Graham Barron Design Inc | Blog

Recent Photos of Cliff House

2012-01-02T10:41:00.000-08:00

These photos were taken last Spring, after the exterior was mostly finished, but not yet the interior.

Highlights from the Mount Pleasant Community Plan

2011-03-08T12:53:00.000-08:00

The residents of the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood of Vancouver, together with the planning department, presented a community plan to City Council on November 18, 2010. The plan was unanimously adopted by Council. Perhaps the most contentious aspect of the plan was the large site issue, and Rize Alliance's proposal to put a 22-storey highrise at the corner of Kingsway and Broadway.

However, tucked away in the community plan were a number of excellent recommendations from the community about the shape of future development that residents would like to see in their neighbourhood. These are some of the highlights:

Encourage contemporary and innovative design:

Keep finding a good way for contemporary design to also fit into the
neighbourhood. As an appreciated contrast / complement to preserved
heritage, invite and support architectural innovation that creates new
legacies (individual sites and/or streetscapes) of which the community
is proud. (page 9)

Encourage laneway development:

"Encourage laneways as a prized feature of Mount Pleasant [...]
providing a ‘second face’ of Mount Pleasant with expanded
opportunities to position architecturally innovative new development
along these routes; (pages 10-11)

Encourage laneway housing and rearyard infill:

Encourage housing on lanes in Mount Pleasant – both infill and
'Laneway Housing' [...] fix the existing infill housing policy to
enable infill housing to be built on most lots (e.g., 33 foot lots). (page 15)

Promote sustainable design:

Explore opportunities to further sustainability and energy efficiency
in design (page 15)

Encourage variety and innovation in housing, and discourage new faux heritage houses:

Investigate opportunities to increase the variety in design of new
housing (e.g., discourage 'cookie-cutter design') and innovation in building design (e.g., discourage replications of heritage-style
architecture or 'faux heritage'). (page 16)

Discourage duplexes as a way to add units to residential lots:

Explore impacts of reducing the height and bulk of new duplexes
(including likely impacts on unit size, property values, and carbon
footprint). (page 16)

Encourage retention of existing heritage houses, in part by fixing the bylaws that allow rearyard infill:

Discourage demolition of older buildings and development of new
duplexes, increase the incentives/regulation relaxations (including
zoning and building code) for heritage retention in Mount Pleasant.
Allow transfer of density within Mount Pleasant as a heritage
retention tool. Recognize that infill housing promotes the retention
of heritage. (page 21)

In short, the residents of Mount Pleasant demonstrated through a long series of workshops and neighbourhood meetings that they are forward-thinking, cosmopolitan and conscientious when it comes to housing and architecture.

One of the first entries I wrote on this blog was about the need for better zoning to allow rearyard infill. The new Mount Pleasant Community Plan addresses all of the issues I brought up in that article, and for the same reasons: laneway housing and rearyard infill are sustainable; they are better alternatives to duplexes; they promote heritage preservation; and they should be encouraged by the City.

Now all the City needs to do is turn this community plan into bylaws. In my opinion, this can't happen too soon.

Lanewave brings contemporary design to laneway housing

2011-02-21T15:02:00.000-08:00

Graham Barron Design Inc is pleased to announce the launch of Lanewave, a new designer-driven laneway housing company based in Vancouver. Lanewave intends to bring new contemporary and modern design to the laneway housing market.

Lanewave features designs by three Vancouver intern architects: Graham Barron, Milos Begovic, and Mike Wartman. The designs are for laneway houses (also known as coach houses or granny flats) on the two most common lot sizes in Vancouver, 33'x122' and 50'x122'.

Graham's laneway house design, gb01.50, is for a 50' lot. It features an open plan kitchen/ living/ dining area on the ground floor, and two bedrooms upstairs. The style is a contemporary west coast sloped roof building, with standing seam metal roof and exposed cedar. The distinctive canted roof overhangs enhance privacy and reduce solar gain:

Milos's laneway house design, mb01.33, is for a modern one-storey building on a 33' lot. The design features an overheight living area and an efficient use of space at under 500 sq ft. The design is pared-down modernism with minimal embellishments and clean black-and-white colour scheme.

Mike's laneway house design, mw01.33, is also for a 33' lot, but uses the 1-1/2 storeys to provide a modern design with sustainable features. The bedroom on the second floor overlooks a green roof. Expansive glazing on the main floor gives the overheight living area wide-open views of the courtyard outside, while slatted wood detailing provides shade and privacy.

With these designs, Lanewave has offerings for all of the laneway house options on various lots. In addition, Lanewave designers are happy to work with homeowners to customize these designs to suit their site, or to work on entirely new home designs. Look for new standard designs coming online soon.

Contact a designer at Lanewave to get started on your laneway housing project!

Building Green Without LEED

2010-11-24T14:04:00.000-08:00

In architecture, sustainability has come to mean LEED, which stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. LEED is an environmental rating system for buildings developed by the Green Building Council that has become the de facto standard for green building design in North America.

However, many architects and designers, myself included, are skeptical--not about climate change or of the need to design more sustainable buildings, but about LEED itself.

This post looks at how LEED works, what some of its flaws are, and the alternatives to designing green buildings without using the LEED standard.

First, why build green at all?

Buildings consume a third of the world's energy. Gas-guzzling SUVs may be the poster-boys for a world bent on over-consumption and addicted to planet-warming greenhouse gases, but the energy consumed by residential and commercial buildings is less talked about but more important. Quite simply, if we are going to manage our resources better and cut energy consumption and carbon emissions, it is critical to design buildings that are more energy efficient and less damaging to the planet and to ourselves.

In the practice of designing more sustainable buildings in North America, LEED has become the dominant system. However, recent results of studies on LEED-designed buildings should alarm architects and green building designers. The National Research Council of Canada found in a study of 121 LEED buildings that one third of the buildings were using more energy than their non-LEED counterparts, and that there was no correlation between the energy performance of the building and the LEED rating.

The Green Building Council is responding to these issues. Since these studies were done there is a new version of the LEED rating system, LEED v3, which focuses more on energy.

However, the results of these studies raise the question: can LEED be fixed, or does it need to be scrapped in favour of a smarter system? To answer this, we need to look closely at how LEED works.

