From Gene Miller, our Victoria correspondent, wh0 can write about anything with flare – especially when architecture does the same:
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Casa Blanca
Gene Miller
An excerpt from FOCUS Magazine, December, 2012
Shutters, the improbably white and unexpectedly sinuous condominium building in Songhees (map here), is not so much a building as a sculpture people live in. Proper buildings, after all, are squared up and have right angles. Everyone knows that. And they’re brick-y red, not wedding-cake white. So, let’s study this one-off that flaunts all of Victoria’s unwritten cultural code regarding colour and shape of buildings, and that seems not so much to have been built as to have landed.
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Shutters was undertaken by Ian Gillespie’s Westbank Developments in Songhees, and designed by Vancouver architect James Cheng. It is the most architecturally flamboyant building in Victoria, all nerve, curve, brazen performance and exhibitionism.
Shutters is entirely sun-loving, care-free and sea-cruise, and has taken its cues from Miami Beach, cribbing some of its design pedigree from architect Morris Lapidus’ Fountainbleu Hotel (below). 
I take slight liberties in describing it as a mismatched pair of single-loaded (units extend fully across the building) punctuation marks—a nine-storey comma and a six-storey parenthesis—on a roughly two-acre site in Songhees—to-date, the only building ‘over there’ to suggest that it might actually be fun to live at the edge of the ocean.
The buildings share in common a resort-size pool that sits almost invisibly on an elevated patio space. Overall, the project scandalizes its grumpy, beige-painted or red shingle-hatted neighbours, and colour and shape-wise in Songhees comes off like a unicorn picking its way through a chivvying herd of hippos.
It’s an impossibly jazzy and sexy development, as dazzling, distracting and disconcerting as Marilyn Monroe captured by Cecil Beaton’s camera in gauzy white petticoats, 
or Marilyn standing on a windy grate, her white dress billowing sculpturally in the updraft…and…and enjoying it!
Shutters’ two building curves have been set on axes roughly at right angles to each other, and as you walk around the site, more of one building is revealed as the curve of the other recedes—a photographer’s dream and an urban aesthete’s delight. It’s interesting that in a city whose developers and builders will swear that every angle, jut-out, and deviation from the geometery of four straight walls spells financial ruin for the project, Shutters is nothing but circumference.
The building is called Shutters because of a repeated design motif of repeated quartets of white-painted louvered shutters that have been staggered from one floor to the next on the exterior walkways of each storey. Funny, actually, to have named so glassy and transparent a building after an object intended for opacity and privacy. Shutters wears all of its circulation systems on the outside: glass columns enclose its numerous elevators and stairs; and its wide exterior entrance corridor makes occupants visible when they leave their front doors. The slightly hypnotic and spacey effect as people pop out of their homes, walk the corridors and visibly descend in glass-walled elevators is a bit like watching something from Second Life or a video animation.
A friend who lives in the building informs me that short bridges cross a narrow void between the elevators and the curving walkways that lead to front doors. He suggests that the act of crossing over is a profound and dramatic event, akin to stepping across the gangway between dock and cruise ship: you leave the world behind and step into a new one.
With room to burn, the building sports a graceful and remarkably spacious lobby filled with designer-istically geometric, furniture showroom-like white-and-chrome seating and table arrangements, bathed in a faint aqua glow from its glass walls. I note this because so many of our recent buildings, facing both cost and security concerns, seem to have opted for a penitentiary aesthetic featuring miserly lobby spaces and the lockdown look.
On its lower south-facing side, Shutters rises glassily out of a low cliff of raw Songhees rock, emphasizing its crystalline grace. The landscape designer has lopsidedly dropped in a copse of white birches to one side of the main building entrance. Nice! In its totality the building must leave occupants happily confused about whether life’s a bummer or a vacation, and humming along with Tony Bennett, “Where am I? I’m a stranger in Paradise.”
In that vein, Victoria’s countless thousands of urban critics habitually bemoan how ego and idiosyncrasy invariably get boiled out of major developments because in the development field flamboyance is equated with cost and risk, if not outright mental imbalance. Westbank is a major developer, yet Ian Gillespie, the company’s president, presumably with his banker’s and investor’s approbation, has installed something eccentric and unexpected in virtually every one of Westbank’s buildings, often with great success—notably, the beautifully controlled The Falls on Douglas Street and his many projects in Vancouver including the Flatiron Building-like Woodwards tower in Gastown, the Fairmont Pacific Hotel and condominium tower near the new harbourfront convention centre, and the planned Beach and Howe Tower by BIG (the very hot Dutch architects Bjarke Ingles Group), a completely insane architectural tour-de-force that will rise between some of the Granville Street Bridge on-ramps and that looks in renderings, unnervingly, like it will fall over in a strong breeze or a tremor.
