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Originally posted by Christopher DeWolf on CAFÉ L'URBANITÉ...
Vancouver builds a drab home for the Games
In B.C.'s new generation of sports venues, rising budgets and a risk-management mentality aren't leaving any room for great architecture
LISA ROCHON
From Thursday's Globe and Mail
Arrivederci, Turin -- it was nice to know you. Now to Vancouver's 2010 Winter Olympics, where, medal counts aside, I'm wanting to know whether architecture will matter on the West Coast.
Does it matter right now as teams of architects, planners and engineers work around the clock to design the next generation of sports venues? Does it matter now that foundation piles are being driven into excavated sites and concrete flooring is being laid?
Sort of, but not really. Not in an iconic, jaw-dropping kind of way. Not as a promise of sublime, beautifully crafted architecture.
"We are not involved in any Olympic or Olympic-related projects," says John Patkau, a principal of Vancouver-based Patkau Architects, one of Canada's exceptional architecture studios, which has been honoured many times over by international and national design awards.
"Design, or culture, for that matter, is not part of public life in Vancouver."
That's a damning indictment, to be sure, but one that the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (VANOC) needs to deeply absorb if it wants to distinguish itself on the world stage.
Turin served the world divine chocolate and a legacy of architecture by geniuses: a university complex by Norman Foster, the redeveloped Lingotto factory complex by Renzo Piano, the Palasport stadium by Arata Isozaki.
For its part, Vancouver will host some fine moments in city building, such as the Olympic Village, but the city is inviting the world to "come play with us" in buildings beaten up by the rising cost demands of an overheated construction industry. Expect a lot of metal cladding and concrete block. "When costs go crazy like this, high-quality architecture is the victim," says one of Vancouver's respected architects.
More than a culture of design, what seems to matter most in Vancouver is risk management. Instead of presenting a distinctive vision, architecture firms are asked to form design-build conglomerates with developers and submit their qualifications for delivering a project on time and on budget.
Amid the countless press releases and information packages produced by the VANOC, there's nary a mention of the individual architect asked to express something personal for the Games. That seems to be yesteryear's concept, when emerging architects were given a chance to showcase their talent on the world stage. For the '88 Calgary Olympics, firms from across Canada were engaged to design the Olympic Archways -- small monuments that were scattered throughout the city and the University of Calgary campus. For Expo '86 in Vancouver, monorail stations and entry gateways were awarded to young firms led by, for instance, Peter Cardew and James Cheng. There was a competition for a monumental Expo tower -- never built, but at least the impulse was right.
The Monsanto effect has invaded the look of the 2010 Olympics: Like genetically modified tomatoes, architecture at the next Winter Games will suffer from lack of difference, variety and distinctive flavours. Consider Barcelona's '92 Summer Olympics, where the designs of the Olympic village buildings were shared among 35 architecture firms. For Vancouver, the number of participating architects for large sports venues has been dramatically reduced.
Even at Vancouver's Olympic Village, one design-build team will be selected later this month to construct nine mid-rise buildings that will house athletes before they are converted into social and market-value housing. Since 2000, the city has been working on a rich urban design for the downtown site: 20 hectares of city-owned property at Southeast False Creek. The mud flats have already been cleaned and, in time for the Olympics, there will be a large waterfront park on the site's western front and a pedestrian path and bicycle greenway that runs along the shoreline. In order to make Torontonians extra green with envy, there will be an inter-tidal channel and a pedestrian bridge that floats over the water's edge.
Still, diversity of design must be allowed to infiltrate. If some of Vancouver's small, significant design studios are invited to participate, this could be the architectural highlight of the games. But a different pattern is developing. "We see no evidence of a desire for quality architecture in anything that has been said so far," says one of Vancouver's leading design architects. "There's no buzz around this in the architectural community like there was leading up to Expo 86."
Stantec Architecture, a global firm of 5,500 employees operating out of over 60 locations in North America and the Caribbean, is designing the slide track facility that will host bobsleigh, luge and skeleton events on Blackcomb Mountain in Whistler, B.C.
At UBC, a $47-million Winter Sports Centre will be produced by Bird Construction and Kasian Architects. The centre, which will include three sheets of ice, is located in the corner of the athletic fields on the south side of the campus; a 1,600-car parking garage is being built across from it. Sound inspiring? Wait, there's more. A traditional oval building with a typical steel-truss roof and a depressing material palette: metal cladding for the exterior of the top half of the oval with the lower portion constructed of precast concrete. There will be some natural light that enters through the entrance concourse but mostly, on the interior, walls of concrete block.
