English Bay Cactus Club

Posted on May 24, 2012 by

Acton Ostrey’s design for a new English Bay restaurant for the Board of Parks and Recreation (really, that’s what you should call them) has raised a few issues since it opened.

The incredibly busy bike path above the new building has two pedestrian routes crossing at right angles to get to the beach, and the restaurant, leading to potential conflict and confusion. The building itself can also be seen down Denman Street, which wasn’t really the case before.

There’s no question that the new structure is a huge improvement over the shack that stood there before – and it’s likely the food is better as well.

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6th and Willow

Posted on May 20, 2012 by

Curiously, the developer of this project, Kenstone Properties, don’t seem to feature it on their website. Nevertheless, construction of the 6th Avenue townhouse project has started – or at least the demolition of the Apple Market mini mall that used to be located there.

The 25 unit townhouse project is one of the last credited to Macfarlane Green Biggar before their recent split, but really this is a Michael Green design and it’s another seriously contemporary design that will be in sharp contrast to many of the 80s postmodern buildings and stucco boxes in the surrounding Fairview Slopes area.

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Cambie+7

Posted on May 19, 2012 by

This project was first here in October 2011 and is now under construction. It also has a coloured render on site and a name - not just an address (538 West 7th Avenue). Designed by W T Leung, it’s a 10-storey 51 unit building replacing Summer’s Auto Body repair shop. The architect has designed a lot of the buildings in this neighbourhood, including both office and mixed use buildings along West Broadway (the most recently completed is Wesley, featured elsewhere on this blog).

Although he’s designed a lot of buildings, the biggest schemes W T Leung has proposed are just showing up. There’s a rezoning already approved for a 12 storey building on Kingsway, and now there’s a 17 storey building proposed for Westbank Projects at 601 Main Street which would replace an abandoned Casino.

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More Walks

Posted on May 9, 2012 by

We’ve scheduled some more walks that look at some of the new buildings that are appearing and the historic context they sit in. Details here.

All tours start at 10.00am and last two hours. They cost $10 per person (cash only please) and require no reservation.

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1545 West 8th Avenue

Posted on May 9, 2012 by

OMB are a North Vancouver based architecture firm – the Office of McFarlane Biggar. They generally design a very sleek, stripped down contemporary look, and in the past have been as engaged designing interior spaces as buildings. They’ve just picked up a Governor General’s Medal in Architecture for a building in Quesnel, and recently parted company with previous partner Michael Green who is now based in Vancouver.

OMB have just submitted this project in the Burrard Slopes residential neighbourhood just off West Broadway. It has only 18 units, and isn’t a rezoning so it can proceed fairly quickly. It’s already scheduled for a July Development Permit Board meeting.

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633 Main Street

Posted on May 8, 2012 by

We’ve already seen a Westbank proposed development on Main Street at Keefer in the very small area of Chinatown where buildings can go to 150 feet in height. Here’s the new proposal for the site to the south. This is for 151 units over retail designed by Chris Dikeakos for Blue Sky Properties. The two projects should compliment each other pretty well in style, follow the Chinatown guidelines on design, and are similar in scale to some of the mid-rise elements of Citygate to the south. They will bring a significant population into a stretch of Main Street and the edge of Chinatown that currently has very few residents and some pretty dismal retail spaces.

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Paris Annex

Posted on May 8, 2012 by

We held off adding this project until August 2011 so that we didn’t spook it, but once the concrete formwork reached the second floor level we thought we could safely assume that Paris Annex was on its way to completion. And here it is within a whisker of finished.

It’s a new-build infill on a 25 foot lot on Hastings Street, to the east of the already completed Paris Block. (That building was former home of Pierre Paris, a boot maker who set up there in 1907, later to be acquired by Dayton Boots. These days it’s home to the Acme cafe.) The infill project of just 17 units on 6 floors, designed by Gair Williamson Architects for the Salient Group, was ‘on hold’ for two years.

In August we suggested that if Holborn Group would start work on the Huge Hole of Georgia Street, all the stalled projects of a couple of years back would be moving again. Guess what? Holborn started digging again last week.

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