23.2 by Omer Arbel. The corners of this Vancouver family home by Canadian architect Omer Arbel can be completely opened up to the surrounding garden by pushing back glazed concertina doors. The roof is made of douglas fir beams reclaimed from burned-down warehouses and its structure was dictated by their dimensions. Bent steel columns inset the structural support, further blurring the boundaries between living spaces and the garden. Photographs are by Nick Lehoux. More residential architecture on Dezeen »More architecture on Dezeen » Here's some more information form the architect: 23.2 by Omer Arbel Designed by Omer Arbel, 23.2 is a house for a family built on a large rural acreage outside Vancouver in the West Coast of Canada. The design of the house itself began, as a point of departure, with a depository of one hundred year old Douglas Fir beams reclaimed from a series of burned down warehouses.
He settled on a triangular geometry. Click for larger image See also: TEDxVancouver. Vancouver photographer Eric Deis captures his city’s vanishing streetscapes : This Magazine // Canadian progressive politics, environment, art, culture // Subscribe today. Eric Deis's large-scale photographic installation of Last Chance. Image courtesy the artist. Even after all its Olympic-related world-class-city posturing, Vancouver remains very much at odds with itself. At once a bedroom community, a wannabe metropolis, and the centre of a long-running real-estate boom, the city is like a teenager who keeps changing her clothes, says visual artist Eric Deis. “Kids grow up, they push boundaries, they try different things. I think that’s what’s happening with this city,” he says. We’re leafing through a collection of Deis’s photographs at his studio in Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant neighbourhood, a few blocks from his home. Let’s be friends! “I’ve explored all my opportunities in Vancouver, and I’ve kind of maxed out,” Deis explains.
Deis’s complaints are common. In Last Chance, Deis captures a new condominium development on Richards Street. Eric Deis. Deis is no stranger to transition himself. Strathcona Community Micro-Gardens in Vancouver. Needs funding to build dozens of micro gardens throughout the Strathcona neighbourhood and help turn this into the heart of the greenest city Overview: We propose to create 20 to 30 community micro-gardens throughout the Strathcona neighbourhood. The gardens would be installed on private properties adjacent to public spaces in highly visible, underutilized areas. Depending on the nature and size of each location, the gardeners and the property owners would decide whether the plot should be a community garden, single-owner garden, or a living wall.
Vegetation would consist of native perennials and edible plants. The gardens would be installed by qualified landscapers of Mission Possible Enterprises, a local non-profit which provides employment opportunities for individuals with job readiness barriers and assists in breaking the cycles of poverty, homelessness, and addiction. Benefits of this project: Edible plants would provide new opportunities for local food production.
Construction Underway on Super Green VanDusen Botanical Garden Visitor Center. The design for the visitor center was inspired by the leaves of an orchid — its wings consists of ‘petals’ that shoot off from the ‘stem’, which serve as the central atrium and lobby. The stem has been built from rammed earth and features a vaulted ceiling and roof constructed from prefab wood-glue laminated beams made by StructureCraft Builders Inc. A glass tower in the atrium infuses the center with natural daylight and also serves as a solar chimney that exhausts hot air. Grass and colorful floral bulbs will be planted on the undulating green roof, which will also direct rain into underground cisterns for use around the center.
A photovoltaic system on the roof will generate electricity for the center, and hot water will be provided by a biomass boiler fed by dry wood waste reclaimed from the surrounding area. Totally off-grid, the center will provide all of its own power and will source all of its own water from rain catchment, storm water and black water recycling. YMCA’s Intercultural Community Gardens planned for the roof of Vancouver’s St. Paul’s Hospital. Planter boxes on St. Paul’s roof looking over the West End of Vancouver. Photo by Michael Levenston. Planned garden to open in June organizers hope. The goal of the Intercultural Community Gardens Project is to make Vancouver more welcoming and inclusive for everyone, including immigrants. Everyone can grow healthy, organic food together with neighbours from all over the world! Who is in charge? The project is managed by YMCA Connections in partnership with the West End Residents Association (WERA) and the Gordon Neighbourhood House.
Where will it be? The rooftop of St. Planter box with irrigation on St. How much does it cost? Participation in the project is free, but you will have to commit time and energy for the gardens to succeed. How can I join? You must attend the Community meeting and the Training Workshops. View of the Burrard-Davie community gardens from the St. For more information, contact Joao Salm or David Tracey joao.salm@vanymca.org david.tracey@vanymca.org. The Rarity of Collective Experience « Scrawled in Wax. I haven’t been writing much lately. Well, not here anyway. But to get back into the flow of things, I’ve embedded a rather simple video below in which an enterprising videographer recorded audio of ‘Vancouver’ when the Canadian Men’s hockey team scored their winning goal in the Olympics. It’s not, however, that I care particularly about hockey.