In this climate, where have all B.C.'s auteur-architects gone? They find work elsewhere and struggle to survive. Some choose to join up with larger, insatiable design concerns. Bob Johnston, previously a Victoria-based sole practitioner with expertise in sports venue architecture, was gobbled up five years ago by Cannon Design, a massive architecture firm with 15 offices across North America and a total of 700 staff members. (Cannon also swallowed whole Toronto-based Moffat Kinoshita Architects last summer.) Now, Johnston is Cannon's principal in charge of the design for the Olympic Oval in Richmond, a sprawling community located half an hour outside of Vancouver and south of the airport.
The 8,000-seat facility for long-track speed skating might have fallen victim to enormous cost cuts but, thankfully, the City of Richmond has a vested interest in maintaining the quality of the project; it's part of a 13-hectare redevelopment of a riverside site, from mobile trailer parking lot to Olympic venue to, eventually, a huge sports wellness facility set on a river park. So far, the massive wood structural trusses, a roof system designed by Fast + Epp structural engineers, have not been replaced by steel. There's a generous glass curtain wall that faces the North Shore Mountains. And there's a sense of asymmetrical flow to the roof, though the wooden canopy flaps sticking out from its upper edge suggest a duck's webbed feet more than the heron's wings the design is meant to recall.
I'm not convinced that a community of 180,000 will benefit from a sports facility so big that it will hold, post-Olympics, eight full-size basketball courts, two international ice surfaces, a large fitness centre and wellness services. There are already eight community centres in town. We shall see. Maybe excessive amounts of fitness are exactly right for a car-dependent community. Besides, there's plenty of parking being dug underneath the speed skating facility.
It's a given, maybe even a necessary evil, that the games will cost hundreds of millions more than initial estimates. In British Columbia, a booming economy combined with an overheated construction industry means cost escalations beyond our wildest dreams. Already, four years before the opening of the games in Vancouver, the cost estimate has risen from a 2002 estimate of $470-million for venue construction to $580-million. That means the original pledge to create highly sustainable facilities will suffer. It also explains why most of the Olympic venues are being conceived not as original, daring design but as business strategies. For some, that's a necessary comfort.
Vancouver builds a drab home for the Games
In B.C.'s new generation of sports venues, rising budgets and a risk-management mentality aren't leaving any room for great architecture
LISA ROCHON
From Thursday's Globe and Mail
Arrivederci, Turin -- it was nice to know you. Now to Vancouver's 2010 Winter Olympics, where, medal counts aside, I'm wanting to know whether architecture will matter on the West Coast.
Does it matter right now as teams of architects, planners and engineers work around the clock to design the next generation of sports venues? Does it matter now that foundation piles are being driven into excavated sites and concrete flooring is being laid?
Sort of, but not really. Not in an iconic, jaw-dropping kind of way. Not as a promise of sublime, beautifully crafted architecture.
"We are not involved in any Olympic or Olympic-related projects," says John Patkau, a principal of Vancouver-based Patkau Architects, one of Canada's exceptional architecture studios, which has been honoured many times over by international and national design awards.
"Design, or culture, for that matter, is not part of public life in Vancouver."
That's a damning indictment, to be sure, but one that the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (VANOC) needs to deeply absorb if it wants to distinguish itself on the world stage.
Turin served the world divine chocolate and a legacy of architecture by geniuses: a university complex by Norman Foster, the redeveloped Lingotto factory complex by Renzo Piano, the Palasport stadium by Arata Isozaki.
For its part, Vancouver will host some fine moments in city building, such as the Olympic Village, but the city is inviting the world to "come play with us" in buildings beaten up by the rising cost demands of an overheated construction industry. Expect a lot of metal cladding and concrete block. "When costs go crazy like this, high-quality architecture is the victim," says one of Vancouver's respected architects.
More than a culture of design, what seems to matter most in Vancouver is risk management. Instead of presenting a distinctive vision, architecture firms are asked to form design-build conglomerates with developers and submit their qualifications for delivering a project on time and on budget.
Amid the countless press releases and information packages produced by the VANOC, there's nary a mention of the individual architect asked to express something personal for the Games. That seems to be yesteryear's concept, when emerging architects were given a chance to showcase their talent on the world stage. For the '88 Calgary Olympics, firms from across Canada were engaged to design the Olympic Archways -- small monuments that were scattered throughout the city and the University of Calgary campus. For Expo '86 in Vancouver, monorail stations and entry gateways were awarded to young firms led by, for instance, Peter Cardew and James Cheng. There was a competition for a monumental Expo tower -- never built, but at least the impulse was right.
