around oppenheimer park:: façades

Oppenheimer Park in the Downtown Eastside/Japantown enclave has been recently returned to the neighbourhood with much fanfare after a 2.5 million dollar facelift that now seems almost too posh for its previous regular inhabitants, although if they have already re-occupied their "home" territory, the washroom facilities are much brighter and cleaner and well-worth a visit...

I, however, find the blocks [Dunlevy Avenue, Powell Street, Jackson Avenue and Cordova Street] facing the park much more intriguing in their evolving cosmetic alterations and wildly diverse stylistic modifications...

from this vertical strip-lapped bento-boxed minimalism...

to more traditional ship-lapped frontier-style trading post, now jazzed up like a garish show-girl...

to cagey yet hip with cool signage for those without a second hand???

to the sturdy, trustworthy provider of faith and hope for the needy and the speedy...

to a gracious classic pioneer box house with welcoming front porch [but concealing curtained windows]...

to a turn of the 20th century deco-moderne funeral parlour converted into art gallery and multi-purpose live venue for the mostly undead...[needless to say,  memorial services can still be arranged]

around oppenheimer park:: vignettes

During the 34th annual Powell Street Festival held in the renewed and recently reopened Oppenheimer Park, I wandered around the periphery of the lively park and well-attended event to focus instead on the details of a gentrifying block that has yet to shed its rough and tumble edges...

Despite the huge effort to clean up the neighbourhood by revitalizing the park and to attract families and tourists [and adventurous yuppies!] who are not turned off by the continuing presence of street people and drug activity, the more squeamish will have to avert their eyes to such gritty evidence as needles stuck to trees and certain fragile beings breaking down unheeded by the masses of better dressed and culinarily sated visitors...

violated trunk...

classical pretensions...

workboots and chandeliers...

portrait behind bars...

a century of grime...

gas pump blues...

chapel revival...

courtyard respite...

and a gauzy reprieve...

city haunts

Surreptitiously wandering the aging corridors of municipal power one summer afternoon, the art deco halls were hauntingly silent while I stole a few ghostly images of the original fixtures and detailing still in use from so long ago...

[there was a wall of framed photographs of all the previous mayors of Vancouver - needless to say, they were all male, all white, some with bushy beards...]

Vancouver City Hall, operating since 1936,
designed by the architectural firm of Townley and Matheson,
Captain George Vancouver guiding on...
[façade facing West 10th Avenue, Cambie Street to the right]

MOA outside

Perhaps the most sensitive and intuitive of Arthur Erickson's many prominent creations, the much vaunted Museum of Anthropology rising from the edge of the University of British Columbia campus remains a lyrical and distinguished contemporary depository for the collected and preserved art and ritual objects of indigenous cultures from the Northwest coast and all the continents...
I began my studies at UBC a couple of years after it was completed in 1976 and took a class in archaeology in my second year that enabled frequent access to the museum - thereby spending many fascinated hours exploring the collections in the crowded glass cases and countless drawers...
I have returned sporadically over the years but have never photographed the exterior [except during a totem pole-raising ceremony well over 20 years ago, the photographs from which may still be in a box somewhere!], and on this bright summer's day I am entranced once more by the visual poetry of the raw concrete edifice - Erickson's elegantly minimal interpretation of traditional Northwest coast post and beam structures - and the powerful play of light and shadow on the strong basic forms that are as solid as the ephemeral lives that created them are not...

"At this stage in our history when most forces at work in society are dispersing our energies, fracturing our society, disrupting the ecology of our planet, dismembering our cities, the architect has the opportunity - and I believe the duty, though he seldom seizes it - of being a cohesive force, of providing wholes, "integrities" as Buckminster Fuller would put it in a different sense.  As the mechanization of life and man proceeds on its relentless course, we need to reaffirm that which the machines would atrophy in us - the human spirit."

ARTHUR ERICKSON [1924 -2009]

MOA :: uncategorized objects outside

There may be thousands of obsequiously studied objects from myriad cultures the world over all very carefully housed in the Multiversity Galleries within the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, but outside around the grounds of this Arthur Erickson-designed concrete culture temple staggered above the waters of English Bay are some curious artifacts stumbled upon unobtrusively one hot summer's day...

these few silent and weather-born objects left still in an oblivious state of grace...