LEED NC (for "new construction" - they do love their acronyms) is a system for designing a sustainable building. It has certain features that do not change from project to project. These include:

Hiring LEED-certified professionals to score the building, and certifying the building with the Green Building Council
The LEED score is based on a point system, which is broken down into six categories: site, water efficiency, energy & atmosphere, materials & resources, indoor environmental quality, and innovation & design process
The energy efficiency is scored using a modeling system that compares the proposed building with a standard one (for example, ASHRAE, which stands for American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers), and assigns points based on how much better it is relative to that standard
Depending on the number of points awarded, the building is given one of four medals (Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum)

The LEED system has a number of features that have made it successful and highly marketable:

The point and medal system is easy for designers to understand and easy for marketers to market: it has been shown that LEED buildings with higher medals will sell for more, which incentivizes developers to seek higher standards
All buildings are rated on the same scale, which makes it seem like you can compare the relative sustainability of one building with another
The system does not require developers, consultants or contractors to do anything that they are not already familiar with in terms of construction, since the building uses standard mechanical systems; they can build the usual building, and add more efficient technologies to gain points

However, these very same features also create a number of problems for LEED buildings, which are inescapable given the way the system works. These include:

The LEED certification process for professionals and for the buildings themselves adds an overhead to projects above and beyond any cost of construction. This additional cost is so great that in some cases, clients on a budget can find themselves having to choose between paying for the certification, or for the sustainable technology itself.
The buildings are self-rated by the LEED professionals designing them. Since there is always an incentive to get a higher rating, the energy modeling, in particular, is likely to show a bias towards best-case scenarios, leading towards LEED-point inflation. This was one of the conclusions from the study by the National Energy Council.
Different buildings have different programs, different sites, are located in different climates, and have different regional systems for transportation, wastewater treatment, energy production, recycling and waste management. This means that no two buildings are ever really comparable.
Because the energy rating system, in particular, is based on mechanical efficiency relative to a standard, LEED does not encourage more radical design, in particular passive design which could lead to elimination of mechanical systems altogether. (There is a passive house system in Europe which has been very successful in this regard.)

One of the shocking findings of the National Energy Council's study was that there was no difference in terms of energy-efficiency between LEED buildings with different medals. In other words, bronze buildings were on average just as energy efficient as platinum buildings. How can this be, when the higher medals are awarded to buildings that are supposed to be measurably more energy efficient than the lower medals?

Here is my theory: At the lower range of the LEED rating system, the designers choose approaches and technologies that make sense for that building's local climate and general site conditions. So these initial choices are highly cost and energy efficient. Then, as higher ratings are sought, the designers begin to "chase LEED points," a common phrase in the industry. The thinking switches from making good choices based on a knowledge of local conditions, to one that simply piles on additional systems. The goal shifts from doing what makes sense for the design, to doing whatever gets the most points. As you would expect, these added systems are less cost-effective and less energy-efficient than the simpler ones, thus the result that higher medal buildings are no more efficient than lower medal ones - just more expensive.

Or to put it another way, the higher the LEED rating, the more wasteful the project.

The problem goes back to LEED's blindness towards local conditions. In order for buildings to be comparable according to a universal rating scale, LEED had to jettison the uniqueness of the local environment - an astounding oversight for an environmental system.

The fact that different buildings are not really comparable is a key point, and worth discussing at length, using examples:

Example One: A building in Prince Rupert, which receives 2,600mm of precipitation a year, gets the same number of LEED points for reducing water usage as a building in Lillooet, which receives 380mm. Similarly, that building in Lillooet will see clear skies for 277 days a year, while the one in Prince Rupert sees only 125, yet both would receive the same number of LEED points for installing solar panels on the roof.

Example Two: In August, the hottest month, Vancouver has an average temperature of under 18c. A comfortable indoor temperature is 21c. For a building to need air conditioning, then, it would have to acquire and trap considerable heat, most of which would come from the sun. Yet a building that is designed to control this solar gain passively may not gain any LEED points, while a building that uses energy-efficient air conditioning and some form of alternative energy generation will get points on both counts.

In the first example, solving problems of energy and water in Prince Rupert at a scale larger than the building, such as a hydroelectric project, make sense, even if they do not get any points, while in Osoyoos building-scale solar energy generation and water conservation, both point-gainers, would be appropriate. In mild Vancouver, meanwhile, much energy-consuming and –producing can be avoided by good passive solar design. Different environments, in other words, suggest different solutions.

In order to have a universal rating system, LEED imagines a building that is effectively floating in space: it could be any environment, so it has no environment. That free-floating building’s performance then becomes an absolute which can be measured against any other building and put on a scale. Under LEED, it is possible to imagine such a thing as a “most sustainable” building: the building with the most points wins.

In practice, however, every building exists in a particular environment, and that environment is ultimately unique in its location, climate, precipitation, solar exposure, and so on. What matters is the suitability of the design relative to the place. The green systems chosen should be based on local surpluses and scarcities. Adding green systems to a building that does not need them is wasteful. Creating problems through poor design and then solving those self-made problems through green features is likewise inefficient.

What is needed, then, is a vision of sustainability that relates the design to the place. This relative measure of suitability of design to place would be less glamorous, because it cannot be rated in a quantifiably comparable way: there would be no way to say that one building is platinum, while another is merely gold. It would be less marketable, because the success of the approach taken by the design would be subtler and thus harder to explain. It would also be, I would argue, more sustainable.

New Photos of Cliff House

2010-11-13T15:36:00.000-08:00

New construction photos of Cliff House on Pender Island, which is nearing completion.

Architecture and Excess: Reflections on the Recent Boom

2010-10-05T13:02:00.000-07:00

Last week I attended a presentation by Shohei Shigematsu, a partner at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) founded by Rem Koolhaas. The presentation was for a new cross-disciplinary arts building at the University of British Columbia that would be used by the schools of architecture, landscape architecture, and planning, among others. (I got my master's degree at the UBC school of architecture).

Detail from OMA's Seattle Public Library

As a presentation for a new architecture building, Shigematsu's slideshow was disappointing. I was in a studio with Patricia Patkau (whose firm is one of the competitors of OMA for this project, as it happens) and one of the first things we did in that studio was study Rem Koolhaas's presentation for the Seattle Public Library. In both cases, UBC and Seattle, the purpose was not to present a design, but rather to show the firm's approach to design.

Detail from Patkau's Grande Bibliotheque du Quebec

Koolhaas's presentation in Seattle was a masterpiece of analysis and wit. His presentation showed that OMA would engage more deeply with the project than the other firms, and that this engagement would lead to a better building. OMA was of course chosen to do the project, and the resulting building is one of those rare successes that is admired by architects and the general public alike. The project also propelled OMA towards becoming one of the great architecture firms of the recent boom.