The Monsanto effect has invaded the look of the 2010 Olympics: Like genetically modified tomatoes, architecture at the next Winter Games will suffer from lack of difference, variety and distinctive flavours. Consider Barcelona's '92 Summer Olympics, where the designs of the Olympic village buildings were shared among 35 architecture firms. For Vancouver, the number of participating architects for large sports venues has been dramatically reduced.
Even at Vancouver's Olympic Village, one design-build team will be selected later this month to construct nine mid-rise buildings that will house athletes before they are converted into social and market-value housing. Since 2000, the city has been working on a rich urban design for the downtown site: 20 hectares of city-owned property at Southeast False Creek. The mud flats have already been cleaned and, in time for the Olympics, there will be a large waterfront park on the site's western front and a pedestrian path and bicycle greenway that runs along the shoreline. In order to make Torontonians extra green with envy, there will be an inter-tidal channel and a pedestrian bridge that floats over the water's edge.
Still, diversity of design must be allowed to infiltrate. If some of Vancouver's small, significant design studios are invited to participate, this could be the architectural highlight of the games. But a different pattern is developing. "We see no evidence of a desire for quality architecture in anything that has been said so far," says one of Vancouver's leading design architects. "There's no buzz around this in the architectural community like there was leading up to Expo 86."
Stantec Architecture, a global firm of 5,500 employees operating out of over 60 locations in North America and the Caribbean, is designing the slide track facility that will host bobsleigh, luge and skeleton events on Blackcomb Mountain in Whistler, B.C.
At UBC, a $47-million Winter Sports Centre will be produced by Bird Construction and Kasian Architects. The centre, which will include three sheets of ice, is located in the corner of the athletic fields on the south side of the campus; a 1,600-car parking garage is being built across from it. Sound inspiring? Wait, there's more. A traditional oval building with a typical steel-truss roof and a depressing material palette: metal cladding for the exterior of the top half of the oval with the lower portion constructed of precast concrete. There will be some natural light that enters through the entrance concourse but mostly, on the interior, walls of concrete block.
In this climate, where have all B.C.'s auteur-architects gone? They find work elsewhere and struggle to survive. Some choose to join up with larger, insatiable design concerns. Bob Johnston, previously a Victoria-based sole practitioner with expertise in sports venue architecture, was gobbled up five years ago by Cannon Design, a massive architecture firm with 15 offices across North America and a total of 700 staff members. (Cannon also swallowed whole Toronto-based Moffat Kinoshita Architects last summer.) Now, Johnston is Cannon's principal in charge of the design for the Olympic Oval in Richmond, a sprawling community located half an hour outside of Vancouver and south of the airport.
The 8,000-seat facility for long-track speed skating might have fallen victim to enormous cost cuts but, thankfully, the City of Richmond has a vested interest in maintaining the quality of the project; it's part of a 13-hectare redevelopment of a riverside site, from mobile trailer parking lot to Olympic venue to, eventually, a huge sports wellness facility set on a river park. So far, the massive wood structural trusses, a roof system designed by Fast + Epp structural engineers, have not been replaced by steel. There's a generous glass curtain wall that faces the North Shore Mountains. And there's a sense of asymmetrical flow to the roof, though the wooden canopy flaps sticking out from its upper edge suggest a duck's webbed feet more than the heron's wings the design is meant to recall.
I'm not convinced that a community of 180,000 will benefit from a sports facility so big that it will hold, post-Olympics, eight full-size basketball courts, two international ice surfaces, a large fitness centre and wellness services. There are already eight community centres in town. We shall see. Maybe excessive amounts of fitness are exactly right for a car-dependent community. Besides, there's plenty of parking being dug underneath the speed skating facility.
It's a given, maybe even a necessary evil, that the games will cost hundreds of millions more than initial estimates. In British Columbia, a booming economy combined with an overheated construction industry means cost escalations beyond our wildest dreams. Already, four years before the opening of the games in Vancouver, the cost estimate has risen from a 2002 estimate of $470-million for venue construction to $580-million. That means the original pledge to create highly sustainable facilities will suffer. It also explains why most of the Olympic venues are being conceived not as original, daring design but as business strategies. For some, that's a necessary comfort.
