Worth bringing forward: Ralph Segal’s viewpoint on the City’s contentious view corridors. (For Ralph’s bio, go here.)
.
.
While it is considered, in most circles, heresy to challenge the theory of preserving views to our spectacular mountains, I find the straight-jacket of the present 27 corridors, so adamantly enforced to the exclusion, it seems, of all else, excessive. This, from someone who was their strongest advocate for many years but in 2010 realized their grip was too tight and fought for increased building heights at particular locations (eg. at Bridgehead entries to Downtown) to free up opportunities for towers exhibiting exceptional design excellence as part of the City’s then Higher Buildings Policy review.
I hope one of the new Director of Planning’s first tasks will be to relax the tyranny of the view corridors, particular from those view points visited by perhaps nine people and three dogs per day, for the expressed purpose of opening up opportunities for brilliant architecture that marks on our present uninspired built skyline important, recognized public downtown locations. This can be accomplished without any sacrifice to the power and supremacy of the mountains.
“I hope one of the new Director of Planning’s first tasks will be to relax the tyranny of the view corridors, particular from those view points visited by perhaps nine people and three dogs per day”
Well, that’s a bit melodramatic.
It’s easy to snipe that the policy is inflexible, but you either have a view of the mountains or you don’t. Are you suggesting the City undertake some latent viewing demand analysis to determine the ‘value’ of one protected viewshed over another – perhaps by the number of people who come to feed pigeons at the specific point of origin of each view corridor?
I’m further puzzled by your motivation for this suggestion. The architects in the recent Vancouver Sun article complained primarily about lost revenue from the viewing corridors. This is technically true. Is your desire for larger buildings in support of adding to the supply of residential and commercial space? Or are you offended that we as a City have chosen to occasionally deny ourselves beatific architecture in favour of a shared view of the mountains? Why revise the view corridor policy and what parameters on its flexibility would you propose?
Ralph, your timing seems a tad suspect to me as well, like piling on.
IMO, Co-Director Larry Beasley was certainly the strongest defender of the view corridors, having seen him go toe to toe before council against one of our renown architects who wanted a relatively modest intrusion, and winning.
I’m both amused and bewildered by the claims that it is our height limits that is keeping our architects from striving for and achieving their latent brilliance. Come on!
I certainly hope and indeed trust that our new chief PLANNER – not City ARCHITECT – will have much bigger fish to fry than to be seen to give away a public good (views) for yet another private benefit (ego, profits).
I expected that the number would be closer to zero than nine. But the point is that these viewpoint locations are completely arbitrary, and often located in obscure places where you cannot even safely stand to contemplate the sublime beauty of yonder mountains.
View cones can reduce the allowable height of a building, or cause a building’s ground plane position to shift, or produce various design shenanigans at the crown of a high-rise. No one benefits from this nonsense, and other urban design objectives are sometimes compromised as a result.
Height is always measured from grade, and grade is always changing so there is already a system in place that produces “skyline” variety. And there ought to be height exceptions for significant civic landmark towers.
It would be interesting and perhaps telling if someone with a lot of computing power and patience were to model the building envelope of the downtown peninsula using the parameters of allowable height and view cones. What would this look like, really?
View cone locations might be OK for a geo-cashing game but not for much more than that.
Yes, we really shouldn’t put any checks or balances on what developers can do. They’ve paid for their influence, they should be allowed to enjoy it unrestricted with concern for the greater community.
Yes, you can probably be assured that buildings limited by view cones won’t have peaked roofs or spires.
Will the poor schmo’s that fell for this stunting esthetic engineering for over “20 years” now be able to get a refund as their buildings are dwarfed into insignificance by the new hulks on their blocks?
There are clearly competing “viewpoints” here. We hear all the time that a key part of what makes Vancouver beautiful and why people want to live here is the view of the mountains from across the City. Yet, Vancouver’s film and TV industry use its “anonymous buildings that can stand in for anywhere” in countless productions.
The designated view cone spots could have been better chosen, there could have been more or less of them across other areas of the city and so on, but that’s lost details now.
Once Upon a Time, the City spoke of both preserving a view of the mountains and maintaining an interesting skyline (domed downtown core, “landmark” buildings as key spots”, etc). But, do you find today’s skyline “interesting” decades later? What about the iconic landmarks? You can barely spot the early landmarks of Hotel Vancouver, Marine Bldg or even the Harbour Centre (not great architecture, but distinctive) amongst the forest of towers from most places.
BC Place’s marshmallow-in-bondage was replaced with a crown-of-thorns, only to be progressively obliterated from view by a ring of towers. Can you spot any of these landmarks through the glass walls of Concord Pacific or from your favorite viewpoint in the City?
Sure, the Wall Centre, Shangri-La, Residences @Georgia Hotel, Telus Gardens and Trump Tower now stand out for their height, but architecturally, not so much. What about when Burrard Place, Vancouver House and the next wave punch through to the still rarefied air?
Most of the Library’s interesting architectural features were eventually dropped between the proposal and the final product. It’s not the only building which look nothing like the renderings which generated the rezoning approvals.
The next round of developers will trot out the same argument as the ones before. Vancouver’s skyline in boring, but my “iconic and bold architectural masterpiece city landmark” will save it as long as I can build to 70 – 80 – 90 stories and get above the droll masses.
