City of Vancouver, why not just demolish the Planetarium, too, and all our other iconic, distinctive buildings while you’re at it? Do we even deserve architecture in this town? See news story here. In short, last night it was decided in a 4-3 vote amidst raucous public opposition that the dome should be closed. This decision should be appealed.  The Bloedel Floral Conservatory is a beautiful glass conservatory sitting at the top of Queen Elizabeth Park which is situated in a high, disused quarry with a panoramic view of the city in all directions. (PS Technically, as a nerdy aside, the dome is a triodetic and not a geodesic dome.) The Vancouver Parks Board has already removed the fantastic 60s/70s minimalist wooden pavilions and water features that surrounded the conservatory, and now they actually want to close it permanently, which will no doubt also mean its demolition. It needs a 2 million dolllar roof re-fit, it’s true, but the cost of re-modelling the top of the park will cost much more than that. The city and province are currently awash in shortsightedness and ideological budgetary inanity. They like to claim “expense” and “recession” but they can’t even turn their own stunning assets into worthwhile ventures because they put dusty, creativity-deficient accountants in charge of civic life and aesthetics, and they support the wrong things. This building is a huge asset and any other city would be capitalizing on it. City of Vancouver, take over responsibility for the Conservatory from the Parks Board, which clearly doesn’t have the budget or the vision, and do the right thing – you have an enlightened mayor, finally, so perhaps we can be hopeful. What this city really needs is an advisory group of experienced architects and artists who can actually provide some informed guidance – developers and accountants have run the city long enough. If you care, sign the petition. Photos by nep, keepitsurreal, eldan, worldofjan, arsidubu, and marcinchady.

Rio Vista housing development, California. From blog.zeit.de.

You could almost call these buildings archeotecture, or perhaps archeolitecture, because though all three were built recently, they look and feel profoundly archeological. All of them have the mute, mysterious quality of monumental ancient ruins and they produce – for me, anyway – that weird, quiet, prickling-the-back-of-the-neck sensation you sometimes get when viewing something impossibly old. The Ningbo Museum (at bottom) is actually an archeological museum, so it’s not surprising that it mimics an unearthed stone structure, but the other two buildings have no immediate connection to archeology: one is a house in Peru, the other an office in Spain. The building above is the Pachacamac House in Peru by Longhi Architects. The room in the third photo is the master bedroom. The house is a beautiful building, almost an earthwork, extremely sensitive to its environment, and one among many intelligently-thought-out buildings appearing lately in South America. 

The building above is the SGAE Central Office in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, by the Spanish architectural firm Ensamble Studio. “The great stone wall can be thought of as a monumental sculpture, constructed by the superposition and repetition of prehistoric orders adapted to a Renaissance broken composition. The Mondariz Grey stone facade components appear in one of their purest forms, as irregular ashlars of variable geometry and size, selected directly from the quarry overage, and ordered in permeable strips that manipulate the South light breaking it on the inside. This sculptural content causes the disintegration of the building as such, going beyond its mere symbolic and functional dimension…” 

Above, the Ningbo Historic Museum was designed by Wang Shu of Amateur Architecture Studio. Photos by Iwan Baan. 

Maybe these forms and materials – the simple monumentality, the stone – are a reaction against recent architectural glitz and excess, or maybe they’re the unconscious product of an increasingly apocalyptic environmental imagination that already imagines every building a ruin, or maybe it’s all just coincidence. I’m certain there must be earlier examples of this, but I can’t think of them at the moment. All three buildings were found on the superb archdaily.

“Electoral reform.” That’s our comment on yesterday’s Canadian federal election. On this dark day in Canadian politics, when a majority of Canadians couldn’t put a stop to the tyranny of a minority, here’s a nice photo of a famous piece of Canadian design. This is the Donahue Chair, shown here in the house of Suzanne Dimma, the new editor of Canadian House & Home magazine. This chair, now known as the “Canadian Coconut,” was born in 1947 in the studio of the riotous, heavy-drinking Winnipeg architect and furniture designer James Donahue. The studio was in his basement and was staffed mainly by his architecture students, which might explain why only a few hundred of these chairs were ever produced. A little known fact is that Donahue was the first to pioneer the use of moulded plywood for furniture. The method was then immediately copied across Europe and America, first by Arne Jacobsen for his stackable Ant chair and then by many others. The Coconut Chair is arguably better-looking than the Nelson Coconut Chair (which is a direct copy), it’s much more comfortable, and now it’s almost impossible to find one. Sarah and I have one in our studio, quite a bit more decrepit than this one, and everyone competes to sit in it. We were reminded of the chair by Kim of desire to inspire and Wish Magazine. See the chair here too.

Our prime minister explicitly attacked the worth and relevance of Canadian arts and culture as a strategic part of his election campaign. See Margaret Atwood’s fiery essay on the topic of Harper and the arts in Canada by clicking below.

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