Posted Jun 8, 2009, 7:36 PM
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testify
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Join Date: Mar 2008
Location: san francisco and montreal
Posts: 1,319
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Quote:
Heritage advocate targets Robson Square
Arthur Erickson creation subjected to 'incremental intrusions'
Lisa Smedman
Vancouver Courier
Friday, June 05, 2009
On May 25, Cooper received a City of Vancouver Heritage Award for her campaign to save the Evergreen, a 10-storey commercial building at 1285 West Pender St. that was built in 1980. That building--which came close to being demolished--received heritage designation as a result of Cooper's campaign.
As a designated building, it now would require a heritage alternation permit, issued by the city, before it could be altered or demolished.
At the awards ceremony, Cooper noted that two city councils had voted unanimously for "measures that saved the Evergreen Building from demolition--and in Arthur Erickson's lifetime. And it will not be the last," she vowed. She then formally nominated another of Erickson's works, Robson Square, for inclusion on the Vancouver Heritage Register, a first step in getting heritage designation.
"It's one of the few complexes in North America that so melds landscape, public space, purpose, building--everything from the law courts to the art gallery," she said in a subsequent interview with the Courier.
Cooper, an art consultant who founded the Arthur Erickson Conservancy in 2003, said Robson Square needs protection from the "incremental intrusions" that are cumulatively eroding Erickson's original design. She cited the loss of its outdoor restaurants, large auditorium and cinema--as well as little things like the more recent installation of glass barriers that prevent people from getting close to the waterfall and from sitting on the edges of planter boxes. "These glass barriers are so contrary to the design and the spirit of Robson Square," said Cooper. "[They] break every Erickson design rule. They make the space less accessible, less public."
She'd like to see these intrusions generate the same protests as the "clamshell," a proposal to erect a wooden roof over Robson Square for the 2010 Olympics.
"That never actually made it to a formal proposal stage, and one of the reasons it didn't was because of the outcry against it from the architectural community [and] from the citizens of Vancouver," Cooper said.
She noted that Robson Square, built between 1973 and 1979, made Heritage Vancouver's "top 10" endangered historic sites list earlier this year.
Cooper first met Erickson in 1998 in his garden. She was struck by its design, a "microcosm" of the architect's philosophies on the use of scale and proportion. The cedar deck, the hedge, a platform leading into the pond formed a series of horizontal planes that, she recalled, lead "your eye to infinity, to a distance you cannot see. This is something that Arthur does in all his domestic work, and also in his public work."
She said the time is ripe to preserve that legacy. "There's only a handful of Erickson buildings in Vancouver, and I really believe that the generations after us will look to us to say, 'What happened to them? Why weren't they preserved?'" Cooper said. "And now is the time."
Cooper is especially interested in preserving "modernist" buildings--those built in the 1950s and later. "We're a young city. So when we look at buildings from the '50s and '60s that's a really important part of our history."
Erickson, a Vancouver architect famous for his work on Simon Fraser University and UBC's Museum of Anthropology--as well as for buildings around the world--died May 20. A memorial service will be held June 14--a date that would have been his 85th birthday--at 2:30 p.m. in SFU's Convocation Mall.
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this strikes me as almost comically misguided. it's a pretty simple and uncontroversial proposition that failed public squares ought to be made to work.
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