Paris Shoes at 51 W. Hastings, in Vancouver, possibly 1919. If shoeboxes still looked this beautifully white, you wouldn’t have to have salespeople constantly disappearing into the back. I somehow doubt that the uniform whiteness of this bank of shoe boxes could every happen again, though, and if it did it would be some sort of high art hipsterism rather than pure utility. In 1945 this shoe shop was still in operation, and that’s Pierre Paris in front of it, below, just after the end of the war. Like so many buildings in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, the building fell into disrepair (see bottom) over the past few decades and was condemned. But it has been gutted and saved and has just been turned into condos. That’s optimistic on the developer’s part, considering that the block is even sketchier now than it was when Hastings Street was the logging skid road that gave birth to the term skid row. You can see the building’s interesting retail neighbour in the before pre-renovation shot at bottom. Lots more pictures of the building and neighbourhood are at parisblock.com. From the site:
… For over 60 years The Paris Block was home to Pierre Paris & Sons – a logging boot manufacturer and shoe retailer. Today, the Paris family company continues as Paris Orthotics on West 4th Avenue. Originally built in 1907, The Paris Block is unique in that massive iron i-beams were employed to span the entire width of the building… A mixed retail and commercial building, The Paris Block was originally known as the Eastern Building, and attracted prominent tenants from the beginning. Not long after its construction, the upper floors became the Strathcona Hotel while the ground floor was occupied by Pierre Paris & Sons in 1919. Remnants of the painted signage for both these businesses are still visible on the east and west exposures of the building.
For those who haven’t been following along, the above is what Vancouverites call a Vancouver Special (see previous post to learn more about this house style). All of the houses below are, believe it or not, updated Vancouver Specials. They were part of a recent tour organized by the Vancouver Heritage Foundation. It’s nice that the denigrated Vancouver Special house style is now being viewed as heritage, because until recently, heritage in Vancouver has fairly narrowly meant Edwardian and Victorian housing. As you can see, the Vancouver Specials below vary in their degree of divergence from the original house style, with the last house shown varying only slightly from the original, while the first varies the most. Thoughts? Perhaps because of the example set by this famous VS restoration, everyone seems to be using the combination of dark charcoal grey with unpainted wood. Unfortunately, interior photography wasn’t allowed.
My favourite is the house below, and not just because it was updated by my friend Scott.
The last house, below, is interesting just because it was fixed up with very little alteration. A paint job, removal of some plaster lions, very little waste, and very little money spent. Most of the renovations just involved opening up the interiors; in this one, the only wall removed was between the living room and kitchen. On the exteriors, the distressed faux brick was painted charcoal and the soffits were stripped down to the bare wood.
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.
In my neighbourhood there’s a heritage program called True Colours wherein you can receive a pat on the back from heritage types and sometimes free paint if you agree to paint your house in the original house colours circa 1901. Unfortunately, most True Colours are the official colours of depressive mood disorder: muddy hunter green, dark drab maroon, watery urine-sample yellow, sickly ivory. Before the creep of drabness extends any further, I’m planting my flag for Untrue Colours and posting these exuberant and adventurous feats of house and door painting. If we can’t have innovations this exciting, maybe we could at least have more true colour. One old heritage neighbourhood in Vancouver is already heading in a more cheerful, anti-rainy-day-blues direction. If you’ve been to Vancouver in February, you’ll know how important some form of cheerful intervention is. Beautiful photo of house in Indiana, above, by i am krisan on Flickr.
Modernist Vancouver house of the painter BC Binning, who painted his own interior and exterior murals. Photo by Arne Haraldsson. See here for more information on this heritage-protected house.
London house decorated by the painter Stanley Donwood, photo by artofthestate.
Rainbow house on Clipper Street, San Francisco, by jordanpattern.
Old mural on a housing building by the Polish art group TWOŻYWO, which turns 20 this year. “Dom” means house or home. By zorro za trzepakiem on Flickr and see also misiekgreen.
Doors in Soho, NYC, taken last week.
Final note: I’m not against heritage preservation at all. But I’m against slavish, unimaginative heritage preservation. Sarah adds that around 1900 “houses were originally painted those ugly dark colours because the air was so choked with coal pollution it was the only way to hide the dirt and grime. Why continue with an idea based on something that is no longer relevant?” I would also like to add the salient fact that many of the European settlers here were Scots Presbyterian and since that’s my own heritage I know of what I speak concerning its dour aesthetics. To read about San Francisco’s painted houses, see an interesting entry on Wikipedia.
