’ mansion, “Shannon” (1912-15); the terracotta Birks Building (1912-13, demolished 1974); and the elegant pair of buildings at Abbott and West Hastings, the Merchant’s Bank and the B.C. Electric Railway Company edifice, are Somervell’s forgotten legacy. He also left behind the blueprints for the Toronto-Dominion Bank at Hastings and Seymour (built as the Union Bank in 1920) when he went off to World War I.
Somervell’s only rival at the height of the 1907-13 boom was Thomas Hooper, whose masterwork is the Winch Building of 1908-09 (now part of Sinclair Centre on Hastings at Granville), the kind of well-financed commercial building that only appears toward the end of a boom. Many feel that Hooper’s south facade of Francis Rattenbury’s courthouse of 1906-12 (now the featured elevation of Arthur Erickson’s Vancouver Art Gallery) is superior to Rattenbury’s grander Georgia Street side.
But the pre-World War I boom’s most lasting legacy, aside from the buildings, was a firm of architects formed in 1908 that persisted for nearly 80 years. Charles Joseph Thompson was the firm’s businessman and George Lister Thornton Sharp its designer-draftsman. Both were capable architects, Thompson the nuts-and-bolts chap and Sharp the artist. Sharp and Thompson’s future was guaranteed when they won a competition to design the University of British Columbia in 1912. Such civic landmarks as the Vancouver Club (1912-14), the Cenotaph at Victory Square (1924)--on the site of the original courthouse by N.S. Hoffar--and the galleries of the Burrard Bridge (1930-32) all testify to Sharp & Thompson’s ability to get work and execute it in a variety of styles.
Sharp and Thompson’s first use of concrete as a structural material was for the clergy-house of St. James Anglican parish in 1927; their association with Sir Adrian Gilbert Scott on the parish’s third church at Gore and Cordova Streets produced, in Arthur Erickson’s estimation, the finest building in Vancouver.
Ned Pratt, a bronze medal winner in pairs rowing at the 1932 Olympics and an engineering student at the University of Toronto, would take the firm to new heights after meeting Thompson in 1937 while courting his daughter Esme. He met his future partner Bob Berwick, also at U of T, at the Thompson tennis court and Berwick persuaded Pratt to switch to architecture.
After a war spent building air force installations along the B.C. coast, Pratt returned to a city little changed from the pre-World War I Vancouver. Sharp & Thompson’s great rivals were Townley and Matheson, the leading civic architects, and McCarter and Nairne, the foremost designers of highrise office buildings.
Townley and Matheson, both of whom studied architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, became the city’s finest practitioners of the Deco Moderne style, which they applied to the second Stock Exchange Building (1928-29) and Vancouver City Hall (1935-36). They built much of the former Vancouver General Hospital, including its exquisite Children’s Health Centre (1944) and its Centennial Pavilion (1956-58) as well as the regrettable Public Safety Building on Main Street.
McCarter Nairne and Partners gave the city its foremost deco skyscrapers, the Marine Building (1931) and the Medical-Dental Building (1929, demolished 1989) on Georgia Street. The new Main Post Office that Capt. Vancouver’s statue points to on the cover of Alan Morley’s 1961 book was an impressive technical achievement in 1958 (project architect: Bill Leithead), and the firm survived into the 1980s working with distinguished outsiders, such as Victor Gruen of Los Angeles on Pacific Centre (1969-76), the most ambitious construction project undertaken in Vancouver up to that time.
Sharp and Thompson evolved into Thompson Berwick Pratt and Partners, a multi-disciplinary firm that outlasted both of its rivals by producing two generations of great designers who rode the post-war institutional boom in schools, banks, hospitals and transportation facilities. Ned Pratt’s TBP&P became known as the West Coast graduate school of architecture, a finishing course for all but a few of the finest architects of Vancouver’s last quarter-century.
A few of the “graduates” who founded other major firms include Ron Bain and Ken Burroughs (False Creek South and Lethbridge University for Erickson/Massey); Barry Downs and Richard Archambault (Carnegie Centre, Canada Place); Norman Hotson, Joost Bakker and Mike Geary (Granville Island, 2211 West Fourth); Geoff Massey and Arthur Erickson; and Joe Wai (Sun Yat-sen Chinese Classical Garden).
Among the important TBP&P partners were administrative partner John Dayton, who did Bank of Montreal branches ("Oh, about 150 anyway"); Roy Jessiman (Buchanan Building, UBC); engineer Otto Safir, whom Pratt calls the real author of the B.C. Hydro Building; and Zoltan Kiss (Vancouver International Airport, 1968).
There is a direct line of design influence from Pratt through Ron Thom to Paul Merrick, who developed his own variation of Thom’s gothic style, and Brian Hemingway who, with Merrick, won a Governor General’s Award for their Officer Training School at CFB Chilliwack. Oddly enough Pratt, one of the first champions of modern architecture in provincial post-war Vancouver, begat a line of romantic architects whose primary design influences, aside from Frank Lloyd Wright, were medieval cathedrals.
Pratt was instrumental in launching the modern era in house design by doing the drawings for artist B,C. Binnings’ largely self-designed West Vancouver house in 1940. Pratt’s own work is highlighted by the War Memorial Gymnasium at UBC (1947, with Fred Lasserre) and the Dal Grauer Substation on Burrard Street (1954, with Jim White).