Shigematsu's presentation last week did not have the same effect. It was witty, and at times brilliant, but the attention paid to the UBC project itself was scant, and showed none of the intellectual brilliance of Koolhaas in Seattle. The overall impression was of a firm that has enjoyed enormous success, but is now perhaps not as hungry as it was, or should be.

The most interesting series of slides for me was Shigematsu's reference to the recent economic downturn, and the effect it has had on the architecture profession. Shigematsu is based in New York, and he said that unemployment among architects in the United States is 40%. This slide was highlighted by graphs of major stock indices such as the DOW and NASDAQ showing them falling off a cliff over the last few years.

Shigematsu then reversed the slide, showing the chart trending up dramatically, and called it a graph of architectural intellect, or something like that. The idea is that during these periods of unemployment, architects have time to think and publish, and the ideas they come up with will make for better design and fuel innovation in the next boom.

If only it worked that way.

No doubt it appeals to the vanity of architects that the brilliance of their work is related to the brilliance of their ideas. Certainly there are phenoms out there like Zaha Hadid, who spend years generating fantastic design before ever constructing an actual building. But architecture is ultimately about putting theory into practice, and practice means getting the building built. And getting the building built is much more likely to happen during a period of excess, like the one we have just been through.

Zaha Hadid's Maxxi Museum in Rome

What do I mean by "excess"?

I mean something very specific, and it comes from the theoretical works of Georges Bataille, in particular his line of thought about "The Accursed Share."

Anyone could tell you that works of significant architecture are more likely to be produced during times of prosperity. Large, extraordinary buildings are expensive, and require a lot of money, materials and labour. If you look at any textbook on architectural history, you can see that there is a one-to-one correspondence between "great architecture" and periods of great wealth. When wealth was accumulated in one place - historically through empire, but more recently through big business - some of that wealth was spent on extravagant buildings.

How Egypt spent its surplus

There is a significant counter to this, namely that the accumulation of that wealth, and the buildings that came from it, generally resulted from a lot of suffering. The theory is that the surplus used to create the buildings was produced by the labourers who made them. That surplus rightfully belonged to them, and not the emperor or mogul who commanded them to construct their monstrosity. Call this the marxist argument.

Another counter is that this only talks about "great architecture." What about buildings constructed on limited means, the vernacular architecture produced by ordinary citizens, who built from local materials and used ingenious means of crafting their dwellings to suit them to the local environment? Call this the sustainability argument.

This is where Georges Bataille comes in. Bataille starts by flipping standard economics on its head by arguing that the central problem of human society is not scarcity, but surplus, or excess. The standard condition of human life on this planet is that we have adapted to our environment in such a way that we are capable of producing more than we need.

Bataille's favourite example is the native American potlatch. Periodically a successful elder would take his accumulated surplus and throw a ritualized party in which he would give away his excess goods to the rest of his family and his nation, even to his rivals. Why would anyone do that? Because the surplus has to be spent somehow, and it is ultimately an exchange: by giving it away, he receives prestige in return, and puts everyone into his debt.

How Chetzemoka spent the surplus

In other words, if the human condition is one of producing excess, we are then faced sooner or later with the problem of how to spend the extra that we produce.

Why would that be a problem? If we have more than we need, surely that is a good thing. It means that we can put some aside for later. We can re-invest the surplus, in other words. Or we can consume it and enjoy the fruit of our labour. We can throw a potlatch, and give it away to others. We can spend the surplus on taking care of the disadvantaged in our society, or taking care of the elderly and infirm. Yes, that's all true. However, re-investing the surplus only leads to a greater surplus, which at some point has to be spent. And consuming the surplus only leads to greed and waste. The ultimate wasteful expenditure is war: the large surplus that is built up is used to produce weapons and support and train an army of unproductive young people whose job is to destroy.

This is what makes the extra "share" that we produced "accursed."

This curse attaches to our labour whether we like it or not. Following the marxist argument, where each labourer gets to spend their own surplus instead of having it taken away by capital, all this means is that the choice of excess expenditure is smaller scale. At its best it means a broad producing-consuming class that spends at a great aggregate rate. At its worst it means that destruction is wrought by individuals or small groups instead of corporations or governments - by a terrorist cell or a well-armed militia instead of a national army. Surplus is a destructive problem no matter who spends it.

The fact that individuals are spending it does not make it less destructive. That is the central lesson of 9/11. The easy access to technology - whether it is planes that can fly into tall buildings, roadside bombs, automatic weapons in luxury hotels, or nuclear weapons in suitcases - makes it possible for individuals and small groups to wreak disproportionate damage.

(I will respond to the issue of sustainability and surplus in another blog post, because it's a big and, I think, really interesting topic. For now all I would say is that the idea of a surplus economy turns sustainability on its head, because sustainability is predicated on the idea of scarcity.)

Getting back to the economic boom of the last ten to thirty years, the signs of excessive consumption and destructive spending are everywhere. The lifestyle of the McMansion and SUV set, 9/11, the Alberta tar sands, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Beijing Olympics. This enormous economic bubble that we have lived through, when so many people and so many governments lived the high life for so many years, is in retrospect a litany of destruction and waste.

And then there is architecture.

I would argue that of all the ways to spend the surplus, architecture is one of the most appealing.

Perhaps the most succinct case to make for spending the surplus on architecture is to look at the past ten years in terms of the divergence in paths between China and the United States. Those two nations have produced and spent more wealth than any others in recent times, and they spent it entirely differently.

In the United States, Bill Clinton ran a budget surplus for the first time in generations, and he used it to pay down part of the federal debt. Then when George Bush came to power, he took that surplus and he spent it not once, but twice: first he gifted the surplus to the wealthy in the form of tax cuts and low interest rates, and then he spent it a second time in the form of two wars, an arguably necessary one in Afghanistan and an unnecessary one in Iraq.

Of course if you only have one surplus to spend and you spend it twice, you are going to have to pay for it at some point, and that is what we are seeing now, as the United States will be paying for the debts run up by Bush for many years to come.

How George Bush spent one surplus

How George Bush spent another surplus

Then there is China. In 2008, the world witnessed perhaps the most extravagant potlatch in world history in the form of the Beijing Olympics. China announced its presence on the world stage as the next great superpower. The opening and closing ceremonies were spellbinding, the control exerted over the city and the populace was ruthless and astounding, the event ran like clockwork. Westerners could only look in awe, and console themselves by criticizing China's human rights or environmental record.

