By Trevor Boddy
The Globe and Mail
Housing the homeless and affordability for the rest of us generates a lot of talk these days in Vancouver. A few — a very few — are also doing something about it.
One doing very much indeed is Gregory Henriquez, the Vancouver architect at the forefront of social housing innovation as a partner at the design firm founded by his father, Richard. Henriquez Jr. is the key designer for three highly original designs at the leading edge of social housing thinking — not just for this city, but continent-wide: Bruce Eriksen Place; the Lore Krill Co-op; and the massive Woodwards mixed-use redevelopment.
Read the rest of the article at
The Globe and Mail
Price Tags Blog: Woodward’s Progress Photos & Commentary
Say what you will about the appropriateness of a highrise in the Downtown East Side, but at least one of the worst street-end views in the city has been dramatically improved.
Read the blog posting here
By Helena Grdadolnik
Dockside Live/Work Building and Lore Krill Housing Co-op
With copious new housing developments being built on former industrial sites, the threat of losing swathes of Vancouver’s historic urban fabric is real. More than a decade ago Henriquez Partners produced a study for Coal Harbour’s Bayshore Lands near Stanley Park. They proposed replicating the original survey for the railway terminus–narrow slices of land perpendicular to the water’s edge–and rather than master plan the site chose six prominent architects to develop the parcels incrementally, working straight from survey to architecture. The idea was to keep the original texture of the city’s development intact but, unfortunately, the client dismissed the scheme and in its place today is the type of generic podium and tower development that the firm’s study sought to avoid.
Lore Krill Housing Co-op
Dockside Live/Work
Read the full article at
canadianarchitect.com
History of the Woodward’s ‘W’ Sign
The building was built in 1903 by Charles Woodward, as the second location for the Woodward’s department store. Woodward’s pioneered the concept of one-stop shopping; the store included a food floor, household items, men’s and women’s fashion, and provided cheque cashing, travel booking and other services. The store was well-known for carrying a large variety of goods that were not available anywhere else. The store soon became a feature attraction in Vancouver, and it expanded over 12 separate phases to a final size of 12 storeys. It occupied approximately 2/3 of the city block. The popularity of Woodward’s attracted many other businesses to the area.
In 1944, the landmark ‘W’ was installed on the top of the building on a 25 metre replica of the Eiffel Tower, replacing a pre-war searchlight-beacon which had until then been the building’s hallmark. The beacon, which was visible at night from as far away as Abbotsford and Mission, was shut down at the beginning of World War II because of its potential use as a landmark for aerial attacks.
Read more about the ‘W’ sign at
vancouverneon.com
Read the Woodward’s entry at
wikipedia.org
