It was an evening of openings. But at the centre of last Friday’s launch of the Woodward’s co
mplex was Trevor Boddy’s exhibition on Vancouverism, originally curated for London and Paris, featuring the best examples of Vancouverism expressed in architecture.
That exhibition still occupies the atrium at the centre of Woodward’s – and is well worth the trip and the time.
Boddy argues that too much credit has been given to or taken by planners and politicians for the evolution of Vancouverism – the point-and-podium tower that serves as architectural shorthand for a way of urban design that has captured international attention. In particular, he argues, it was Arthur Erickson, who, “with a single visionary 1955 sketch … (of) a hyper-concentrated downtown of soaring residential towers on continuous street-flanking bases” provided the idea, the form and the rendering of what became Vancouverism.
“Plan 56,” if built, would presumably have led to the demolition of the deteriorating housing stock of the West End, and the rehousing of the population in vast megastructures mounted at the height of land, rising from there.
It was a good time to be thinking big. 
Up at City Hall, the English planners were writing the regulations that would become the city’s first zoning and development bylaw, shaping the post-war building frenzy that would indeed transform the West End. Passed in 1956, the bylaw allowed for the construction, by the dozens, of the concrete highrises that were arguably the first phase of Vancouverism.
But here’s where I disagree with Trevor. These highrises were discrete and small in scale (only 2 to 3 FSR – the way the bylaw measured destiny). 
They were not the megastructures that had captured the architectural imagination well before Erickson, promoted by architectural philosophers from Corbusier to Soleri, illustrated by Hugh Ferriss in the 192os. Erickson, when he had the opportunity with the winning design for Simon Fraser University, embraced the megastructure in a way that is still contentious.
The West End highrises, on the other hand, fitted into the 19th-century grid: narrow streets, narrow lots, each block divided by a lane – not the superblocks that Erickson’s Plan 56 would have required.
The West End of today, largely completed by 1972, departs from Erickson’s vision so significantly that Plan 56’s connection to Vancouverism is tenous indeed. The podium concept that characterizes the slightly larger highrises of Downtown South, Coal Harbour and False Creek North could more accurately be traced to Barry Downs work in North Park (the precurser to International Village), James Cheng’s Cambridge Gardens at City Square, or John Perkin’s designs for CityGate, the first real megaproject after Expo.
They all had their antecedents in the West End, in the highrises so indistinguishable that many had no architects of record. Except at least two. Harley House and Sutton Place, two painted concrete towers, rise from the height of land in the 1200-block Nelson – and we know the name of that architect.
Arthur Erickson.
http://regardingplace.com/?p=1895#more-1895