Link to opinion on the Times Colonist website
I wonder if the popular plea for memory, for heritage, here isn’t in fact a prayer for citizenship.
Maybe it’s just the number.
Six.
You drive around, you look at sixes. You think: “Design by fire department.” Then, you relent. Why beat up on the fire department?
Maybe it’s the architects. Yeah, it has to be the architects, those spineless Darwinian accidents!
I can picture it: A real estate developer stops tearing the wings from living sparrows just long enough to summon his architect from the stone-staired depths. Up the architect staggers, dressed in rags, his beard filthy, a grimed and tattered copy of John Ruskin’s treatise, The Stones of Venice, clutched protectively in his starveling arms.
“Y-y-yes, Master?”
“Gimme a six.”
A chained, nail-collared wolf licks the gore from the developer’s fingers.
“A what?” asks the architect in a frightened tremolo.
“Didn’t you hear me? A six.” The whip handle fractures under the force of his grip. “First, I was thinking maybe five, but they make you recess the top floor, so it’s just like a four with icing. Forget lucky seven, might give people reason for hope.
“I went to Google Images, searched for six-storey residential buildings. Perfect! All blots on the landscape. Sins against the horizon.”
The developer shifts in his chair. His elaborately tattooed arms flex. “Mother,” says the left. “Density,” says the right.
“Now get back downstairs and gimme a six, a crate with windows, and if you do any of that ornamentation or historical reference crap, I’ll murder your family.”
• • •
OK, standup’s over.
You ask: Is a six-storey building inherently irredeemable from a design perspective, or is it possible to create a six that’s attractive externally and welcoming, homelike inside?
The latter, I think.
You could aim that same question at everything from a house to a highrise and the answer wouldn’t change.
Architectual appeal seems to hang on three factors: public and civic culture (matters of purlic priority and urgency), regulation and enforcement (terms of development approval), and developer disposition (the subjective, that is, personal ratio between risk management and a passion—a sense of obligation— to gift the future; buildings last a very long time).
Victoria’s deficient on all counts. We’re inclined to think of that deficiency purely as a visual one, but without challenging that, I’d like to go behind the scenes and offer a different perspective.
Buildings amplify or diminish, even destroy, citizenship. That is, their external appearance and internal design and organization affect whether people feel like stakeholders in the civic life and process.
Buildings talk. They let you know if you’re just passing through. They let you know when the assumptions of citizenship are expected of you.
This, I’m convinced, is the real message of our structures.
While we might never express our instinctive knowledge, we sense when a building delivers a successful and reinforcing connection with the ground it’s built on. After all, buildings are made from the materials on and under the earth. So are we.
Buildings either welcome or repel. When they welcome, they say we’re all in this together. When they don’t, they say to occupants and passersby you’re on your own.
If you design placeless interiors so that suites are accessed to either side of a long, featureless corridor that stretches from here to oblivion, it reminds occupants that they’re just visiting, transient.
I think the city has had a hard time imposing design standards regarding all the above because it has never made the connection between buildings and design and the human investment in place.
Not for lack of noise on the subject: Citizen concern and complaint is loud, and one way or another, people are begging the city to be a constructive partner in sustaining civic identity. There are constant skirmishes, but little conversation.
I’m not convinced that the arguments in support of downtown highrise density are credible, but I know the city is helpless in the face of economic and social arguments, to reject them, and lacks the design literacy and confidence to ensure that Victoria doesn’t wind up “Vancouver But Smaller.”
There are other built forms that can deliver densities equal to highrise densities. With the newspaper’s indulgence, I would like soon to present visual proof of that.
I wonder if the popular plea for memory, for heritage, building scale here isn’t in fact a prayer in support of citizenship.
Citizens. Is any number too many?
Gene Miller is the founder of Open Space, founding publisher of Monday Magazine, originator of the Gaining Ground urban sustainability conferences, founder/developer of ASH houseplexes, and currently writing Nothing To Do: Life in a Workless World. He’d be pleased to receive and respond to your thoughts. genekmiller@gmail.com