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Architecture

Architecture in Vancouver

Vancouver builds between the sea and the mountains and regulates its towers to keep the view corridors open, so its architecture tends to be glass and restraint. Its landmarks are the public buildings and the west-coast modernism of Arthur Erickson.

• Vancouver House

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  Completed 2020

  Bjarke Ingels

  A residential tower downtown that starts as a triangle and ends as a square. Ingels's firm twisted the floors as they rise off a small site squeezed by a bridge ramp, so the tower widens and straightens as it climbs and recovers full floor plates high up from an impossible base. The ramps below are hung with public art. That structural stunt turns the worst site downtown into the most recognisable tower on the skyline.

• TELUS Garden

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  Completed 2015

  Henriquez Partners

  An office and apartment complex downtown, built around a sequence of gardens in the air. Henriquez cantilevered a timber-lined canopy over the corner, hung the tower with terraces growing produce for the restaurants below, and ran the whole thing on a shared energy system that made it the first LEED Platinum office in the country. The green is worked into the structure, not applied to it. The block treats sustainability as the design rather than a badge.

• Vancouver Convention Centre West

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  Completed 2009

  LMN Architects

  An extension to the convention centre, built out over the harbour on the downtown waterfront. LMN covered the whole building in a six-acre living roof of Pacific Northwest grasses and wildflowers, the largest in Canada, and stepped it down to meet a chain of waterfront parks so the roof reads as a continuation of the shore. Beehives and a marine habitat are built in. It argues that a convention centre's bulk can be given back to the city as landscape.

• Vancouver Public Library, Central Branch

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  Completed 1995

  Moshe Safdie

  The city's central library downtown, built as an ellipse wrapped around a rectangle. Safdie set the reading rooms in a freestanding curved wall, like a coliseum, and glazed the gap between it and the book stacks into a lit concourse of cafes and bridges that stays public and warm through the wet winter. The colonnade drew years of argument for looking like Rome. It has become the busiest room in the city, which settled the argument.

• Museum of Anthropology

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  Completed 1976

  Arthur Erickson

  A museum of Northwest Coast First Nations art on the university's cliff over the water. Erickson took the post-and-beam frame of the coastal longhouse and built it in concrete at a great scale, rising to a wall of glass where totem poles stand against the sea and sky they were carved under. The building steps down the site toward the water. It is the clearest statement of the west-coast modernism Erickson made his own, a modern frame around an older one.