Vancouver curator Scott Watson’s essay Urban Renewal: Ghost Traps, Collage, Condos and Squats is part of the impressive and totally compelling Vancouver Art in the Sixties website project. It’s a well-organized archive of Vancouver’s 1960s art production and it’s far too large a topic for one post. What I found immediately interesting though was Watson’s historical contextualization of residential architecture and interior aesthetics in the 60s, especially its turn away from modernist minimalism and toward more baroque historical styles. He suggests that the Edwardian bric-a-brac and Art Nouveau styles that were adopted by Vancouver’s arts and hippie communities in the 60s were a reaction against the City of Vancouver’s move to demolish the crumbling inner-city Edwardian houses, which housed its art and social protest, and replace them with corporate architectural brutalism and strata-controlled condos. This was no doubt replayed in cities all across North America. Watson’s essay is particularly interesting in light of the current revival of Edwardian/Victorian granny chic in interior design and craft. It seems to me this is revival without any politics, but I could be wrong. In many cases it seems the farthest thing from radical, however you understand that word, but it could also be an echo of a similar problem in urban planning. Photo above by Michael de Courcy shows a screening on December 31, 1969 of a collaborative video at Vancouver’s Intermedia art centre.

The following are excerpts from Watson’s essay (click the link at top for the whole text).

“At the advent of what we now call postmodernism, the doomed Edwardian building inventory that provided bohemia’s living, studio and event spaces also provided an aesthetic opposed to Brutalism, the heavy concrete fortress style of public buildings that had arisen in response to the riots and demonstrations of the 60s. Late Victorian and Edwardian furniture and bric-a-brac furnished communal houses. In these spaces Art Nouveau was revived and deployed to advertise concerts and events. Rejection of the “brutality of the new” was, in essence, a very real concern about the disappearance of places to live, eat, congregate, exhibit and perform. In defnse of a crumbling inventory of modest, poorly built pioneer-era wooden and brick structures, the art community of the day rejected not only the Brutalist idioms of the 1960s and 1970s, but the gentler suburban modernism of the 1940s and 1950s. Or to be more precise, the authoritarian, normalizing, “design for living” modernism, with its unarticulated suppression of libidinal circulation, was an anathema for the generation of the 1960s and 1970s. The hippie movement as appropriated by fashion and popular music adopted Edwardian and Art Nouveau as its style of protest and renunciation of consumer/spectacle society.” [This excerpt was the last paragraph of several excerpts below. Click for more.]

Art Nouveau-influenced Doors poster by Bob Masse, Vancouver, 1967. Below, Bob Masse, William Tell & the Marksmen Great White Light, Vancouver, 1960s.

Will your home be next? Poster by Don Gutstein, poster, Vancouver, 1975

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It shouldn’t be that difficult; it comes apart. The owner residents of Tokyo’s famous Nakagin Capsule Tower have voted to demolish it and rebuild a “modern” tower on the same location, which is now a valuable property adjacent to the Ginza district. See the recent article by architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff in the NYT and an interesting post on pingmag. The building was designed by Japanese architect Kurokawa Kishō in 1972, in the style known as Japanese Metabolism. Typical of the buildings in that movement, each capsule is suspended from the structure independently (rather like this), so even though the capsules’ interiors are now outdated (all-in-one plastic consoles including built-in reel-to-reel audio systems!), each capsule can be removed, gutted, de-asbestosized, refurbished, and lifted back into place, and that is exactly the solution the architect recently proposed before his death. The real issue is land value – the apartment owners want a more “efficient” use of the lot, which means they want to maximize the “value” of each apartment. They say the capsules are cramped, but they’re no different than most Tokyo apartments. Every Japanese architectural association has argued for preserving the building, as have international architectural critics and associations, but the futuristic building’s future doesn’t look good. I love this building; I had a postcard of it on my desk all through school. So I’m asking you, Vancouver, you who contains so little interesting architecture: since these capsules are individually removable, why not have the building stacked like jenga pieces on a freighter and floated over here? Since you apparently want to install a new 14-storey homeless housing 3 blocks from me – despite the fact that this neighbourhood already contains almost the densest social housing for the homeless anywhere in the world, and studies overwhelmingly show that this level of density is a really bad idea – here is my suggestion: I won’t complain about your badly-thought-out scheme IF you buy this 14-storey building from Tokyo. It’s the same height as the one you’re planning anyway – so convenient. And the rooms are actually bigger than the tiny ones you usually provide. Final note: I am the farthest thing from being against housing for the homeless, one of Vancouver’s most pressing needs, but am against the city’s imagination-less, ill-designed social architecture, its decision to locate all of these things in a single 8-square-block area, as well as building an ugly new high-rise in what is otherwise a low-rise neighbourhood. Solutions are necessary, but they need to make sense socially and architecturally too. As for views on micro-apartments in Vancouver, see here. More on Treehugger. Photo of the architect’s own capsule on the top floor is here.