But I was watching the game – mainly because I think the cultural fragmentation of the 21st century means that there are less opportunities to witness and be part of a moment of shared experience. Collective experience is a bit like a worn, fabric-covered book: it’s pleasingly anachronistic. I too pumped my fists when Canada scored, even though I hadn’t been following the Olympics terribly closely. If you like, the ‘action’ starts just past the 1 minute mark. P.S. Portland Architecture: Vancouver, Portland's point-tower role model, embraces mid-rise housing for Olympics.
Vancouver Olympic Village, photo by Nathan Veldhoen, via Flickr Over the last decade, Portland's skyline has been substantially transformed by the addition of several condo towers that were taller and thinner than just about all of the local high-rise buildings that had come before them. In neighborhoods like South Waterfront and Pearl District--but also in places like Northwest 23rd, downtown and along West Burnside--we saw a succession of these new buildings. Usually they incorporated a two- or three-story base, or podium, where the building extends all the way to the street, and then a thinner portion rises 20 or more stories from there.
In most cases, these projects take up entire blocks by themselves. In the past, Portland's central city was zoned to encourage shorter, squattier buidings built to the street and going straight up from there. Vancouver Olympic Village, photo by Michael Tedesco, via Flickr But I’m not sure about creating whole neighborhoods out of the point-tower form. Vancouver’s medal-worthy Olympic Village, one of the greenest neighborhoods anywhere. Vancouver’s civic leaders believe that the athlete’s village built for the 2010 Olympic Winter Games, and the planned neighborhood that will surround it, will be one of the very greenest neighborhoods in North America. I am inclined to agree. The village is the central parcel in a larger planned redevelopment of a section of the city’s old industrial waterfront called, somewhat awkwardly, Southeast False Creek. When the Olympics and Paralympics are finished, the village will become a mixed-use community called Millennium Water, which sounds a lot more marketable to me.
I haven’t visited the site, but I have sifted through virtual reams of information about it, and I have paid particular attention to its plans and progress for some time now because Southeast False Creek is participating in the LEED-ND pilot. Most of the development’s buildings will qualify for a LEED-gold building certification (in addition to the LEED-ND goal for the project as a whole). Link to original post. Mettre le couvert sur Vancouver | Hugo Dumas | Hugo Dumas. Malheureusement, on a eu droit à une fête de deux heures et demie bourrée de clichés de cabane au Canada et de folklore dépassé.
Est-ce bien l'image poussiéreuse et surannée que le pays souhaite montrer à toute la planète, soit un défilé de policiers de la Gendarmerie royale, du hockey sur glace, des feuilles d'érable, des rondelles géantes, un gros castor, des canots d'écorce, un orignal gonflable, des bûcherons et des chemises à carreaux? Pas certain. Où les organisateurs ont-ils enfoui le multiculturalisme qui caractérise le Canada partout sur la planète? Probablement sous un gros totem. Bien honnêtement, le metteur en scène australien David Atkins n'a pas fouillé bien loin pour nous offrir des performances de Nickelback, de Hedley et du crooner Michael Bublé, qui, dans son costume d'officier de la GRC, a poursuivi cette tradition olympique désastreuse du lipsynch.
Vancouver 2010, impair et passe - Sports - Actualité Challenges.fr. The Walrus | March 2010 | "A Tale of Two Cities" by Gary Stephen Ross. Left: VCC-Clark SkyTrain station; right: Grouse Mountain The city as we imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps, in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture. — Jonathan Raban When I knock off work this September afternoon, around two o’clock, I’ll stick an Eckhart Tolle book in my backpack, hop on my bike, and head for the North Shore.
I thought of going sailing on English Bay, or playing tennis at Jericho, or golfing at Shaughnessy, or maybe swimming laps at the Second Beach pool, but I’ve decided to do the Grouse Grind instead. Along the way, pedalling furiously, I’ll give the one-finger salute to a few road-hogging, carbon-emitting drivers before stopping in at Choices to grab a Happy Planet juice. At the foot of Grouse Mountain, I’ll join the hundreds of other fitness buffs who scramble up the 2.9-kilometre trail on a typical summer’s day.