How China spent the surplus

Architects, however, couldn't help thinking about the buildings. The backdrop of every camera angle, it seemed, was framed by the work of a notable starchitect. The most famous of these was the Bird's Nest by Herzog and de Meuron.

Another building that showed up in fewer shots, but which was no less extravagant, is the one commissioned by the state television station in China, CCTV. This building was designed by Rem Koolhaas and OMA.

OMA's building for CCTV, under construction

Perhaps more than any other building, the cantilever on the CCTV building is so absurd that it can only be about one thing: excess.

Like a potlatch, part of the purpose of the Beijing Olympics was to humiliate and to put others in debt. The West, and in particular the United States, is deeply in debt to China for other reasons. What the cantilever of the CCTV building says is something slightly different. It says: we are so wealthy that we can spend ridiculous amounts of money hiring your best architects to design utterly frivolous and unnecessary monuments, monuments so profoundly expensive that they could only be built in China, under our system.

The same archiecture firm that designed the CCTV building just presented to the school of architecture at UBC to build its new building. That firm, OMA, may send one of its partners to tell witty stories about the creativity of unemployed architects, but the reality is that OMA's built works are the product of a period of unprecedented excess, of employed architects being paid to create astounding design.

This is not a criticism. If you have read this far, I hope you will see the argument: that human society produces a surplus whether it wants to or not; that this surplus needs to be spent somehow; and that it is much better to spend it in the form of extravagant architecture than extravagant weapons systems. This is all fairly straightforward.

What is less straightforward, and what I have no idea how to explain, is how it came to be that a ruthless, authoritarian government chose to shock and awe the world with the beauty of its buldings, while an advanced democracy faced with spending a similar surplus chose to shock and awe the world with the destructive power of its weapons.

Vancouver and the So-Called Real Estate Bubble

2010-09-02T14:58:00.000-07:00

One of the fascinating aspects of the run-up in real estate prices in Vancouver is watching the highly emotional reaction in the comments sections of websites that post news stories on the subject. For instance, the Real Estate Board of Vancouver regularly publishes monthly data that tracks prices, and these are often the subject of articles in the Vancouver Sun or Province. Take for example the most recent such article from the Sun, "Vancouver's lofty house prices fall slightly in August."

The comments following these articles immediately turn into a flame war, with one side arguing that the data is rigged, housing is in a huge bubble, and prices are about to collapse. For example, from an anonymous poster: "This article is a great spinning of the facts by our realtor friends at the VCR real estate board." Keep in mind that the web commenters are arguing about data, not opinion.

As someone who lived in London and New York during the start of the boom in the late 1990s, I find the reaction of Vancouverites to their real estate prices a little odd. Yes, the prices are high. However, they are nowhere near the levels reached during the bubble by desirable cities in other countries. I've had trouble making this argument, though, because I didn't have the data. Not many of the worthwhile media in the US or UK bother to compare their real estate with Canada.

The Globe and Mail recently helped me out by publishing an interactive article entitled "Why the housing market may be heading for correction." The graphic article intended to argue that Canadian real estate is in a bubble condition and about to burst. However one of the graphs provided by the article inadvertently argues exactly the opposite.

Here is the first chart, which does make Canadian real estate look like a bubble. Prices are in inflation-adjusted 1980 dollars:

Looking at this graph, the real estate prices in Vancouver jump out. From around $75,000 in 1980, prices are now at almost $250,000 in Vancouver. Since it is adjusted for inflation, that means houses are more than 333% more expensive now than they were 30 years ago. This does indeed look like a bubble.

Flip to the next chart, however, and those Canadian prices are plotted against US prices in the same time period:

Suddenly the Canadian bubble doesn't look so bad (unless you live in Calgary). That big bulge in US prices - now that's a bubble. Vancouver prices, by comparison, appear to have missed that bubble entirely, and then rejoined the US price graph in the recession. This, in short, is what my experience abroad told me.

Okay, but what about that 333% increase in prices, after inflation, since 1980? The issue here is interest rates. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the North American economy was suffering from stagflation, i.e. a stagnant economy coupled with high inflation. As a result, interest rates approached 20% during the period. Today, you can get a mortage for 4-5%, give or take. In other words, debt in 1980 was four to five times more expensive than it is today.

As an example, compare the cost of fully financing that $75,000 house in 1980 versus financing a $250,000 house in 2010. The 1980 house would cost $1,211 per month to finance. The 2010 house would cost $1,315 per month. (This is in 1980 dollars, 25 year mortgage, monthly payments). The cost of owning a home has barely changed.

The key, then, is what will happen to interest rates. If they go up significantly, people holding large mortgages could be in trouble. If they are stable or go down, there won't be a problem.

Reputable economists like Paul Krugman of The New York Times are talking about the possibility of a long period of deflation, similar to Japan's lost decade. In a deflationary period, interest rates go down and stay down. Interest rates in Japan have been at or near zero for many years.

The likely scenario, then, is that interest rates will stay low for the foreseeable future. This means that Vancouver real estate prices, regardless of what the anonymous web commentators say, are not in a bubble.

New Photos of Cliff House

2010-08-23T11:05:00.000-07:00

View of the house from the driveway.

View of the house from the southwest. The master bedroom cantilever is visible at the top.

The view from the master bedroom.

Cliff house nearing lock-up

2010-06-11T15:07:00.001-07:00

Vancouver and the Tyranny of the Parking Space

2010-05-27T08:58:00.000-07:00

Vancouver has recently been named the fourth most liveable city in the world by Mercer and frequently tops a similar list from The Economist Intelligence Unit. What neither listmaker mentions is that Vancouver is an especially nice place to live if you happen to be an automobile. It's hard to imagine that the City's planning policies could be any more conducive to the creation of warm, dry parking spaces. These policies permeate every scale of building in Vancouver, easily trumping sustainability and affordability in policy priority.

At the large scale, highrises and apartment blocks are required to provide so many parking spaces that they make many projects prohibitively expensive. This is especially true of rental units, which require the landlord to pay for the parking spaces over time, with rent payments, rather than outright, with the sale of high-priced condos. Rental vacancy rates in Vancouver are under 2% in part because so few new rental units are being built. This lack of supply drives up the price of rent and makes the city unaffordable for many.

