Lisa Rochon on the Shangri-La Developer, from Globe and Mail, Review Section:
ARCHITECTURE: VANCOUVER DEVELOPMENT
From five-star glam to Eastside grim
Developer Ian Gillespie is building both luxury hotels and a bold project for Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, Lisa Rochon writes
LISA ROCHON
VANCOUVER -- Thank God for Vancouverites. Shall I compare them with Torontonians? I wouldn't dare. But, I'd offer that people still operate in Vancouver as if the city were a sort of small town blessed by ocean breezes, endless rhododendrons and really cheerful real-estate agents. Did I forget to mention the mountain views? They're there - protected by the city's sacred view cones.
Something else: City politicians, who are not ward-based, have a vision for the city, and there are fewer secret deals between developers and politicians. And, having an invigorating conversation about architecture is one of the thrills provided by the city's urban design review panel.
So, it's not surprising Westbank Projects president Ian Gillespie, a Vancouver developer building luxury projects in Canada and the United States worth billions, including the five-star Shangri-La hotels in both Vancouver and Toronto, in co-operation with the Peterson Group, will actually go for a walk - yeah, just walk around - every once in a while with architects to check out a site. He did a walkabout last year, for example, with Tadao Ando, the Japanese poet of concrete, in the hope that some day they'll do a building together in Vancouver.
Improbable though it may sound, Gillespie, now emerging as a developer with a vision, is strutting his stuff in two territories: the luxury market and the terrain of society's castoffs through a massive and inspired redevelopment of Woodward's in Vancouver's troubled Downtown Eastside.
"I look at sites that are really important and I say, I don't want somebody else to do it," says Gillespie. "I don't want it to be less than it should be. It sounds really egotistical - I'm sorry. But I don't want it to be screwed up."
Gillespie, 45, is telling me this early one morning while dropping off one of his three kids at the local public school. The family lives in the bucolic University of British Columbia endowment lands in a house surrounded by reflecting pools, designed by architect James Cheng, the creative force behind Vancouver's glass point towers with the diminutive floor plate.
You may be interested to know that Gillespie was once a star sprinter who nearly made Canada's Olympic track team during the mid-1980s. So, focusing in on the finish line is never that far away for him.
The Woodward's redevelopment, now under construction, is not your average pro forma deal. When Woodward's department store opened in 1903, it was the pulse of a thriving neighbourhood, where people could shop for groceries and clothes and storm through the doors for $1.49 Tuesdays. In 1993, the big neon W perched on top of an imitation of the Eiffel Tower went dark, and, since then, the building has stood empty and increasingly derelict.
After much battling between activists, who wanted low-income housing, and developers' plans for condos, the City of Vancouver eventually purchased Woodward's in 2003 from the province (an NDP government had bought it in 2001). After a public-consultation process, which eventually generated principles of historic preservation, sustainability and urban design, the City launched a competition searching for a compromise. The design by architect Gregory Henriquez with Westbank Projects/Peterson Investment Group and the Portland Hotel Society, a remarkable community service provider, was chosen the winner in September, 2004.
Transforming Woodward's - using the historic brick store as the linchpin in a 1.2-million-square-foot redevelopment to serve both the downtrodden and the blessed - might help to restore faith in the Eastside. The ambition of the project, a four-building affair connected by an atrium pierced by a massive artwork by Stan Douglas, quite frankly boggles the mind. In the building on West Hastings, there will be 125 low-income housing units for singles that cost tenants the welfare shelter-allowance rate of $375 each month. Simon Fraser University's School for the Contemporary Arts is moving in, bringing its tolerance and edginess to the complex.
The building on Abbott Street will house both condominiums and 75 units for low-income families. (And, for the first time in years in the neighbourhood, there will be a grocery store.) The original Woodward's building is the only piece to be saved and restored from what became a sprawling accretion of additions over nearly a century. Retail space - such as a Toronto-Dominion Bank branch - will be located here, along with non-profit city offices, such as AIDS Vancouver, and a day care. Within a 400-foot high-rise on West Cordova, there will be higher-end condominiums, with sky balcony units fetching as much as $1.5-million, as well as four floors of housing accessible to the handicapped. One floor is dedicated to severely disabled people in wheelchairs.