Quietly lost in the argument for building taller and denser is the sad fact the taller you go, the less “sustainable” that building becomes. Water does not flow up those buildings. No one wants to come 70 (or even 7) flights of stairs when the power’s out (and there’s no water for you upstairs). And when your “view” for the first 50+ floors is the 50+ floors of the new tower across the street, was that worth the premium you paid for it? It really makes all but the a small portion of the building indifferently desirable.
At some point, with or without view corridors, the core will be “built-out”, most likely still with a boring architecture and non-distinct skyline. Then what?
Would you not rather reach that point while still retaining some sense of the natural characteristics and views that attracted everyone to this City to begin with ?
Once again, this topic touches on so much more than views and buildings. Where the buildings land, and their approaches and even their own viewsheds are all-encompassed by the streets, and by the parks that occasionally intersperse between them. Our streetscapes are where we first physically interact with buildings.
Regarding the rampant obsession with tall buildings poking up into the really limited places we can obtain long distant views, I find today’s towers far more interesting than the TD Square and Scotia Centre overdose of mediocrity. However, the library didn’t change that much from the model; the immature Pomo references to the Roman coliseum were as evident when the model did the mall crawl (they labeled that “public consultation” in the absence of real architectural discourse) as the building itself. Great facility (we use it all the time, love it once inside), nice play on elliptical form, but definitely not gladiator design.
To clarify, my call for a fine-tuning (not a gutting!) of the 27 view corridors is strictly for the purpose of enhancing Vancouver’s urban design and downtown skyline, while reinforcing its image as a growing city set in nature by maintaining our spectacular mountain back-drop as the dominant element in this montage. Would proactively identifying several more specific, tightly defined sites or blocks meeting the above parameters open the floodgates, causing the mountains to disappear behind a wall of towers? I think not. Present policy (General Policy for Higher Buildings – June, 2014) speaks to “marking the prominence of the CBD in our downtown skyline” and any higher building “making a significant contribution to the beauty and visual power of the city’s (built) skyline”. It then identifies 15 demanding criteria to be satisfied in consideration of any height exceeding present Downtown Official Development Plan limits (up to 450 ft.) in very limited areas of the downtown. In respect to a future “tallest” tower, a single site at the south-west corner of W. Georgia and Burrard is identified at maximum 700 ft., a mere 41 ft. higher than present tallest, the Shangri-La, at 659 ft. This site is now occupied by a 1970’s era 20-storey office/retail building which was very recently entirely re-clad and is fully leased …..
In the wide-reaching conversation about the city’s healthy growth, public views, public realm, height relaxations, and density, there is the instructive downtown example of Vancouver House designed by Danish Architect Bjarke Ingels, to be built beside the downtown Granville Bridgehead. Through an exhaustive review against the Higher Building Policy, it was judged to have earned a height of 497 ft. Whatever your personal opinion of the clearly innovative tower design and its impact on North Shore mountain views (it happens, more by luck than anything else, to avoid any view corridors except, of course, the Queen E. view, which, by intention, is relaxable), the overall urban design performance of this project is exemplary. It will entirely transform the depressing underbelly of the Granville Bridge and on/off ramps with needed neighbourhood-serving shops, cafes, restaurants and some offices, these to be housed in intriguing, triangulated low, green-roofed building forms with stairs and elevators linking grade up to the Bridge walkways. Beach Ave., Howe and Pacific street frontages will be handsomely re-invented in this LEED Platinum development. The enthusiastic support given by the Urban Design Panel for the project’s design has been subsequently re-affirmed at the prestigious 2015 World Architecture Festival in Singapore, awarding it “Future Project of the Year” and then Canadian Architect 2015 Award of Excellence.
I’ve made no mention of the CAC’s this project will be delivering since such contributions must not be considered until the project’s architecture and urban design quality has been tested and deemed to be exemplary in accommodating proposed increased density and height. But suffice it to say CAC’s are considerable (double-digit millions of dollars to go towards various targeted public infrastructure and amenity upgrades). So, bravo to those hard-fisted City negotiators on behalf of we Vancouver tax-payers! I have images of the developer limping back to his office from tough City Hall negotiating sessions, much lighter in the wallet. (Tongue-in-cheek here – the developer will be just fine AND so will the City).
So, is there room in the downtown for several more developments of this calibre? I hope so.
Speaking of Vancouver House … the stated reason for its shape (which I quite like) is keeping 100ft from the bridge. The Arc building, by the stadium, keeps no such distance from Cambie Bridge, and the new buildings by the Viaduct at Rogers Center are also much closer than 100′.
Anyone know why this rule was enforced for Granville, but doesn’t apply to the others? Is it because the Arc is hotel at that point?
I think the rationale for Vancouver House is strong – IF its a response to a good rule, but the rule seems to be inconsistent, and so either Vancouver House ends up being very complicated to follow an unnecessary rule, or the other towers will be severely compromised by not having that rule applied to them.
Either way, I’m quite certain I wouldn’t want to live/stay 20′ from Cambie Bridge or the Viaduct (of course, one could cynically argue that those planning the Rogers tower ‘knew’ the viaduct would disappear, and so wouldn’t be a problem for long … but that would assume that decisions were made behind the scenes before they were said in public, and that would *never* happen, right?).