(The underground parking lots in large buildings also end up determining the spatial layout of the units above, as the column pattern required by parking is extruded upwards into the living space - another reason, perhaps, that condos in Vancouver seem to have a generic feel. Actually, that feeling you get from the rooms of a condo is not generic: it's the feeling of living in drywalled parking spaces).

At the smaller scale, new duplexes are required to provide a two-car garage on the lane. Never mind that this two-car garage is similar in size and scale to the laneway infill building that the City generally forbids in these two-family zones. Never mind that the lost yard space could have been used to plant a garden. Never mind, either, that most people simply park on the street and use the garage for storage space, since their cramped duplex is too small to accommodate all their stuff.

And if you are trying to build an accessory building in the backyard to do something worth while - say, pursue art, or set up a bicycle workshop, or, god forbid, house one of those tenants desperately looking for somewhere to live - the City will likewise require you to take that floorspace away from the main building. Unless, of course, you want to create new parking spaces, in which case Vancouver is more than happy to accommodate your automobiles with a building permit.

Vancouver makes much of its liveability, its greenness, its bicycle-friendliness, its creative class - but when you get to the nitty gritty of its planning documents, the reality is that the thinking in the planning department is permeated with rules that require or promote parking spaces, often at the expense of those other, much worthier endeavours.

Cliff house wing walls

2010-05-07T12:24:00.001-07:00

Cliff house deck cantilever

2010-05-07T12:17:00.003-07:00

Cliff house progress

2010-05-07T12:17:00.001-07:00

Cliff house progress - roof is on

2010-03-30T14:38:00.001-07:00

Cliff house roof-ready

2010-03-09T15:06:00.000-08:00

Cliff house view

2010-01-28T15:13:00.001-08:00

Cliff house rises

2010-01-28T15:11:00.001-08:00

Seen Around Town: Ken Lum's East Van Sign

2010-01-15T13:02:00.000-08:00

Like the graffiti that it references, Ken Lum's newly installed sign showed up in various places around East Van before it arrived for real at Clark & 6th this week.

It was first seen at Knight & 33rd:

Then at the flatiron-like triangle at Main and Kingsway:

Here it is at Commercial Drive skytrain station, in S, M and L sizes:

And again, slightly further west, in S, M, L and XL:

Watching the sign move around town is like hearing the voices inside the head of Vancouver's public art unconscious. Where will the most number of people see it? Where will it offend the least number of people? How tall a sign can we afford? And perhaps most importantly: Will it obstruct anyone's views?

A similar conversation is now rolling through blogs and tweets as the city reacts. Many are for it (City Caucus, Vancouver Is Awesome, Vancity Buzz) and a few are against it. In an age when public reaction is driven by complaints and carping, this is an impressive ratio.

I'm biased, but to me the East Van sign does what really good art tends to do: it has an immediate, visceral effect on you; and then the more you think about it, the more ambiguous and interesting it becomes.

Kudos to the City of Vancouver and Mount Pleasant for taking the risk to install this beautiful artwork.

Ken Lum's VanEast Light Sculpture Almost Vertical

2010-01-11T11:19:00.000-08:00

Ken Lum's light sculpture at the corner of Clark & 6th is almost vertical. It is one of a set of public art works commissioned to coincide with the Olympics. I was honoured to work with Ken on this project.

Cliff house as toy

2009-12-18T11:20:00.000-08:00

Check out this new photo. I edited using Tiltshift Generator, an iPhone app that gives the photo a toy camera effect. I like it!

Cliff house deck in place

2009-12-14T17:17:00.000-08:00

The deck at Cliff house has been installed. The deck cantilevers sixteen feet out over the cliff, supported by steel beams.

By avoiding touching the ground with columns, and allowing rainfall through a permeable cedar deck surface, this design intrudes less on the cliff wildlife below.

The subfloor for the main floor has been laid down, giving a good sense of the platform created.

The next step is to place the steel moment frame. Then the wood frame walls will go up and what looks like a construction site now will quickly take on the shape of a house.

The view from the deck is quite spectacular and a little vertigo-inducing, although that will change once the cedar decking goes on.

A bald eagle was on the lookout today further down the cliff. A good omen, if you're Roman.

Mount Pleasant Promotes Contemporary Architecture in Future Zoning Revision

2009-11-25T16:29:00.000-08:00

The renewal of Main Street, together with the humming light industrial area of southeast False Creek, has made Mount Pleasant the creative centre of Vancouver over the last decade or so. Now Mount Pleasant is gearing up to add architecture to its leadership role in the City, as participants in the neighbourhood's Community Liaison Group have shown overwhelming support for contemporary and green architecture during a round of reviews of the area's residential zoning.

The City of Vancouver has received a lot of credit, some of it deserved, for its approach to planning in the City's core. The term "Vancouverism" popularized by Trevor Boddy has its own art exhibit extoling the City's success. In a nutshell, Vancouver planners pioneered a development model which offered density bonuses to developers who provided public amenities, a win-win that has led to a downtown that is the envy of most other cities in North America.

Less well-known is that Vancouver's planners have used a similar approach in the City's single family home neighbourhoods, except that instead of handing out extra density for public amenities, the City has given it to designers and builders for putting faux heritage facades on its houses. The City achieves this through a set of design guidelines which accompany the zoning bylaws. The design guidelines require the building permit application to include a streetscape analysis which compares the existing houses to the new proposed house.

For example, the single family zone RS-5 includes this image in its design guidelines, with the accompanying text: "Where a streetscape offers identifiable facade composition, a new house design should be derived from common patterns":

In other words, new houses should look like existing houses.

To make matters clearer, a further example is given which explains how the new house should be sure to incorporate period details: "A streetscape of houses of different styles and periods requires the designer of a new house to select some predominant context elements and compose these into a design which generally fits into the surrounding context":

In Mount Pleasant, which is an area with many heritage houses, this enforcement of periodized copying has meant that most new houses built in the neighbourhood have earned the name "faux heritage." In some parts of Mount Pleasant, faux heritage houses outnumber the original heritage ones they were intended to copy.

If a designer objected to this, they would be told that they could still build something different, but if so then they had to do it "outright," i.e., they had to build a smaller house. Since most clients wanting a new house, and practically all developers, prefer to build as large a house as possible, in practice that means that the vast majority of new houses are faux heritage. Lately, the requirement to build faux heritage has extended to the outright designs as well.

