We don’t get many prominent non-Vancouver architects doing business in this city. Our best-known ones — Arthur Erickson, Bing Thom, James Cheng, Peter Busby, Gregory and Richard Henriquez — have generated a lot of star power on their own.

But the city is about to see a radically new element in its downtown fabric, with developer Ian Gillespie’s decision to bring in high-profile Danish architect Bjarke Ingels to do an unusual project next to the Granville Bridge.

I got to interview Bjarke and hear more from both him, Gillespie and city planners past and present about what they’re hoping this building will do.

Our yesterday’s tributes to Jim Green, who made an indelible mark on Vancouver.

My story and Tom Hawthorn’s lovely obituary. Many more tributes in numerous places elsewhere.

Night two of the public hearing got through about 50 people on the speakers list. Only two or three were in support, the rest opposed for reasons that ranged from reasonable to conspiratorial.

I heard, at various points, that the Mount Pleasant Community Plan was no longer a valid document, because it was the result of conversations with a group of people from the past and not the current community, and that it was an excellent plan solidly founded on what the community wants.

One woman said she welcomed new condos because, as a single mother and low-income renter, new condos helped her feel her rental apartment would be secure because the first-time homebuyers would decamp to buy condos instead of putting more pressure on her building. Many others said they believed allowing the Rize tower to be built in the neighbourhood would displace current residents and drive up rents.

One of the more striking presentations from the night was from designer Annabel Vaughan, who had this to say:

Good evening Mayor and council. I have lived in Mount Pleasant for twelve years; I run a small design firm; I am an activist and a voter who is passionate about citizens having a voice at the development table in their communities.

I could have spent the last 2 years fighting this development – but the thought of going up against another developer was exhausting because it is not the developers that are the enemy – the ENEMY is the flawed process that the CITY uses for rezoning large development sites.

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In response to a request from another poster, Joe Just Joe has done heroic work in digging up some numbers for people to compare to the Rize project. They’re buried in a string, so I’m re-posting here.

298 East 11th Avenue (2725 Sophia) 8 stories, 3.0FSR.

350 Kingsway 13 stories (126ft), 3.0 FSR

96 East Broadway 3 stories, 3.0 FSR

2758 Prince Edward 9 stories, 3.00FSR

2321 Scotia Street (The Elyse) 9 stories, 3.01FSR.

133 EAST 8TH AVENUE 6 Stories, 3.0FSR

301 Kingsway 11 Stories, 3.0FSR

1 Kingsway, 9 stories, 2.96FSR

2520 MANITOBA STREET 5 Stories, 2.74FSR

Could not find Jacobsen, but looking at the comparibles it’s safe to say it’ll be ~3FSR

333 Main 5 stories 2.5FSR.

Think I’m done though, you can buy me a beer at the next secret monthly Frances Bula beerfest.

A quick resume of last night’s festivities at the first stage of the public hearing for the Rize project at Kingsway and Broadway, which includes five buildings altogether, one of them a 19-storey tower.

This is a hearing that many think historic for a lot of reasons. This hearing will set the stage for how development will unroll in other Vancouver communities that feel they have a historic or unique character they’re trying to preserve and who expect developments, which they’re not completely opposed to, to integrate into that fabric in a way that complements the existing buildings.

The hearing didn’t really get underway until 9:30, since two hours were occupied with debate over a new tennis bubble at Jericho. As a result, the audience heard almost exclusively from city planners and the developer and his representatives, with only one of the scheduled 181 speakers heard from.

It’s starting tonight again at 6 p.m.

It’s clear there are strong feelings running. The clerk noted that the city got a petition with 635 names supporting the project and another two petitions, with 2,116 and366 names respectively, against it. Letters seemed to be evenly split. Public forums have indicated more opposition than support, ranging from60 per cent opposition to about 80. Surveys of the neighbourhood has indicated opinions are more evenly split.

The crowd got some new information from the city’s urban-design expert, Scot Hein, about the history of the project. A lot of people were aghast when the project originally emerged in the public consciousness as a 26-storey tower two years ago. But Hein said the developer originally came in pitching a tower that was 340 feet tall and 7.5 FSR.

(Note to newbies: FSR stands for floor-space ratio and it’s used to determine how much space can be built on a site. Most single-family houses are allowed .7 FSR outright, which means they have as manysquare feet in the building as is equivalent to 70 per cent of the lot’s area. A house on a lot that is 33 x 120 gets to be 2,700 square feet in however many stories allowed, which is 70 per cent of the lot’s area of 3,960 square feet. A building of 7 FSR on a lot that is 20,000 square feet gets to have 140,000 square feet.)

“We were dismissive of that,much too aggressive and ambitious,” said Hein, as he showed visualizations charting how that building would compare to other buildings in the area at that height and then the lower ones that the developer pitched successively: 279 feet, 246, and its current 215, with an FSR of 5.5

While Hein likely meant that to show how much the city had pushed back against the developer’s original proposal, I have a feeling that what this likely demonstrated to many of the opponents in the crowd was that the developer came in looking to get as much as he could possibly get away with, with no ear at all for the community discussion that was going on at the time where people kept saying over and over they wanted something that fit in with the character of the neighbourhood.

Even though the project has been scaled down, I know there are many who feel that it all started wrong. Instead of the developer really listening to what the neighbourhood was saying before doing anything, they believe, developer William Lin came in with an idea of what he wanted first and has scaled it down grudgingly to try to lower the community pushback.

There were some interesting arguments made by architect Mark Ostry, who talked about how the form of the project is designed to reflect the building character of two very different streets in Mount Pleasant.