Ron Thom was the culmination of the pre-Arthur Erickson era in Vancouver architecture. Many architects are failed artists. Thom was an exceptional artist who turned to architecture--the first of the arts to fully mature in Canada, historian Alan Gowans says--after meeting Richard Neutra during the Los Angeles architect’s visit to Vancouver in 1947. Though fundamentally a pupil of Frank Lloyd Wright and an apprentice of Ned Pratt’s until 1958, Thom had by then already succeeded in marrying the horizontal Wright house with the West Coast climate to move B.C. residential design into a league of its own. Although Erickson had designed a few houses already, he only began turning out houses incorporating his own ideas around 1961.
By then Ron Thom was off to Toronto. It was as if there had been some symbolic handoff of design leadership. Each architect would extend the ideas he has explored in house design to bigger and bigger projects; Thom in Ontario, Erickson here. The pressure of such projects as Trent University took their toll on Thom, who drank his way from marriage to marriage and partner to partner. Meanwhile Erickson organized around himself a design and planning talent greenhouse capable of such challenges as the complex that includes Robson Square and Vancouver’s new courthouse.
It was Erickson who became the most famous native of Vancouver until Bryan Adams. It was Erickson who completed the process of devising an architecture that was so specific to the city’s climate that it could be said to be a Vancouver architecture. Concrete is Erickson’s marble, partly because he believes Vancouver’s grey climate cannot take bright colors. Glass canopies are an Erickson trademark for the same reason. Feature staircases are Erickson’s response to building on slopes, although he covered much of the Robson Square, an essentially horizontal composition, with stairs to give public access to what became, in 1976, Vancouver’s central town square. One local masterpiece incorporating these ideas is the Museum of Anthropology at UBC (1973-76).
If, as with Ned Pratt, we calculate Erickson’s output as more than buildings, we can foresee his direct influence continuing well into the next century Its outlines are already apparent. Expo 86 was the turning point for Vancouver as a home for international investment and Erickson’s first and second major disciples made significant contributions to that epochal fair.
Bruno Freschi was Expo’s planner; with engineer Bogue Babicki, who came up with the basic concept, he designed its generic pavilion and left what is now Vancouver’s Science Centre as its keynote building. Bing Thom, Erickson’s project architect on the Robson Square complex, designed five pavilions (including the award-winning Northwest Territories’ entry) for Expo.
Expo was a terrible disappointment for Erickson. His proposal for a retractable-roof theatre at mid-site, with its stage overlooking False Creek, was supplanted by Waisman Dewar Grout’s $54 million B.C. Pavilion. After a post-Expo adventure in Los Angeles doing that city’s huge Bunker Hill development, Erickson returned for a second career in his hometown, which appropriately included more major buildings for the SFU campus he originated 30 years before.
The architect who rode the 1966-82 boom to commercial success was Frank Musson, whose Musson Cattell Mackey (MCM) firm reoriented Downtown Vancouver from its east-west Georgia Street axis to north-south along Burrard. This change was envisioned by C.B.K, Van Norman, who began the move to that street with his Burrard Building (completed 1957) while simultaneously pushing for the relocation of the Central Library to Burrard. (He lost the commission to Vancouver’s finest International Style designers, Semmens and Simpson). A staff architect from England with Semmens and Simpson and the Bentall family’s Dominion Construction firm, Musson and his partner Terry Cattell were natural choices to build Bentall Centre (1966-82), four towers that formed the biggest superblock development in Western Canada. MCM were involved in almost every development from West Georgia to the waterfront, including the Governor General’s Award-winning 888 West Hastings (1980); that boom’s outstanding commercial building, Park Place (1982); and Canada Place (1985, designed by Toronto’s Zeidler-Roberts Partnership with Downs-Archambault).
Vancouver’s two biggest firms in 1995 were Aitken-Wreglesworth Associates (AWA) and Waisman Dewar Grout Carter, both founded by Winnipeggers, both numbering at their peaks, 50-odd employees. Winnipeg has long exported the cream of its architects to Vancouver. Both firms did innovative, clean work soon after arriving (AWA’s Seimens Building, SFU’s Downtown campus; Waisman’s Martello Tower apartments in the West End) but lost their edge as their founders became more interested in self-improvement and corporate management programs. In a bid to strengthen its design side AWA engaged Erickson as a consultant and got work at both Lower Mainland universities, including a massive consolidation of UBC’s library facilities. But Erickson was not enough to save the big firm. In 1995 Waisman and AWA merged and became Architectura with Clive Grout as chief designer.
The most celebrated pure designer in Vancouver at the time of the mid-nineties slowdown was Richard Henriquez, another ex-Winnipegger. Henriquez, originally from the West Indies, had done innovative work for Rhone & Iredale (Sedgewick Library, UBC, 1971-72) and blossomed on his own with several highly celebrated projects. They included the consolidation of four Downtown heritage buildings into Sinclair Centre (1983-86, with Toby, Russell, Buckwell & Partners); the Sylvia Hotel Extension (1987) and, more recently, a Student Activities Centre gymnasium at UBC, paid for by the students themselves. It sits across a field from Ned Pratt’s War Memorial Gym, on an architecturally mediocre campus, as a kind of summary of Vancouver architecture since World War II--and ample evidence that good architecture begets more of the same.
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