Why would the City believe that this is a good idea? To answer that question you have to look at Vancouver's history over the last thirty years or so. I would argue that the key moment arrived in the 1980s when Vancouver experienced an unusually high rate of immigration. At the time, there were no design guidelines, and new immigrants with enough money built large houses that looked different from the existing housing stock. Locals called them "monster houses" and proceeded to pressure the City into the creation of the design guidelines: if people wanted to build a large house, then it had to look like an existing house.

Vancouverites might not want to admit this, but the design guidelines are a clear form of architectural xenophobia. This is echoed in one of the comments from an earlier Mount Pleasant community liaison group meeting, in which one person wrote that there should be design controls in place to ensure that new houses are Edwardian or Victorian in style rather than "foreign looking."

In general Vancouver as a city has moved on from this xenophoboic moment and has become a cosmopolitan, outward-looking Pacific Rim city. Most Vancouverites don't just tolerate our multi-cultural diversity, we celebrate it and see it as one of the City's greatest strengths.

The xenophobic design guidelines, however, are still on the books.

This enforcement of antique design is an obstacle for local architects and designers who wish to pursue contemporary and innovative forms. It is particularly debilitating for the careers of young designers who usually cut their teeth on smaller buildings such as houses or laneway houses, but who are forced to produce dated designs.

Permit applications with contemporary design mean that the designer has to fight for approval or alter the design to meet the design guidelines. House builders, meanwhile, who are more concerned with square footage than aesthetics are happy to comply with the design guidelines if it means an easier passage through the permit process, which can otherwise be time-consuming. To make matters worse, many of the faux-heritage designs that are accepted use inexpensive techniques, such as slab-on-grade and engineered trusses, that were part of the reviled Vancouver Special and monster house repertoire, but which are now acceptable provided that they are hidden behind a periodized facade.

How refreshing it was, then, to attend the Mount Pleasant Community Liaison Group last Wednesday.

The group split up into three rooms, two for design of new houses, and one devoted to preservation of existing heritage houses. I joined one of the two design groups. I was ready to speak my mind, expecting to have to fight for contemporary design, only to discover that everyone in the room felt the same way.

This was graphically demonstrated when we were asked to put stickers next to ideas on the walls that we agreed with, and the most stickers were stuck next to sustainable design, followed by contemporary design.

Even more heartening was to sit in the full session following the design meeting, and discover that the other design group also felt exactly the same about the need to promote contemporary design, and to stop promoting faux heritage.

Everyone felt that existing heritage houses should be protected, and should be easier to designate as heritage. No one argues with the value of the City's architectural history. What people object to is the idea that architecture stopped in 1920, and that the neighbourhood should be frozen in time.

The thorny issue of how to incentivize contemporary and green design in Mount Pleasant still has to be worked out, and it will be tricky. But the first and crucial step has already been taken, and that is the rallying of this trend-setting community around the belief that contemporary architecture is important to the cultural life of the City and should be promoted.

Framing Started on Cliff House

2009-11-20T18:51:00.000-08:00

Formwork and Treeplanting at Cliff House

2009-11-02T11:25:00.000-08:00

The house on the cliff at North Pender Island is nearly ready for foundation wall pouring.

Meanwhile, we have planted some Red Alders and salmonberries at the front of the property, by the driveway, with the intention of restoring it to its natural boggy state.

Formwork on Cliff House

2009-10-10T17:53:00.001-07:00

Formwork for foundation walls is half done. The bracing for the deck
means the concrete is higher than expected, but the bonus is that the
house gets a better view and a roomier basement.

Under the Zelkovas: Hitoshi Abe's Aoba Tei Restaurant

2009-10-02T16:03:00.000-07:00

Take a bullet train an hour and a half north of Tokyo and you’ll find yourself in Sendai, a coastal city of one million known for its trees—and for one of Japan’s most intriguing young architects, Hitoshi Abe. What makes Abe so intriguing is that he continually reinvents his design process, making each project uniquely itself: a football stadium takes on the contours of the surrounding hillside; the rooms of a private art gallery are sized according to its collection and arranged like soap bubbles in a box. Across the street from Toyo Ito’s celebrated Mediatheque in downtown Sendai is Aoba Tei, a French restaurant specializing in beef tongue. The interior of the restaurant is designed by Abe and takes its cue from the double allée of zelkova trees lining the boulevard outside. The architect has employed a sophisticated technique to achieve an extraordinary effect, as the space within the restaurant conveys the experience of being under the zelkova canopy directly outside. Though small in scale, the project is one of those key works that engages significant changes taking place in the field. Aoba Tei places Abe at the forefront of a conversation taking place in architecture about the use of 3d modeling to create complex surfaces, while at the same time the restaurant embodies many of the qualities of older Japanese architecture, before the country opened up and began its mad dash towards modernity.

Entrance to Aoba Tei Restaurant

It is worth looking at that trajectory in order to understand where Aoba Tei’s ideas came from and what makes it so interesting.

The story is perhaps best told by pop artist Takashi Murakami, who describes postwar Japanese art as a progression from flat to superflat. Under America’s influence, Japan became a flat society. Traditional hierarchies dissolved in the new democracy and the middle class expanded to make Japan a nearly classless capitalist economy. In this media-driven age, flat cultural products predominated: billboards, magazines, TV and movie screens.

Postwar Japanese architects meanwhile adopted modernism, a movement whose flat ideals of universality and mass affordability suited the country’s urgent need to rebuild. Tadao Ando and others did for reinforced concrete what Kobe did for beef (and much else besides): they imported something that did not exist in the country before 1868 and raised its quality to the point where the West now copies Japanese techniques. Here and elsewhere, this boxy architecture derived in part from a design process rooted in flat formats. Orthographic projection, the use of plans and sections flattened onto paper and computer screens, tended to produce buildings composed of planes arranged at 90 degrees to each other.

As the economy took off, it was the otaku (geek) subculture that produced the country’s most commercially successful cultural products: manga, anime, Nintendo. Takashi Murakami’s work is a sendup of this trend, flat culture taken to its logical conclusion: superflat. Like Andy Warhol, Murakami’s work is at once a celebration and a critique of the flattening of high and low art, of art and commerce. His signature style, brightly coloured kawai (cute) figures, has found its way onto Louis Vuitton handbags.

Superflat Japanese architecture arrived in the 1970s with the metabolist movement, which proposed that buildings are living cellular organisms that can evolve over time. Its best known product is the Nakagin capsule tower, which is composed of small replaceable concrete units attached to a permament spine.