The two sides of the project that face Broadway and Watson (the little alley that has a street name and is a legacy of Mount Pleasant’s old small streets with working-classhouses) are lower, with a height that echoes Mount Pleasant’s defining building almost kitty-corner, the Lee Building.

The 19-storey tower, on the other hand, is parked on top of the podium at the 10th and Kingsway corner, part of a line of modern condo buildings that have gone up along Kingsway in the last few years.

What was less convincing was the pitch from Lin and Ostry that this will help the city achieve green objectives, by putting density at the intersection of major transit routes and the plea that Metro Vancouver needs to find some place to house 40,000 new residents a year.  I know from lots of experience that people are not going to accept what they think is bad and inconsiderate design just to allegedly save the planet.

What was even less convincing and extremely boring and irrelevant was the squabbling that is going on over the way the building has been computer-rendered by the architects, the city, and Rize opponent Stephen Bohus. Architect Russell Acton used up 10 precious minutes of my life on this earth talking about how Bohus’s revised renderings of the building (that show it as much larger and as ominous as a freighter) are skewed because of their used of multiple vanishing points in the perspectival approach, margins of error, and more. Bohus then used up another 10 minutes accusingly noting that the clouds don’t match in the renderings by the architect and the city, along with other similar earth-shattering details.

A shame this is what kicked things off, as I think the renderings are irrelevant. As anyone who’s gone beyond Grade 5 art class knows, you can make buildings or people look bigger or smaller depending on whether you look up or down at them and various other tricks. The people who support this building don’t support it because they’ve been hypnotized by a rendering. And those who oppose it also don’t need a rendering to convince them that the project is more density than they’re prepared to swallow.

Here’s hoping everyone moves on to more relevant arguments tonight.

For myself, I’m hoping to learn what it is the community actually agrees that it wants in the area. I talked to two people last night after the meeting ended at 11:30. I couldn’t get an answer I could understand from either one of them about what the community did agree to. I’m sure they thought I was exceptionally stupid (one just walked off in exasperation) but I really can’t understand at this point what they think they agreed to.

Do they think they said buildings can only be built to the existing zoning? (30 feet, under certain conditions) Did they agree that some of the already built-up parts and the arterials could take higher densities than that? Did they agree, as planners keep saying they did, that three sites could POTENTIALLY be considered for greater height and density if there were sufficient benefits to the community? (Some seem to tell me yes; some seem to tell me no, not really.)

This is going to be a difficult hearing for everyone involved, because you can see some rights and wrongs on both sides. But both sides are also engaging in some off-putting hyperbole to sell their cases.

Here’s hoping there’s more rational discussion tonight. And perhaps the audience could learn some manners. I’m sure residents of this city would be shocked if city planners booed them or laughed out loud at anything they tried to present as fact or carried on as though they are evil manipulators bent on ruining the city. So why they think it’s okay to boo, heckle, and jeer city planners — decent people who are trying their best in a difficult job — is beyond me.

Another year, less lawn-cutting, more tiny cuts. My story on what was being considered by park board. Latest update is that they did not go through with elimination of lifeguard positions.

Monday night, council will start hearing speakers on the proposed new tower at Kingsway and Broadway, one that promises to be a landmark and precedent (or, some say, eyesore and negative force) for the booming Mount Pleasant area.

The project has also given birth to an extremely vocal and effective opposition group that says the building will 1. change the character of the area 2. drive up rents 3. displace people 4. have a negative effect on the heavily used 10th Avenue bike route 5. actually lead to less density, as multi-person households are replaced by single-occupant condos. See this commentary for a fuller account of the Residents Association of Mount Pleasant positions.

On the other side, I’ve heard the arguments that 1. the neighbourhood agreed that this site was one of three in Mount Pleasant eligible for possible higher densities 2. if council turns this down or scales it down, it will mean prices will rise as people continue to bid up the cost of a limited pool of housing 3. this is an ideal site for density because it’s got so much transit 4. this will help add population and businesses to Mount Pleasant that will strengthen it as a community. (To look at the project details, you can to the company website here and architects’ blog here.)

This project, of course, hits home because it’s only a few blocks from where I live. It puts to the test my general feelings about how the city needs to handle the new development that has been moving out from the downtown, where it was mostly confined for the last decade, to the city’s outlying neighbourhoods of single-family and duplex zones.

A lot of people have weighed in on this already, but here are my observations for what they’re worth:

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I’ve been reading the coverage in the Ottawa Citizen about phone calls that were made during the federal election that appeared to be trying to suppress the Liberal vote, either by having the caller pretend to be with the Liberal candidate’s campaign and making harassing calls or through other tactics.

That put me in mind of a strange incident that happened during the Vancouver election campaign. The COPE office phoned me, telling me that they’d had a complaint from a woman who said she’d been called by a COPE volunteer and was then sworn at and insulted. The woman had copied the phone number down and, when COPE checked into it, it wasn’t one of their numbers.

They wondered if someone was running a vote-suppression calling campaign, but they didn’t hear any other reports of similar calls. I also put out a tweet during the election asking about those kinds of calls but got no response.

I wondered who would bother and why, but they thought it could possibly be someone affiliated with the NPA, since they believed (and that turned out to be true) that COPE and NPA candidates were in a fight to get enough votes at the bottom of the list to get elected.

I dismissed it because I didn’t hear any other reports like that, but when I read some of this Ontario coverage, it makes me wonder whether someone here didn’t at least dabble in this technique.

My story on a conversation with Jim as he looks back on a life that he filled to the brim.

Do any of those TransLink fare-evading bums ever pay their fines? And would Vancouver consider setting up its own power company? Enjoy.