For my week as guest editor of Price Tags, I intend to view Vancouver from an architectural perspective. To this effect, I will be releasing an interview with an architect, planner, or academic each day. Each person has been selected for his/her unique and timely perspectives on the city. Our discussions will highlight each person’s practice along with their notions of city building and form in Vancouver.
I am on the 18th floor of Bentall One, sitting across from architect Michael-Burton Brown in his company office, ABBARCH. Michael worked on such projects as Park Royal South and Lansdowne Centre before founding ABBARCH in 1979 with Ian Annand, going on to produce many of the region’s most visited shopping districts and stores. Michael has joined me to talk about Vancouver’s urban fabric, the design community, shopping, and the city at large.
Michael Burton-Brown
JB: You were the president of the Architectural Institute of British Columbia (AIBC) between 2001 and 2003. Since your tenure, how has our community of architects changed?
MBB: When I was President, we were trying to “broaden the tent”, because we felt under attack by unlicensed individuals. We wanted to bring in unlicensed architects and interior designers into our registration system. Without regulating these practitioners we can’t protect the public from poor design decisions. It wasn’t achieved. The Architect’s Act still allows unlicensed designers to build projects under a certain size; we wanted to mandate that any new building should have an architect.
The act is there to protect the public from unqualified designers, not to monopolize the market. The whole thing had bad optics, though. The government wouldn’t have it.
I was also the President during the leaky condo crisis, which also had very bad optics for architects. The government mandated the design and maintenance regimes in these condos; the architects were simply following the building code (which has since been revised thoroughly). The combination of poor design embedded in the code plus no maintenance resulted in the crisis.
JB: You were trained at the Liverpool Polytechnic School of Architecture. How did training at a polytechnic influence one’s career in comparison to the Masters of Architecture degrees required today?
MBB: A polytechnic is a craft school. There was emphasis on traditional architecture, drawing, and building. We had a brick-laying and plastering class. We had to make real arches and walk on them. We learned how to cut bricks. The benefit of this form of teaching is that the students leave school with a much stronger understanding of the fundamentals of building.
JB: You were involved with the design of such massive shopping malls as Park Royal South and Oakridge Mall. How have these malls changed since their inception?
MBB: Commercial buildings, like malls, are a model for the exchange of goods and services. This has been unchanged for thousands of years. We have trucks instead of horses now, and recently people have been driving less, however the base model remains the same.
What does change is the market. When we were designing Park Royal South in the 70’s everyone drove but it was no longer affordable to do big, open parking lots (we did tiered parking). Today we can now cut our required parking stalls down by half because of transit and home delivery.
More people shop from home now, but there will always be a place for high-street (like Robson Street) and indoor malls (like Park Royal). Malls like the Burlington Arcade and the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II have been active for a very long time. Strip-malls on the other hand are becoming marginalized. There are few places left where you can afford the space to build like that. New strip-malls are trying to hybridize with the high-street model of shopping.
Oakridge and Park Royal will not become obsolete because they provide services that one cannot find online. There are social aspects to good malls. Malls like these are trying to be places that people want to be. For example, Nordstrom has a bar in it. Another example is that in the 70s malls had no benches, to keep people shopping. Now, malls have lots of oases for people to lounge in.
JB: Your firm, ABBARCH, carries a substantial amount of work that involves repetition. For example, you have done multiple car dealerships, malls, and offices. How does the model differ for this type of work in comparison to the unique projects seen showcased in our magazines and newspapers?
MBB: Early on we were identified as good architects to deliver reliable buildings. Repeating work is a good business model but we did not seek to do it. We sought to make a living. Vancouver is a filing cabinet, and the community here only calls upon the firms that are the best at what they do. Once we started doing work of this type, it pigeonholed us forever after. It is still like this in Vancouver today.
We branded ourselves as a “people’s architecture” or “housekeeping architecture”. We serve most everyday needs. If you look at medieval and roman cities they are mostly background fabric, and that is what we produce. The icons in those cities needed the fabric to stand out. Imagine a sea of icons; it would be overstimulating and too expensive.
JB: As a “fabric maker”, what role does an office such as yours play in the architecture community?
MBB: We provide consistency, quality, and financial stability. We are a training ground for giving fundamental skills to young architects. It is inevitable that economically-driven offices like ours exit, look at any creative field: we all wanted to be rockstars. We realized we couldn’t all be rockstars. Some of us learned to live with it. We always saw ourselves as a “Bar Band” playing small venue gigs rather than concert halls and big auditions.
JB: Do you have any particular soap box that frustrates you when it comes to architecture and urbanism in Vancouver?
MBB: I love this city, however for me it is difficult because of the cozy relationship between the planning department and the architectural elite. It’s partially my fault because when I got here I consciously decided not to participate in that system. My firm would have never been allowed to get away with the elements cantilevered over the adjacent street, but it got built because of the way the community works.
JB: Defining Vancouver’s heritage architecture has been a recent topic of discussion. What does heritage architecture mean to you?
MBB: Heritage architecture is not anything that manages to survive longer than 20 years. Heritage architecture should say “this is special because it has irreplaceable qualities.” In Britain, we knocked down 500 year-old buildings if they were bad.
JB: If you could make any intervention into the fabric of Vancouver, what would you add, subtract, or modify?
MBB: It would be nice to help bring about a richer texture to the city. It will happen in time, it is already much richer than when I moved here in 1974. I grew up in Liverpool, which had tiny magic alleys and big splendid civic squares. At the moment we have neither.
You can learn more about Michael and his office’s work on their website: abbarch.com