Nakagin Capsule Tower

Today the lines of superflat art and pop architecture converge in Tokyo at Shibuya, with its building-scale jumbotrons, or in the maid cafes of Akihabara; it can certainly be found at the love hotel Adonis in Osaka, where for ¥950 patrons can spend half an hour in kawai intimacy in the Hello Kitty room.

Shibuya, Tokyo

Hello Kitty Room Info Screen

It might seem as though Japanese culture has long since left behind its austere roots. Yet superflat art and modernist architecture fluorished in Japan in part because they resonated with certain design qualities of the past. Manga and anime are direct descendents of ukiyoe and kabuki, while in architecture, modernism has much in common with tatami-era buildings: asymmetrical composition, minimalism, and a modular building system. There is a line of artistic thought that can be traced directly from Edo to the accelerated culture of contemporary Tokyo.

Tea Room at Daitokuji Temple

Still, there are other qualities in traditional Japanese architecture and landscape design that have fallen into disuse in the process of modernization. These qualities are most evident in the temples and gardens of Kyoto, which was spared the bombing, but can be found throughout the archipelago, often in the rural, slower parts of the country.

Rock Garden with Tourists, at Ryoanji Temple

It is difficult to point to any one thing that produces the effect of traditional Japanese design because the different elements work so well together. The natural materials—dark wood, thatch, straw, rice paper—engage the senses. They limit light, reduce contrast, and have an earthy aroma. They are well-adapted to the climate, expelling heat and repelling water in the humid summer and rainy fall. In the winter, heating comes from a hearth sunken in the floor, which is used for cooking and serves as a social focus. The straw tatami mats are sized to the body, creating a human-scale module for room sizing, rooms that are often kept deliberately small to foster intimacy. The transition from outside to inside is measured, with deep eaves and long verandas, while the view from inside to outside is often carefully framed.

For novelist Junichiro Tanizaki, whose 1933 essay In Praise of Shadows laments the passing of traditional Japanese aesthetics, the key element binding everything else together was light:

Our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows, ultimately to guide shadows towards beauty’s end. And so it has come to be that the beauty of a Japanese room depends on a variation of shadows, heavy shadows against light shadows—it has nothing else.

The aesthetic system does not stop at the building materials. Tanizaki cites a lacquer bowl, which in electric light looks garish, but which in the dim shadows of a Japanese room takes on a lustrous depth.

Modern materials and lighting make this kind of effect difficult to achieve. Even in a modern masterwork such as Tadao Ando’s Church of Light, which lights the nave by cutting a glass cross out of the concrete behind the altar, the transition is too sudden, too high-contrast to achieve the gravitas of traditional Japanese space.

Tadao Ando's Church of Light

Yet while it may be hard to set the mood, as anyone who has sat down to contemplate a rock garden knows, the tranquility can be broken by just about anything. By the busload of school children filing past. By the tinny music playing on the loudspeaker behind you. By the fellow next to you snapping photos with his mobile phone. The rocks don’t seem to have an answer to any of this other than to sit there, enigmatically, photogenically. As solemnly beautiful as these places are, there is an incongruity to them as well, as if they find the modern world a bit trying.

Returning to Hitoshi Abe, the genius of his design for Aoba Tei is that it evokes the mood of older Japanese architecture while being at ease with the gadgetry and pace of the times. The compressed, shadowy space transitions seamlessly from the from the leafy boulevard to the dining room. Sitting in the restaurant under the pixellated Zelkovas sets up a view of the trees outside. The effect is highly place-specific, not just to Japan, but to this particular spot in Sendai. Move Aoba-Tei three blocks in any direction and it would lose much of its power.

Sendai's zelkvovas during the festival of light

The zelkovas on the interior of Aoba Tei restaurant

The making of this effect is just as interesting. The tree images were made from digital photos taken inside the zelkova canopy. The photos were then pixellated and applied to a surface designed to wrap the interior of restaurant, a process known in 3d game development as texture mapping. The difference is that Abe has brought this technique to life, drilling holes of varying sizes in sheets of steel, which were then shaped by marine welders to match the 3d model. When backlit, the trees render as pixellated outlines of limbs and leaves, enveloping the diners in a variation of shadows much as the zelkovas do the pedestrians outside. The likeness is even stronger during the winter Festival of Starlight, when the bare zelkovas are lit with strings of white lights.

3d rendering of zelkova trees outside Aoba Tei

One pixelated zelkova

Rendering of interior steel shape inside Aoba Tei

Steel shape with pixelated trees punched out

Steel shape inserted inside restauarant

Rendering of final street scene outside restaurant

Rendering of interior of restaurant looking out at zelkovas

Though modest in scope, Aoba Tei is one of the better examples of an important shift taking place in architecture. Innovation in the field has always been fueled by technology. If modernism was the working out of the logic of new building materials —concrete, steel and glass—what we are seeing now is the logic of the computer. Abe’s design relies on perspective, a view that defies measurement, or did, before the advent of 3d modeling. Where 2d drawing led to boxes, 3d modeling is just as happy with angles and curves. This development has had a surprising effect: the computer, which was supposed to distance the designer from the haptic qualities of building, has instead in the right hands brought a new sensuousness to architecture.

While technologically sophisticated enough to accommodate the inevitable mobile phone, Aoba Tei is also a place where the lacquerware would show its beauty. It seems fitting though that the restaurant is international, with its chef having trained in France and its architect in the United States. Perhaps most globalist of all is the use of 3d modeling, a technology that has spread across the arts and around the world, but which Hitoshi Abe has used here to create a very local, and very beautiful space. As for the beef tongue: that is a matter of taste.

Construction Started on Cliff House

2009-09-17T16:44:00.000-07:00

The footings have been poured on my first real building project, a cliff house on Pender Island.

The structural engineer was over to visit the site and discuss the framing with the contractor and the steel fabricator.

"When does the steel need to be ready?"

"The crane operator gets back from his vacation in Russia in a month. So, in a month."

Vancouver Laneway Housing: An Unfinished Project

2009-09-14T11:31:00.001-07:00

The City of Vancouver recently approved its Ecodensity initiative, which includes a provision for laneway housing in single-family zones. This is a welcome and progressive move by the Council, since it adds density, and all its benefits, to the least-dense parts of the City. Metro Vancouver is expected to double in population before the middle of this century, and all those new people need to live somewhere. The general view is that laneway housing adds density without disrupting the granular building pattern that makes these neighbourhoods so desirable. The fact that the City was able to increase density in areas that have traditionally been reluctant to allow it is a sign of how appealing laneway housing is.

