This 12-storey office building at 1090 West Pender was built in 1970 – and, like so many of its era, it’s coming down.
The off-white applied masonry, with a stamped repetitive pattern, gives it a more solid appearance than most of its glassy contemporaries, a style popularized by American architect Edward Durell Stone (stone by Stone?). It was perhaps the modernist version of the terra-cotta facades popular in the 1920s (see the Marine Building or Hudson’s Bay store) which tried to maintain the illusion of craft in a time without affordable craft.
Its successor will have no such illusion:
Designed by Musson Cattell Mackey Partnership, the architects who have done most of the work for Bentall Kennedy, it will continue the growth of the landmark Bentall Centre.
The style of architecture that extensively used repeating precast concrete panels is called “formalism”.
One of the best examples in the city is the Museum of Vancouver.
I’m sure people will look back at the architecture of our era and draw conclusions about the zeitgeist of our time.
Sleek, optimized, austere, and amoral. Postmodern, post-values. Rational, unassuming, cool-tempered. No frills!