I volunteer to help refurbish it. For a discussion of some of the arguments against the Nakagin Tower, see an excellent article at Reloading Images. Below is from the building’s Wikipedia entry, updated only a few days ago to include Ouroussoff’s article:

The original target demographic were bachelor salarymen. The compact apartments included a wall of appliances and cabinets built in to one side, including a kitchen stove, a refrigerator, a television set, and a reel-to-reel tape deck. A bathroom unit, about the size of an aircraft lavatory, is set into an opposite corner. A large circular window over a bed dominates the far end of the room.
Construction occurred on site and off site. On-site work included the two towers and their energy-supply systems and equipment, while the capsule parts were fabricated and the capsules were assembled at a factory…

The capsules were fitted with utilities and interior fittings before being shipped to the building site, where they were attached to the concrete towers. Each capsule is attached independently and cantilevered from the shaft, so that any capsule may be removed easily without affecting the others. The capsules are all-welded lightweight steel-truss boxes clad in galvanized, rib-reinforced steel panels. On April 15, 2007, the building’s residents, citing squalid, cramped conditions as well as concerns over asbestos, voted to demolish the building and replace it with a much larger, more modern tower.

In the interest of preserving his design, Kurokawa proposed taking advantage of the flexible design by “unplugging” the existing boxes and replacing them with updated units, a plan supported by the major architectural associations of Japan, including the Japan Institute of Architects; the residents countered with concerns over the building’s earthquake resistance and its inefficient use of valuable property adjacent to the high-value Ginza.

A developer for the replacement has yet to be found, partly because of the Late-2000s recession. Opposing its slated demolition, Nicolai Ouroussoff, architecture critic for The New York Times, described Nakagin Capsule Tower as “gorgeous architecture; like all great buildings, it is the crystallization of a far-reaching cultural ideal. Its existence also stands as a powerful reminder of paths not taken, of the possibility of worlds shaped by different sets of values.”

These stills were shot during the filming of Coast Modern, a documentary film about West Coast modern house architecture, spanning from LA to Vancouver, by Vancouver filmmakers Gavin Froome and Mike Bernard. The film “speaks with the architects and their patrons and asks if Modernism’s time has finally come or did it never really go away.” It is currently in the editing phase and is set to be completed this coming fall. The filmmakers talked with an impressive number of well-known architects and designers up and down the coast, and based on the preview the film has a great feel – entertaining and informative. You can follow the film’s progress on their blog, watch the preview trailer below, and there’s a set of stills on Flickr. I’m hoping the film will spark increased appreciation of modern architecture in Vancouver before the current spate of house demolitions proceeds any further. Photos here are: the Stinson Beach House, top; DJ Greyboy’s Opdahl House by architect Edward Killingsworth; Barbara Bestor’s LA House; the filmmakers talking with Julius Shulman; and the Etenza House where the idea for the Case Study project was hatched. I’ll post more information on the film and its events closer to the release date. All photos posted here by permission from the filmmakers.

Coast Modern Film Trailer from Coast Modern on Vimeo.

I’ll admit right off the bat that this is not strictly an architecture post; it’s technically a moment of retro 70s nostalgia. The 1976 movie Logan’s Run, a dark sci-fi dystopia about escape from a domed post-apocalyptic society which euthanizes its citizens at age 30, completely occupied my late childhood imagination. The movie was shot entirely in Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas and most of the film’s key action takes place in the “Great Hall,” which turns out to be the fairly bizarre and also recently demolished Dallas Market Center Apparel Mart, not a great piece of architecture but one that did conveniently feature a quasi-sci-fi interior. If someone has the correct terminology for this style of interior, please advise – my guess is 60s mall rendition of Corbusier, Notre Dame du Haut era. The novel the film is based on was written at the height of  60s youth culture and student unrest, and it was explicitly written with a screenplay in mind. Though it was published in 1967, like Dune the process of turning the novel into a film was fraught with problems, and by the time the film was made, the decor and costumes were reflecting the 70s. The film’s commentaries on totalitarianism, a Brave New World-style docile populace distracted by pleasures, and youth-oriented culture are pretty heavy-handed, but I loved it when I saw it around age 12, too young to notice how wooden Michael York’s acting was but not young enough to avoid total infatuation.

Above, scenes from the film. Below, the mart as it was in reality and then during its demolition. Its destruction is strangely fitting considering the film’s ending. Oddly, the building is part of the vast trade complex JFK was headed for when he was assassinated – he was on his way to a luncheon for 2400 people, in a setup very similar to the one shown below. This particular part of the complex, however, was built a year later, in 1964.

All photos and information in this post are from racprops, aintitcool and snowcrest. The film’s “Love Shop” (image at top, with the odd, oozing brown leather seating, and the mall shot with somewhat anatomical neon sign) was the Oz Restaurant/Nightclub in Dallas. Other locations: Sandman HQ was Zales’ International Headquarters; the Sandman gym was the Arlington Health Center and the living units were the Burton Park Building. The video below was a long promotional trailer for the film intended as a preview for theatre owners, and it gives a sense of the futuristic 70s sets and costumes.