What Vancouver failed to do, however, is apply the obvious appeal of laneway housing to other appropriate parts of the City, in particular two-family zones. The thinking seems to be that two-family zones in the City already allow laneway houses in the form of infill housing, so including these zones in the Ecodensity initiative was unnecessary:

Current City regulations already allow one type of laneway housing. These are zones in which lane houses are placed over garages, in order to provide the required parking. They are generally on larger lots (50 ft or more) in areas zoned to have duplexes, conversions, and other similar development in addition to laneway housing. Although the main house is often retained, both the main house and the laneway house are part of a site redevelopment by small scale developers, with units in both buildings sold through strata titling. This zoning is very suitable for, and successful in, some parts of the city and could possibly be expanded to other locations. Ecodensity Initial Actions (p 18)

The reality however is that infill laneway houses are nearly impossible to build in these two-family zones because of an overly-restrictive set of design guidelines. In Vancouver, many parts of the City have both a set of zoning and development bylaws, which are legal documents passed by Council that determine what can be built where, as well as policies and guidelines, which are less rigorously written and enforced, but which have significant influence on the outcome of development proposals in the City.

In most two-family zones in Vancouver, there is an infill design guideline on the books that limits what can be built. The stated objective of infill is "to retain existing buildings by allowing the construction of a second residential building on appropriate sites" (p 11). The restrictions provided in the design guideline however make laneway infill nearly impossible. These restrictions include:

Separation between existing and infill building of 4.9m (16 ft)
A rear yard area of 195 m2 (2100 sq ft)
Infill building maximum height of 7.7m (25 ft)
Rear yard site coverage of less than 35%
For mid-block infill, a side yard adjacent to the existing building of 4.9m (16 ft)

This is what that looks like:

The first four restrictions make laneway infill doable on many lots, provided the existing house is relatively small and forward in the lot. However the last provision, the side yard setback, effectively kills laneway infill as a popular option. The reason is that most Vancouver lots are either 33 feet or 50 feet wide, while houses are rarely less than 25 feet wide, and are usually placed near the centre line of the lot. For a 33 foot lot, that typically leaves 8 feet of side yard, divided between two sides, while a 50 foot lot has 25 feet of remaining side yard. So 50 foot lots are a rare possibility, provided the original owner built a narrow building and located it off to one side, but 33 foot lots are out of the question.

In other words, the objective of the infill design guideline is supposed to encourage the retention of existing buildings, but the guideline's own side yard setback makes this nearly impossible. In practice, this means that the vast majority of developers of these lots demolish the existing building and construct a new duplex. (Many of these new duplexes look like character buildings, but in fact are built slab-on-grade, i.e. without basements, and without attics, much like the cheap Vancouver Specials that preceded them). This is the first irony.

The second irony is that many of the two-family zones in the City are meant to be heritage-friendly zones, which promote the preservation of character and heritage houses. Since it is largely impossible to build infill, and very costly to renovate or expand an older building, most developers will demolish the existing house, and then design the new duplex in a faux heritage style in order to get a density bonus that allows for greater floorspace. Result: character is being replaced with faux character.

The final irony is that these new duplexes are then required to have a two-car garage on the lane, a parking requirement that is meant to reduce crowding on the street. (Never mind that many duplex owners park on the street anyway, and use their garage for storage.) This required garage ends up being about the same size as the infill laneway house that the design guidelines originally prevented.

The question, then, is what is the point of these design guidelines that prevent infill laneway houses in two-family zones?

Perhaps it's because the municipal infrastructure cannot support the added density? Not true: the allowed duplexes add the same load to the infrastructure as the disallowed infill. And anyway, the numbers for family sizes and residents per building have been falling in Vancouver for decades.

Perhaps it's a matter of safety, i.e. the 16 foot side yard setback is the distance required to get emergency fire and medical services to the infill unit to the back of the lot? Again, not true: the BC Building Code only requires 3 feet for emergency access, which is the setback required for laneway housing in the new ecodensity initiative, and anyway, the lot can also be accessed from the lane.

No, the reason for the 16 foot side yard setback is that whoever wrote the guideline decided that it looked nice. To make that clear, they included this picture in the guideline:

At the time of writing, the City felt that all of the dwellings should be visible from the street. Notice, too, that the laneway house matches the main house to a large extent in terms of style. There is an idea here about the character of the streetscape and the granularity of building pattern relative to open spaces. A couple of questions come up immediately, however.

The first question is: why does this idea of streetscape trump all of the benefits of sustainable urban growth identified in Ecodensity? Laneway housing has proven to be the most visible and popular aspect of the Ecodensity initiative, with very little concern shown for the fact that these small new laneway houses will be hidden behind the existing homes. The answer must be that when the guidelines were written, the sustainable nature of laneway housing was not well-recognized; in other words, the design guideline is obsolete in today's thinking.

The second, and to my view larger and more interesting question, is: why are the City's planners trying to design houses? This is not their job. There is a point where design guidelines cross the line from being general regulations concerning safety and massing of buildings, and into the territory of individual building design. The former is a fair matter of concern for City planners, but the latter is a matter for architects, house designers, developers, owners and their neighbours.

Here and elsewhere, the City of Vancouver has attempted to quantify certain characteristics of older homes in the City, and has developed a set of incentives to encourage developers to build new buildings similar to those old forms. This is a large topic and worthy of a blog post of its own, but for now I will say that I am not alone in feeling that this encouragement of faux heritage new construction is turning the low-density parts of Vancouver into a theme park of kitsch architecture.

It is especially confounding when a kitsch design idea such as the side yard setback for laneway infill ends up encouraging the demolition of the very character homes that the new kitsch houses are meant to emulate. Yet this is what is happening throughout two-family zones.

The City Council showed admirable insight and gumption when it recently passed the Ecodensity initiative. That initiative effectively fast-tracked a slow and tedious neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood revision of zoning bylaws in order to allow small laneway houses in single family homes. Some zones, including Cedar Cottage, have already jettisoned the restrictive design guidelines that prevented laneway infill housing, while other two-family zones, such as Mount Pleasant, are attempting to do it one by one, as part of the regular neighbourhood rewriting process. The City should now show the same pluck and fast-track laneway infill housing for two-family zones.