Text Rhodri Windsor Liscombe
The status of architecture and its force within the social order has always been variable. But presently, in Canada at least, it suffers the proverbial worst of all worlds. The tremendous pace of construction and publicity around a selection of major public or corporate commissions masks the exclusion of architects from all but approximately one percent of the design of the built environment. This represents a massive reduction ever since the May 1960 Royal Architectural Institute of Canada "Report on Housing" written by Vancouver architect Charles E. "Ned" Pratt. More recently, Vancouver has become a particular site of this further diminution in architectural agency. Ironically, however, this phase in the subjugation or exclusion of architects is occurring through the marketing and promotion of high-end buildings designed by architects.
The mobilization of architectural knowledge and of architects' creativity for prestige or profit has a long history. Arguably, this began with the Roman architect and historian Vitruvius's publication of his Ten Books on Architecture. Still in currency, Vitruvius appropriated technical and aesthetic knowledge to boost his reputation. But his treatise also served to reinforce and project conventions of design value that could be exploited by individuals, institutions and regimes. Across that historical trajectory, architects helped construct the fabric of modern society while also engaging in aspects of the commerce of knowledge. Their engagement ranged from the compilation of pattern books to collaborations with entrepreneurial or institutional real estate development. Especially during the 1950s, architects worked in the vanguard of comprehensive urban planning as well as in the socialization of conspicuous consumption through suburbanization. In those arenas, nevertheless, they increasingly lost design authority, despite the re-emergence of high-profile commissions.
A consequence of these conditions is the emergence of architizing. In it, the architect and architecture operate as incidental justification for the mobilization of civic space as the marriage of elitist profit with singular desire. At its foundation is a system of spectacular erasure, comprising a multiple removal or relocation of actual place and conditions operating through promotional literature typified by that for the Carina in the Coal Harbour precinct. The term literature is apposite since major residential developments involve the hiring of marketing firms to produce expensive booklets, flyers and project pamphlets together with much more extensive newspaper advertisements. On average, the expenditure on the services of such marketing firms amounts to approximately 14 percent of total development budgets as against approximately two percent for all design activity. Delta Realty Services hired adept copywriters and photographers in compiling the brochure for well-heeled prospective purchasers in the Carina. They privilege an array of features, chiefly topographical and functional, for which the architecture acts as facilitation or foil.
Lest the Carina campaign appear exceptional, go to one of its satellite legatees. Consider the Corus apartment tower being built as one component of the University Town development at the University of British Columbia. Corus is marketed almost entirely around peripheral features. These are the views across English Bay and toward the Straight of Georgia--but excluding the undistinguished Gage Towers student housing standing immediately behind. Building and location are disconnected in inverse proportion to the virtual engagement of the design with nearby celebrity architecture: Sharp and Thompson's Iona Building (1946-51), Bing Thom's Chan Centre for the Performing Arts (1993-1994) and Arthur Erickson's Museum of Anthropology (1975-1976).
The iconic status of Erickson in Vancouver has, indeed, been appropriated as both aesthetic and investment commodity in recent developments where he also acts as project designer. One for a partially rotated steel and glass condominium bears his name. The phenomenon is more multivalent in selling the CHOKLIT "neighbourhood" condominium. Reading the stylish brochure, Erickson's architectural reputation appears more significant than his design contribution. One page of the brochure is devoted to a brief resumé of his major commissions. On another, the printing of his name literally performs as an emblem of quality. Such a strategy of opportunist disjunction is central to our current celebrity culture. It imposes neo-colonist cultural norms (imported things are always better than local ones) typified by the pre-construction selling of Jameson Place. Peddled as "a new architectural icon by Foster and Partners," its "pure design" concentrates attention on the secure and fully serviced cellular floor plate to the exclusion of its eventual effect on urban location and society. The development intends to replicate Los Angeles' Rodeo Drive in Brollywood North. The privileging of style over substance is at least localized with CHOKLIT, even if the simulation of Erickson's creative ability carries greater force than its application. The plans of the CHOKLIT units occupy a subsidiary position to the literary and sensual fabrication of the visceral experience of occupying the barely described fabric. The tally of reasons deployed to buy at CHOKLIT culminates in a page of phrases beginning with "Wake up Choklit" and climaxing with "Want Choklit."