While the Bay building re-purposed as The Hudson stands in creamy, off-white splendour, and smaller white buildings, homes and such, dot the Victoria landscape, Shutters and the tower portion of the eponymously named The 834 at 834 Johnson Street remain the city’s two major residential studies in white. Not enough to nudge our city toward Mediterranean bliss. We may have to wait for the full-on local effects of global warming (tropical palms, a hot sun, blondes in bathing suits) before we shake off Edinburgh and embrace Miami.
Can Shutters be faulted for not respecting its context? Probably not. Ex-industrial Songhees itself has been a-historical—Victoria’s ‘wild west’ where almost anything goes (and has gone). No reminders of our civic history excepting the nearby railroad roundhouse, car barns, assorted stores buildings and rusting railyard tracks remain to be offended.
Can it be faulted for being capricious, or overly self-congratulatory about its daring curves and good looks? These are hard questions to answer without tumbling down the rabbit hole into a swamp of architectural semiotics. Last time I tried, I broke my leg and almost drowned. What I sense—without knowing the mind of its developer—is that Shutters and Gillespie’s other clever and playful projects are not at all synthetic, Las Vegas products (Egyptian pyramids, castles, faux villas, etc.) but serious attempts to express a new architectural language—a mix of technical daring and design brio intended to bring character to large and tall buildings, and not just the iconic skyscrapers, but all.
Last, can Shutters be faulted for being too curvaceous, provocative and white in a city of well-behaved, soberly coloured cubes?
Hey, do fish walk?
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The full article will be available in Focus Magazine in February.
I think this hotel was also in the James Bond Goldfinger movie.
This is one of the most disappointing architectural reviews I have ever read. And one of the more disappointing buildings, in my opinion. And I’ll explain why:
The building itself is certainly not ugly, and it does a good job of maximizing the views of the water for the residents. In fact, it’s probably a great place to live if you can afford it. Good views, lots of balconies, good location. And while I feel the mediterranean style, all-glass finish and colours to be a bad fit for the temperate rainforest climate of British Columbia, that’s a matter of tastes and I can overlook that aspect of the review.
There are some design problems I can’t overlook, however.
First is the way the project turns its back onto Kimta Road. Yes, there are townhouses, but all you see walking past the building is a large hedge. There is no interaction with that street, or any of the streets that the building fronts onto, giving the condo the feel of a gated castle perched upon a hill of Victoria bedroom with a drawbridge to keep the hordes out. This is in stark contrast to the new projects built a short walk away on Tyee road, not only front the main street but interact with it.
In that sense, the isolation the building has from its environment makes it much like a Toronto-style slab tower-in-the-park, except on acid. It’s too suburban for the neighbourhood that is in essence an urban, inner-city community, and that suburbanness makes it feel less safe, too, for people walking alone at night.
The review is right in one area that the building feels more like a resort than a home. But life isn’t a resort, or shouldn’t be at least. Being in a home is about being in a community, not a castle, and that’s what makes it home.
In the end, the uniformity of the design and the bland colour-scheme also adds to the feeling that this is a theme-park and not a community, and the suburban quality I keep coming back to. There’s nothing interesting, nothing out of the ordinary. Yes, the building is curved, but aside from that it conforms to every rule, and everything is in its place, and is almost reserved, formal in my eyes. The street lacks that mixed-use vitality that again is evident just a few blocks away on Tyee, where residential buildings abut against offices and retail. That’s hardly perfect, but it’s a complete community.
An even better example of what could have been can be found north of the Bay Street Bridge on Raynor, up against the Galloping Goose Trail, where ultra-modern low-rise condos and townhouses intermingle with kayak rentals while beautifully interacting with both the rock that’s so common in Victoria as well as the street in an urban manner, whereas the only place Shutters interacts with the street is where the parking garage exits.
The author barely touches on the concerns and only appears to address the concerns he feels he can most easily brush aside. I mean, “Can it be faulted for being capricious, or overly self-congratulatory about its daring curves and good looks?” Come on. And while we may not expect every building to respect the historical context, what about the existing context? What about the existing neighbourhood? And that’s what I find disappointing.
I have to agree with Tessa. I also have to point out that there is a good reason we don’t have Miami-paletted buildings here. Walk around Vancouver — light coloured buildings all look decrepit within a few years from mildew and moss. Architecture should respect its context and climate. Fairview saw the disaster of importing design from dry and sunny California — millions spent fixing leaky condos.