August 29th, 2011
It comes to me whenever I am in Vancouver: an urge to watch the sunset. Pulled by memories of blue Pacific waters buffeting a tangerine sky, I make my way to English Bay Beach, where I find a seat on one of the large pieces of driftwood that have been arranged on the sand, and join hundreds of others in the nightly spectacle.
Last month, though, on my final day in Canada, I was taken to watch the sunset from the roof of the new Vancouver Convention Centre, a sharply geometric structure that rises from a broad concrete plaza next to Coal Harbour. As I climbed the metal staircase up to the roof, I was sceptical that it would be anything close to the English Bay experience. When we arrived, I was surprised. Built at a slight angle, covered in wild grass, with a gravel path cutting diagonally across it, the roof feels like a country meadow that has somehow found itself three stories above ground. Watching the sun set from there, over the water of Coal Harbour and the tall fir trees of Stanley Park, was a surprisingly bucolic experience.
On the surface, that sounds reminiscent to other recent experiments in aerial urban greenery, like New York’s wildly popular High Line. But the convention centre’s roof has more local roots. In many ways, it is the latest product of a style of urbanism born in 1978, when Arthur Erickson designed Robson Square, a large civic centre in downtown Vancouver that combined provincial law courts, a municipal art gallery, government offices and a series of public spaces.
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June 22nd, 2009
Opening weekend for the High Line, Manhattan’s latest, most expensive new playground, is a mob scene: a line of cabs and SUVs blocks long throng the streets of the Meatpacking District, which, full for once, seem almost grateful to be receiving as much attention as they did when trucks filled with carcasses from somewhere west of the Hudson trundled down them without reproach from sleeping neighbors. Even still, these days, every Jersey plate throws looks of shock, scorn, and derision, even if it belongs to a Montclair family with 2.5 kids rather than a butcher shop in Paterson.
When the blood of slaughtered pigs still stained the streets of the Meatpacking District, the High Line park-in-the-sky was once just a dream of some urban eccentrics who liked nothing more than risking tetanus while strolling in the mangy weeds that had sprung up atop the abandoned railroad trestle that everyone thought was — it was the fashion to describe such places — a blight, a pox, a black cancer preventing the realization of the neighborhood’s bright, less bovine future.
Today, a line one hundred people deep winds its way under the railways southernmost supports, which carry the new park above to its blunt slice-off point, teetering slightly over Gansevoort Street. The whole affair — the carnival atmosphere, the families, the concessionaires (albeit servers of hangover huevos rather than cotton candy), even the fact that the High Line’s hip landscape designers have opted to retain (well, replicate) the old railway tracks atop the trestle (and the weeds, too, although they’ve acquired, like hipster hair, an air of carefully-planned carelessness) — all of this feels like the entrance to some spectacular theme park ride, and I half expect to see a sign forbidding anyone who isn’t this tall to ride (the extensive list of rules and regulations turns out to be much less interesting).
New Jersey looms ominously in the background
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