The vision is monumental, but I admit to being a little fixated on one clever design detail: the bike rack that Henriquez has squeezed into the front hall of the tiny units for people on social assistance. "For these people, the bike is really an important part of their lives and their livelihood. They're not going to park it out on the street.
"They're going to bring it inside their apartment, so we designed a rack for that purpose." That insight speaks to the years that Henriquez has poured into the project, meeting with squatters and housing activists for countless consultations, and pushing his practice into the vanguard of architecture with a conscience.
"Gregory's passion for Woodward's convinced me to do it," says Gillespie, of his commitment to the project, of contributing a large public artwork though it was not required by the city and covering an extra $4-million for an experimental system of hot-water radiant heat rather than giving in to the conventions of baseboard electric units. "When you see somebody [Henriquez] so passionate abut something, you can't help but be enthusiastic for it," Gillespie says. "He's the only architect for it - the only one who could have pulled that project off."
When he's not walking the streets with Henriquez, Gillespie might be huddled over drawings with Cheng. The Hong Kong-born Cheng designed both the 61-storey Shangri-La in Vancouver, to be completed in 2008, and the 65-storey Shangri-La in Toronto, scheduled to open in late 2010.
The Shangri-La will be Vancouver's tallest tower and the North American debut of the five-star Hong Kong-based hotel chain. A mix of hotel and condominium, it's currently rising in the downtown like a sheer cliff of glass, with occasional distractions in the elevation for double-storey gardens for a lucky few. Actually, the Toronto Shangri-La, with walls of glass that angle out to create reflecting prisms, is Cheng's more compelling design.
But the Toronto project lacks the sustainable-development features built into Vancouver's, such as a geothermal heating system. "I don't know why we're not doing geothermal in Toronto," admits Gillespie. And, what the heck, maybe Toronto planners forgot to ask.
Such is the sometimes harsh divide between the way things are imagined in Vancouver and deals are done in Toronto. "For high-rise residential, Toronto is about 10 to 15 years behind Vancouver," he says.
Much of Gillespie's rocket-ship ride to big-time development has to do with support from the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank Corp. of Canada, he says, and his partnership with Ben Yeung of the Peterson Group. In 2001, Gillespie met with Yeung, a developer from a Chinese family with very deep pockets, to ask if he could buy a remarkable waterfront site owned Yeung's family.
Yeung's interest was piqued, "So I laid out all the cards on the table and decided to trust him with my information. I wanted to change the height, the use, the density and bring Shangri-La to the table," says Gillespie, speaking with his usual candour.
"Ben bought into the dream, and once we did that project, and proved my salt, then from there it just felt right."
Now that Gillespie is expanding. In Edmonton, he is the force behind the $1.5-billion Century Park. He is building Cheng-designed towers in Victoria, as well as Dallas and Seattle.
And, now his attention has turned to Toronto, where he's already considering ways of tying his developments in Toronto in meaningful ways to the arts, and, importantly, of adding international architectural talent to his current stable of Vancouver boys. A prime site in Vancouver is being negotiated. Seems to me that the finish line just got moved, possibly a little closer.
The Woodward's redevelopment
1.2-million square feet, consisting of:
125 single non-market housing units
75 family non-market units
Simon Fraser University's Centre
for Contemporary Arts
536 market housing units
Potential federal/municipal office space, AIDS Vancouver
Day care
Public indoor atrium
Public outdoor plaza
Planted exterior facades and roof gardens
retail space - London Drugs, grocery store, Toronto Dominion Bank - the first bank branch in the neighbourhood in 40 years.
ARCHITECT
Henriquez Partners Architects
COMPLETION
Spring, 2009
DEVELOPER
Westbank Projects &
Peterson Investment Group
AoD
