Hello readers of Price Tags! I would first like to thank Gordon for the opportunity to participate as a guest editor and share some of my meandering ideas about Vancouver. My first post on the blog will be an introduction. I hope this short autobiography will help give a sense of how young designers feel about our city and its speculative future.
My name is James Aaron Volpé Bligh. I grew up in a West Coast Modern post-and-beam home in Deep Cove designed by architect John Porter in 1959. My entire family consists of three musicians: one in The Naden Band of the Royal Navy, one in the Little Mountain Brass Band and the 15th Field Artillery Regiment Band, and one has been the Principal Harpist of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra for over thirty years. I am the black sheep. I wanted to design architecture like the home I grew up in. I left Vancouver in 2005 to become a structural engineer at the University of Waterloo.
It did not take long to appreciate that it was architecture, not engineering, which was the field I had intended to pursue. I take solace in the knowledge that most students have drastically switched their degree paths at least once. One to finish what I had started, I completed my Bachelor’s degree and have been branded with the iron ring ever since. Following this, I continued my tenure in Ontario at the University of Toronto’s Daniel’s Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design.
Each passing year of living in Ontario left me more homesick than the last. I wanted to move home, and Vancouver was my only home. I could not imagine living anywhere else. By my tenth year out east I was obsessed with determining why I so sorely missed Vancouver. To complete my Masters in Architecture, I wrote a thesis dissertation aimed at analyzing how phenomena such as place attachment, genus loci, and topophilia were related to the rainy, coastal city I loved.
I learned that my birthplace had come to grip me in environmental, biological, psychological, and sociocultural ways. The environment of other cities (perhaps with Seattle or Portland being an outlier) could not be replicated for me. Neither could my biological acclimatization to the Pacific North West be changed, nor my memories, nor my association with the culture.
The immediate question for me as a designer was whether I could replicate some of these phenomena in the architecture that I worked on. Certainly the works of Arthur Erickson and the West Coast Modern movement have come to represent a fondness for the west coast. What can we learn from this work when we consider today’s architecture and urban form?
As my research continued, I turned from psychology and philosophy to urban studies. I read every book that I could find with the word “Vancouver” in the title. I made a massive model of the downtown city peninsula (which is now on display in the Museum of Vancouver’s latest exhibition: Your Future Home). The more I read about the city, the less rosy and nostalgic I became about what made the city great. I began to see only the mistakes our previous generations had made, or in some cases, luckily escaped making.
Model of Downtown Vancouver – plexiglass, composite starch
I moved home after finishing my degree last year and now my wife and I live in the Woodward’s complex. Today, I work at a design-driven architecture firm in the city. While I hone my skills, I try to advocate for the value of good design. I hope you will find some of my articles insightful, and I hope you think about how design might influence a sense of adoration and fulfillment for our city.
Here we go!