This is artist Donald Judd’s loft in Soho, maintained as a museum but only open infrequently. It was one of the first artist’s lofts in Soho – not to mention in New York – and is now almost the paradigmatic example of loft living. Judd bought the entire 1870’s industrial building for 70,000 in 1968 and moved in with his family. One of the central figures in minimalist art, Judd clearly lived his own aesthetic. His interest in industrial materials and engineering methods is evident here in the lack of any attempt to domesticate the space as well as in the simple, unadorned furniture he built for it. The NYT ran an article a while ago which included an interview with Judd’s son Flavin, who was 6 months old when he moved into this loft and who nostalgically described the Soho of the 60s and 70s as a small town smelling fragrantly of the cigars manufactured nearby. These days there’s a certain huffiness out there about modernism and minimalism’s supposed kid-unfriendliness, but Flavin Judd remembers this space – ground zero of minimalism – happily and even nostalgically (there’s a small image of the Judds at home, below). “There were “the best Swedish breakfasts on the second floor — 50 people would come over — ham, cheese, weird flatbreads, salmon,” Flavin Judd said. “It was a great place to grow up.” To read the whole story, which includes information on the heritage restoration of the whole building, see the NYT. See also this blog’s previous post on minimalism.vs. maximalism in interiors. There’s a good shot of the a reproduction of Judd’s famous daybed on AT , and lastly, Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change by Sharon Zukin provides a really fascinating portrait and social history of artist’s lofts, including 101 Spring Street. According to the Judd Foundation website, tours of the Spring St. building and loft are suspended during restoration but will start up again in 2010.
Photos from the NYT and from DiscoContinental on Flickr. Take a fun quiz (is it a Judd or a piece of cheap furniture?) here.
[Important update: there is new information about what his happened to this house in this update and also in the comments below. Thank you.]
In the late 1920s the modernist designer and architect Eileen Gray, who is best known for her furniture design (her Bibendum chair is visible in the third photo above), designed and built a landmark piece of modernist architecture in the form of a seaside house. On a hill overlooking the Mediterranean at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France, Gray’s E-1027 house was built to share with her lover, critic Jean Badovici. The name of the house sounds impersonal, but it is in fact a numeric code for their joint initials; the interesting story is here and also see a story about the building of the house by Patricia O’Reilly, who has also written a novel based on Gray’s life. The house has steadily fallen into disrepair, and in the 1990s the house’s furniture, also designed by Gray, was sold off by its owner to fund house repairs. But the house continued to distintegrate until efforts to save it were apparently successful in 2000. It was mostly restored (see second photo above) but now I hear that it is again in disrepair. Gray’s inexplicable obscurity has delayed this project far too long. By the late 90s it was a wreck. From greg.org:
What’s… remarkable is that E1027 is still a deteriorating ruin. When I lived in Monaco in 1995-7, I tried once to find it, but no locals could figure out what I was talking about. The most comprehensive images I’ve seen, though, are on flickr, a photoset made by Daniel, an Irish architect, who hopped the fence in 1997 when the house was a squat [the last owner had been murdered a couple of months prior.] I can’t find any images of Gray’s last house, Lou Perou, which was done near St Tropez, either. And I can’t find any word on the status of her own house, Tempe a Pailla, which was inland, up the mountains from Roquebrune & Menton in the village of Castellar. How is it that no modernist pilgrims have tracked and documented this stuff?
The photo above shows Corbusier, his wife and Jean Badovici, photographed by Gray. When you start researching the house, you start to get the feeling that many believe Corbusier had something to do with Gray’s obscurity. (See the link above for a summary of an interesting paper by Beatriz Colomina). It’s hard to determine what role Corbusier played in this but it’s clear that he was extremely fascinated by E-1027.
Le Corbusier, arguably the greatest architect of the 20th century, was obsessed and haunted by E-1027, the seaside villa Eileen Gray built at Roquebrune Cap Martin in 1929. Over the decades, he sought to possess her “maison en bord de mer” in a multitude of ways. It may have been the last thing he saw before dying of a heart attack while swimming off the rocks beneath E-1027 in 1965. After he died, the footpath serving the area was designated Promenade Le Corbusier. In time, as Gray’s reputation faded, some would even credit him with the design of her villa.
More here. It’s known that Gray was infuriated by Corbusier’s alterations of the villa, especially his murals which she felt defaced it. Even in her nineties it was said she was still fuming about it. (The house’s recent disarray is obvious in the second mural photo.)
Gray disagreed strongly with Corbusier’s idea of a house as a machine, arguing for a more organic conception of the functional house. To this end she built her house taking into consideration the angle of the sun, the wind and the elements of the site so that in every season the house fit into its environment but also and more importantly provided maximum pleasure for its inhabitants. In 2008 the house was listed by Building Design as one of the world’s most romantic buildings.
This is a long, messy, eclectic photo essay about the strange, hybrid, and surprisingly impure histories of objects and buildings. It is skewed toward the ancient, the modern, the space-age, the 1960s and the 1970s, the adventurous, the unexpected, the ecological, the utopian and the anti-utopian, the unstuffy and the unstaid, design as making-do, the real, the lived in, and mixes of all kinds. Since design isn't divorced from other things, it's also about art, social issues, urban and community planning, technology, philosophy and anything else that intersects with design, which means everything. "ouno" is a name in both Finnish and Japanese, it's the same upside-down as right-side-up, it refers to both zeros and ones, and it is pronounced uno. My name is Lindsay and I'm open to your complaints, disagreement or general crankiness. Free free to comment or email. This is an anti-intellectualism-free zone and around here we don't try to dampen critique by calling it negativity or whining. We call it thought!
Modernist Vancouver house of the painter BC Binning, who painted his own interior and exterior murals. Photo by Arne Haraldsson. See 
by Sharon Zukin provides a really fascinating portrait and social history of artist’s lofts, including 101 Spring Street. According to the Judd Foundation 
