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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This is the paper-based pavilion designed by Arthur Erickson for the 1976 UN Habitat Conference on Human Settlements in Vancouver. The pavilion, part of Habitat’s exhibit, was erected in front of the old courthouse (now the Vancouver Art Gallery). Photo is via the Vancouver blog Architecture Wanted. An aerial view of the pavilion is below. In 1976 the majority of the world’s population was not yet living in urban centres, but based on the conference proceedings which dealt with urban settlement issues, it’s obvious that a crowded urban future was already on the horizon. As with much current disaster relief architecture (most notably a number of temporary relief shelters by architect Shigeru Ban) paper was used as a durable and low-cost solution. The interesting thing is that Erickson’s paper pavilion predates this more recent work by 30 years. From Architecture Wanted:

The pavilion’s roof is a set of hyperbolic paraboloids created with paper-mache. Sections of the roof were created by about two thousand Lower Mainland children, who paper-mached over the molds in the factory and later painted designs onto the cured skin.
Originally the pavilion was meant to spread over the entire length of the Courthouse Square, but as it was running more than two times over its allocated budget, it was downsized. As a result the pavilion lost a third of its initial breadth – right in the middle no less – resulting in two pavilions flanking either side of that unwieldy and, frankly, even-then outdated fountain. Erickson saw the pavilion as an experiment that could be a solution to housing issues all over the world. He chose paper as the obvious material for it – obviously abundant in Vancouver and oftentimes wasted: “We are not building something useless that will be thrown away in a few weeks as most people seem to think. … We are doing something extremely useful that will be very applicable to building problems in Third World countries.”… There is a fantastical quality to this building, now nothing more than Vancouver’s ephemeral past. From Vancouver Sun’s Moira Farrow: “Erickson said the pavilion should not be judged as a structure with a limited lifespan but as a ‘prototype mock-up of ideas with unlimited possibilities yet to be fully explored’. “

Habitat Forum was an adjunct to UN Conference and it took place in some purpose-built hangars/longhouses at Jericho Beach Park. Iremember sitting outside as a kid and watching teenage volunteers with long branding irons in the shape of that great Habitat logo. They’d heat them in a campfire and then would brand anything we brought to them – cedar planks, driftwood. That’s the kind of thing that could happen around a UN conference in the 70s. Gavin Froome writes to say he still has his branded plank; I was so happy to see it (below). At bottom, a very fuzzy image of the original Habitat guide. It’s quite surprising how little is known now about this key Vancouver event, which was attended by Mother Theresa, Buckminster Fuller, Maggie and Pierre Trudeau and countless other major figures in public policy, architecture and arts. We may remember Expo 86, but the seemingly forgotten Habitat ‘76 possibly had a more long-lasting, subtler influence on the culture and politics of Vancouver.

New York’s new High Line park may be semi-private, but lawn chairs in the middle of a pedestrianized, five-block stretch of Broadway that includes Times Square are absolutely free. 

They say by the end of the summer the chairs will be replaced by permanent seating fixtures about which there are already complaints. In the meantime, Times Square is half post-apocalyptic sci-fi and half peaceful sit-in. A positive view on the new pedestrian mall is here.

Of course the High Line park didn’t open on time for our New York trip – the first phase now opens June 15 - but at least we got to see all the frantic final activity from our hotel window. UPDATE June 6: This had seemed like a great urban park idea, and it would have made a very beautiful promenade for New York, but as it turns out its use is semi-private. Apparently when full public funding couldn’t be secured to produce a fully public park, private funders stepped in and this has meant that the park, a new design on the top of the old elevated railway, will sometimes be reserved for private use. You’ll need a wristband to enter, apparently, and sections can be arbitrarily closed off. (See discussion on gothamist, who also used our photos.) The park’s controlled use is unfortunate because politics aside, the design looks good. [End update.] It seems there’s been only minimal intervention on the el; the tracks remain, and only gravel, pavers and benches have been added. Some of the plants in the final design are the same indigenous species that have been occupying the long-overgrown line for decades. The benches are nicely designed – they ramp up from walkway level. It rained this morning but now it’s sunny and men are painting over graffiti on the adjacent buildings. There are more photos on the High Line website (including the black and white photo below). The Standard Hotel in the Meatpacking District actually straddles the High Line, and from there you get a very good view of a portion of the new park. There’s a beautiful view of what it used to look like here and one by Timothy Schenk on Flickr: