Vancouver by Robin Ward (1990, Hardcover, Unabridged edition).

The talented hand of Robin Ward captures the unique character of Vancouver's classic landmarks. This handsome book contains 70 of Robin Ward's drawings, which thousands of readers have come to know though his regular Vancouver Sun column. Along with his distinctive illustrations, the author's commentary provides an insightful look at some of the heritage and history of Vancouver's celebrated places.

About the Author

Robin Ward was born in Glasgow in 1950, studied graphic design at the Glasgow School of Art, drew and wrote about Victorian buildings for the Glasgow Herald, and published three books on the buildings of Glasgow and Edinburgh. After travelling throughout Europe and Canada, he and his wife settled in Vancouver. He soon became a well-known local, drawing and writing his enormously popular weekly column, "Robin Ward's Vancouver," for the Vancouver Sun and working as an artist, writer, photographer, book designer and architecture critic. Author and illustrator of the bestselling Robin Ward's Vancouver, Robin Ward's Heritage West Coast and Echoes of Empire: Victoria and Its Remarkable Buildings, and co-author and photographer of Exploring Vancouver, Ward has won two City of Vancouver Heritage Awards and a Heritage Canada Achievement Award. He is a favourite guest on local radio and television, speaking on architecture and heritage issues.

SUN TOWER
There was a solitary light on high up in the Sun Tower on the Sunday evening when I finished this drawing. A spectral newsman perhaps, shirt-sleeved as if in the tropics, clattering out Monday's story on an old typewriter. In the gloaming, the city lights came on. Trolley buses hummed along the empty streets. The run-down hotels, the old warehouses, that lonely light-the area took on the ambience of fifty years ago.

Many stories were once written here. The Vancouver Sun was published in this building from 1937, leaving its name and memories when it crossed the Granville Bridge to the new Pacific Press building in 1964.

Publisher Louis D. Taylor wrote himself into the city's history books with this colossal structure, a long term as Vancouver's mayor and the subsequent financial trouble that forced his paperthe Vancouver World, for which this tower was builtto move out in 1917. "There is no limit to the possibilities of the city," he once declared, his skyscraping newspaper tower evidence of Vancouver's growing metropolitan status.

There's a Citizen Kane ring to this story, and to the look of this building. With a facade as bold as a banner headline and a tower that punctuates the Beatty/Pender corner like a giant exclamation mark, this building was designed to be seen throughout its newspaper's circulation area-the free press and the publisher's prominence symbolized in architecture.

In 1912, when it was built for the Vancouver World, the Sun Tower was, briefly, the tallest in the British Empire. It may also have been the most risque. The facade is embellished with naked caryatids, sensuously posed, who support the cornice above the arcaded gallery halfway up the building.


OLD COURT HOUSE
Western civilization's concept and practice of law and order, as we know it today, has its origin with the Greeks and Romans. The style of their buildings was considered an appropriate manner in which to represent the dignified panoply of the law, banks and government institutions. Classical architecture too has its law and order, an unwritten constitution of harmony and proportion. Its laws are easily broken, its order difficult to attain.

Architect Francis Rattenbury, who in 1906 won the competition for the Court House with this neoclassical design, didn't break any laws here. But he didn't quite achieve the order which lifts a classical composition above the ordinary. He played all the right notes - a facade colonnade, columned and pedimented portico flanked by imperial lions, and a Palladian rotunda - to serenade the local judiciary with a flattering tune. But he lacked the skill and rigour, that hard edge of discipline and restraint, that sounds the chord of perfect classical proportion. The interior of the rotunda is more deftly handled than the building's outside detail.

Rattenbury's late-Victorian English sensibility was more at home with the romantic concoctions at which he excelled - the provincial Parliament Buildings and the Empress Hotel in Victoria, for example. But his Court House makes a fine art gallery, which it is today - a romantic and mildly subversive irony, given that art should challenge, as much as establish, order.

The most likable feature of the Court House is the two lions that flank what was once the main entrance on Georgia Street. To enter the building today, you go in the back door: that pleasurable sense of importance, of both the building's status (as the Vancouver Art Gallery) and one's approach to it, has unfortunately been lost in the change of use. The lonely lions guard a purposeless portico, a poor reward for their patience.

They were carved in 19 10 by a Scottish artisan, John Bruce, employed by McDonald (stone cutters) of Main Street. Bruce modelled them after those by Sir Edwin Landseer, erected in 1867 in Trafalgar Square. Landseer's London lions were popular beasts, not only in Vancouver. Copies can still be found outside public buildings throughout the former British Empire. (Excerpts)

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

When I first began drawing and writing about Vancouver's architectural heritage for the Vancouver Sun, one of the editors on the paper exclaimed, "Are you sure there's enough? Look at it!" He waved his arm at the glistening, modern skyline across False Creek. "Where's the heritage? They're knocking it down." From a distance, Vancouver does look like a brash parvenu. Here and there, the profiles of apparently token heritage buildings are hemmed in by rank upon rank of thrusting new towers. The view from afar, though, is misleading. On the periphery of and even deep in the sunless canyons downtown, you can find hidden treasure on the streets.

Vancouverites know this better than anyone. Their city holds a world of memories, a world in which the buildings play a prominent part. In response to my drawings in the Sun, I have heard from a couple who first met in the bell tower of the Holy Rosary Cathedral, a lady whose "dad and his father built the Madrona Apartments on West 15th Avenue," and the designer of the neon sign at the Niagara Hotel - who, after seeing my drawing in the paper forty years later, took new pride in his work. A "native daughter of Vancouver" wrote to share her memory of "visiting the art studio of our Girl Guide captain in the turret of the old Imperial Bank of Commerce building at Granville and Dunsmuir." "Great days" in the Sun Tower were recalled by a former journalist. He worked there decades ago with a "happy crew who did mad things and produced good papers," and who on Friday afternoon "moved over to the bar in the Lotus Hotel to drink till one a.m." For these people and many others, there is much more to Vancouver than its flashy skyline.

During the late 1880s, Vancouver developed as a late Victorian and Edwardian city, influenced largely by the arrival of the Canadian Pacific Railway. It was a colonial town that was well placed on the imperial "all red route," from Great Britain to the Orient, travelled by Canadian Pacific's trains and steamships. Some buildings in Gastown were erected at that time. Most of the city's surviving architectural heritage, though, dates from an extraordinary boom that began with the Klondike Gold Rush in 1897 and ended just before the First World War. By 1912, Granville Street - which in 1890 was "just a slit in the forest, a solid wall of trees on both sides" - had become truly metropolitan.

A local business directory published in 1908 blustered, "Vancouver, the Liverpool of the Pacific, is one of the municipal wonders of the Twentieth Century . . . Canada's most progressive metropolis . . . the Gateway to the Orient . . . aided by the boundless resources of the country ... and the enterprise of its citizens." The community of 1000 in 1886 had, in little more than twenty years, grown to a city of more than 100,000 people.

But in 1912, a recession took the wind out of the city's sails and trapped the municipality in the economic doldrums, where it remained until after the Second World War. There was a brief Art Deco building boom in the late 1920s, but in the early 1950s, Vancouver still looked essentially Edwardian. When the Hotel Vancouver was completed in 1939, It dominated the city with not a modern but a turn-of-the-century presence.

Virtually all the buildings from the boom era still stood: the Romanesque warehouses, the Beauxarts office blocks, the neoclassical railway stations and the Greek and Roman banks. Even today, because of past concentration of modern development west of Granville Street, much of this heritage survives. East of Granville, along Hastings and Pender, the core of the old city still exists. There are many more old buildings here than I could include in this book-the diverse, ad hoc facades of Chinatown alone could have filled these pages.

Most of the drawings reproduced here are of buildings in the city centre and its vicinity, where there is currently the most serious threat to the city's architectural heritage. The scouting party that succeeded in destroying the Georgia MedicalDental Building was only an advance guard of the battalion of developers standing before the city gates. But there is also a strong contingent of people who argue for preservation. The campaign to save the Georgia Medical-Dental Building, for example, was a cause celebre. After protracted debate, members of City Council were convinced that the new building would be somehow "better." It will certainly be more profitable-the word that too often lights the fuse of destruction.

In a wider sense, old buildings too can be profitable, not only in modest financial return. In their variety and craftsmanship of obsolete decor, old buildings offer reassuring guarantees that civilized values still exist in an increasingly tawdry world. Weatherworn stones and antique facades are a physical link with the past, sustaining our sense of personal and shared identity. I often feel a kinship with dated places" anonymous, vanished denizens, their lives and experiences invisible but always present in fading walls.

While few modern buildings are likely to resonate in this way in the years to come, there are exceptions. Vancouver has been better served by modern architecture than some cities I know. Several 1950s buildings in the city are already admired: the B.C. Hydro Building on Burrard Street (recently declared a heritage building), the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce at Granville and Dunsmuir with its interior mosaic mural by B.C. Binning, the Customs Building across Pender Street from the Marine Building and the uncompromising, late-1960s MacMillan-Bloedel Building on West Georgia, are among the highlights of contemporary corporate and institutional architecture in Vancouver. Significantly, those buildings were designed in a purposeful, optimistic modernism. They have a strength and conviction largely absent in today's postmodern world.

Otto Wagner, the fin-de-siecle Viennese architect, once wrote, "The main reason that the importance of the architect has not been fully appreciated lies . . . in the language he has directed to the public, which in most cases is completely unintelligible." These words are still appropriate today, when it seems few architects can understand their profession's history, never mind explain to the public the art they practise. Yet architectural history is rich in sources that we can look to as we attempt to solve the complexities of modern urban life and planning. Heritage buildings, where they survive, are constant reminders of standards once held in high esteem. Too many new buildings, as Robert Louis Stevenson put it, "belong to no style, only to a form of business much to be regretted."

Robin Ward
Vancouver B.C.
August, 1990 (Preface by Robin Ward)