Mr. My Vancouver – Remixing Gary Stephen Ross. If you haven’t read Gary Stephen Ross’s article A Tale of Two Cities in the Walrus, go do it. It is brilliant. Probably the best reflection on Vancouver I’ve read in a long, long time. The piece resonated deeply in a personal way, not only hitting all the right themes about my home city but touching on what about it keeps pushing me away and pulling me back. (Of course, if you are coming for the Olympics, this is a must read backgrounder.) I’ve always wanted to write a long form piece on Open Vancouver/Closed Vancouver which ideas in Ross’s piece touch on.
So with the lens of that project still in mind I’ve posted some of the piece’s best quotes below as well as some thoughts and the occasional mild remix: The main reason I moved back was to be close to my family and to explore what I thought was a city on the verge of becoming a place for ideas. Laugh at the clichés, but understand that leading-edge thinking elsewhere is often the norm here. Serious? There is the escapism again. Learning from Vancouver, Exhibition and Symposium. Curated by Alissa Firth-Eagland and Johan Lundh Opening: January 29, 2010, 8 PM Symposium: January 29 – 31, 2010 According to a recent survey prepared by Mercer Consulting, the world’s largest human resource firm specializing in investments and outsourcing, Vancouver is now the fourth most livable city in the world establishing it as an increasingly popular model for urban development.
The survey, which effectively confers world-class status on the city, sparks obvious questions about Vancouver and its role in the global imaginary. Why is Vancouver the only North American city in the top ten? What images of the city are created and circulated to represent this livability, and what do such images signify? The title of this project, Learning from Vancouver, comes from a commissioned work by Dutch artist duo Bik Van der Pol (Rotterdam, NL). This exhibition marks the first presentation of their practice in Canada. Spreading Seeds – short documentary – a campaign for urban agriculture in Vancouver, Canada.
The Urban Agricultural Movement in Canada: A Comparative Analysis of Montréal and Vancouver. Figure 7: Modeling the Initiation of Urban Agriculture based on Vancouver and Montréal Case Studies The Urban Agricultural Movement in Canada: A Comparative Analysis of Montréal and Vancouver By Chandal Nolasco da Silva Email: chandal.nds@gmail.com A research essay submitted to the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, 16,000 words Carleton University 2009 1. Introduction Urban agriculture is a term used to describe both private and public agricultural activities that take place in urban and peri-urban areas. By documenting the birth of the urban agricultural movements in Montréal and Vancouver, this research has sought to understand how modern Canadian cities can adopt local food systems. Montréal was selected as a model city for urban agriculture in Canada because it is home to over 75 community garden sites and because the City of Montréal’s Department of Recreation and Community Development maintains over 6654 individual garden plots (Cosgrove 2001).
Vancouver Makes a Bright Green Future its Official Goal. Vancouver just released its new city strategy, titled Vancouver 2020: A Bright Green Future (PDF), and it's a bold step forward (as well as a flattering adoption of our bright green frame): We envision a bright green future that couples economic prosperity, health, and happiness with decreasing greenhouse gas emissions. We envision less pollution and cleaner air, less machine noise and more birdsong, less pavement and more green space, fewer sick days and healthier people. We want to send a clear and compelling message to the world: prosperity and environmental stewardship can be partners, not opposing forces. We can meet the challenge of climate change in ways that will improve the quality of life for our children, and our children’s children.
The plan's central, measurable goals include: >eliminating fossil fuels by 2040 >reducing greenhouse gas emissions 33 per cent below 2007 levels by 2020 >cutting water use 1/3 by 2020 >cutting the carbon footprint of the city's food supply by 1/3. Vancouver's Open Data Catalogue - Beta version. Aquaquest Center Teaches Sustainable Living Through Design. Aquaquest is a beautiful addition to the Vancouver Aquarium that was conceived as an education center to teach the surrounding Canadian community the importance of eco-friendly living. True to its nature, the complex demonstrates these principles through an impressive set of sustainable building strategies including a leafy green wall, rainwater harvesting, and a highly efficient heating and cooling system. Aquaquest was constructed as an addition to the Vancouver Aquarium located inside Stanley Park in downtown Vancouver, British Columbia.
Designed by the global design firm Stantec, the Center includes over 52,000-square-feet of office space, gallery and exhibition areas, as well as classrooms and supplementary spaces for the existing facilities. One of the greenest additions to the complex is the Center’s 10-foot-by-50-foot living wall, the first of its kind in North America, designed by Vancouver-based landscape architecture firm Sharp & Diamond. . + Aquaquest + Stantec. City of Vancouver could open data for all. Cycling Route Planner.
VancouverArchives's Channel. Open Data at the City of Vancouver – An Update 16/7/2009. Crown, King of the Streets.