The discourse of desire is one theme investigated in the deconstructive critical strategies associated with postmodernism. But most have become inverted into the cupidity driving condominium sales in Vancouver, and increasingly in major North American cities. The inversion is most evident, and subtle, in the campaign for the Shangri-La Tower. Initial proof resides in the very name assigned to this residential and hotel complex under construction on West Georgia Street in the downtown core. Shangri-La refers to the hotel established in Hong Kong as part of a little-studied if significant feature of the post-colonial era: nostalgia for imperial privilege and snobbery. Even more ironically for Vancouver as a one-time racist community (excluding or relocating Asian immigrants wherever possible until the 1950s), it ascribes positive meaning to a heritage of exploitation descried in Orientalist and post-colonial criticism. In a comparable inversionary gesture, the expensive brochure entitled "Living Shangri-La" places developers, promoters and specialist designers above the architect, James Cheng, on the "dream team" list of those responsible.
The parti or concept of Shangri-La is primarily a packaged experience and secondarily a packaging of fixtures and consumables. The commerce of culture traditionally affecting architecture has become merely a culture of commerce. Expensive goods such as Bentley and BMW automobiles and high-end kitchen and bath fixtures and fittings determine the visual aesthetic of the building and not its design--except as a vehicle for the display of exotic or expressive lifestyle. And the clever wording and imaging of the building-to-be play unconsciously upon Marshall McLuhan no less than Martin Heidegger. But the play reverses their critical intention and especially their exposure of the divide between essence and appearance. Instead, that becomes the mode of acquisition stimulation.
The most remarkable process of inversion occurs around tropes of sensual appeal. In the major Shangri-La brochure, the narrative of desire begins with a photograph of a woman, or rather of her leg, emerging from a luxury automobile, carrying the monogram of the hotel. She wears very high heels, attire which has long served as a signifier of the eroticized female body. Images of an exoticized young female, Asian of physiognomy and dress, course through the brochure and the ongoing newspaper campaign. Especially in the promotional linkage of hotel with apartments, these perform as erotic-exotic ciphers of male desire, mastery and servicing. Yet, in a significant illustration of the opportunism of this sophisticated campaign, the symbolism is reversed in a picture of a young woman being massaged by a male.
The core dynamic is gratification as identity. It recurs in the advertising of less expensive developments. The advertisements for Generations in Burnaby cite complimentary alliterative attributes, "Exclusive, Expansive, Exceptional," that are purported to be transferred with the deeds of ownership. Such ploys indicate the positive interpretation of affect, transience and titillation in contemporary society. By way of further proof, the really expensive strata-title condominiums are cleverly represented as estates, recalling the possession of extensive land-based real estate. And in one more twist of meaning, most advertisements sell ownership as status bereft of owner identification. Quite opposite to the historical work of architect and architecture as fabricator of elevated status, and presence in public space, anonymity of possession early figured in advertising for the Wall Centre Tower (1996-1998), designed by Peter Busby. Owning an apartment at the Wall Centre included ownership of secure, unseen ingress, occupation and egress.
All the promotional campaigns assert uncomplicated consumption of the city's amenities and, particularly in Vancouver, of its remarkable topography. Although not novel--even at the zenith of Modernism, architecture remained a singular rather than comprehensive process--the exclusion or erasure of the urban impact of buildings and building complexes has become much greater. The positivist irony involved in such erasure is again most manifest in the Shangri-La hotel/apartment advertisements. Floor plans overlay obscuring and romanticizing night-time images of Vancouver's West End. Not surprisingly, these comprise views to sea and mountain that eradicate the noisier and messier downtown surroundings. One page with the heading, "Take Shelter," parodies both the conventions of grounded habitation and the inner-city shelters necessitated by the harsher social ethos of today's economy. The parodic process is accompanied by equally ironic appropriations.
Architizing coincides with a larger trivialization of architectural and urban design. In Vancouver, this takes the form of the celebration of the greening of streetscape and espousal of sustainability objectives while deficiencies of public housing, transit and welfare or preservation of agricultural land and pollution reduction persist. A more substantive indicator of socio-economic impact is the reporting of real estate commerce. Aside from periodic anxiety about market collapse, this journalism reflects the superficiality of contemporary mores. The superfice is especially evident in a full-page advertisement printed in the August 20, 2005 Vancouver Sun publicizing Lower Mainland developments by Polygon. With the caption "Homes for Everyone" illustrating domiciles well beyond the average income, the advertising copy makes no reference to architect or architectural characteristics beyond a questionable allusion to the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. The rupturing of architecture (and planning) from urban development parallels that of experience from fiction in advertising. The incidental and even illusory role of architect and architecture in such market urbanism is blazoned on the front page of the CHOKLIT mail-out: "Architectural Eye Candy."
Rhodri Windsor Liscombe is Professor and Head of the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia . His publications on architectural history and culture include The New Spirit: Modern Architecture in Vancouver 1938-1963.