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Home isn't someone else's investment unit

9/17/2024

New modular building blocks create a visual for more humane density

I blame my dream-home fantasies on that OG influencer Martha Stewart.

When the thick, slick Martha Stewart Living was queen of the magazine racks I was there for the Crafts: the rustic doorstop animals made of French linen tea towels; the velvet lavender sachets for drawers and for gifts. Soon I was sucked into the glossy paper vortex of step-by-step tableaux of Martha — in cropped jeans and crisp Oxford shirt — engaged in various Good Things like washing her paned windows using vinegar from a glass sprayer or sweeping her freshly-painted porch with a birch-twig broom. I was led to believe that people who weren’t already trained pastry chefs or architects could create the Halloween gingerbread haunted mansion, and that one day I too would have a fireplace mantle to display handmade snowglobes nestled between mason jars of glittered cedar boughs dangling with tiny crocheted snowflakes. Never mind that my wreath of pinecones tied with tartan ribbon and tacked to my apartment door wasn’t adding any rustic Christmas vibes to the purple-and-teal common hallways. This was all temporary.

By the time Martha finished doing her five months for fraud, I was half way through 20 years in the same apartment, engaged in the more practical project of trying to live a creative life in a small space (sprawling in comparison to the majority of new builds in Vancouver). I ended up writing a weekly newspaper column on the subject and even partnered in a home re-vamp service that funded four years of art school. Dwelling design remains one of my Special Topics so when I heard first thing this morning (at the time of this writing) that the provincial government had released some free modular plans for small-scale multi-unit housing, I jumped onto the site for a look-see.

Streetscape concept of multi-unit integration with single-family homes, Standardized Housing Catalogue, BC Ministry of Housing

Because when it comes to affordable housing in this town, things can’t get worse (barring, of course, the imminent earthquake a.k.a. “The Big One”). According to one report, last year Vancouver’s median home price was more than 12 times the median household income, making it the third most expensive housing market in 94 cities around the world. Many of the investment units in Vancouver’s soaring glass towers are now languishing on the market, because even if they were affordable, “home” does not conjure up visions of 35 floors of stacked 500-square-foot rectangles with one wall for windows and no outdoor space.

The customizable building blocks are an attempt to provide an option to this modern-day warehousing of humans, a step toward addressing the missing middle between standalone houses and condo towers. They were developed following recent zoning changes that allow three or four units on the standard city lot, to the horrors of NIMBY owners in those single-family-home neighbourhoods and to cheers from developers. To curb design and construction costs and expedite the permitting process, the limited options of modular blocks are basic. One shows two bedrooms with a shared bathroom. The common-area block shows a surface that is both dining table and kitchen island with sink, with the rest of the kitchen along one wall. No balconies are indicated and there are not a lot of windows. Every unit shows stairs.

Placement options on various lot sizes, from the Standardized Housing Catalogue, BC Ministry of Housing

Common space options, Standardized Housing Catalogue, BC Ministry of Housing

Multi-family dwellings on a standard city lot, Standardized Housing Catalogue

On the upside, they are connected to the earth and integrate into established communities. They open up the possibility of having a baby, aging in place, living with or beside other relatives or families of choice. They are the kind of home that might incline a crafty type to collect pinecones from the mature trees in those longstanding neighbourhoods and glue-gun a wreath to hang on the front door.

It’s a Good Thing.

Time is ripe for Occupy Neighbourhood movement

4/24/2015

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One of a handful of Vancouver's 'country lanes' from a 2002 pilot projects. (Photo: Ben Nelms for National Post)

And yet.

And yet there is nothing like an untenable situation to spark a creative response. There is evidence of it in the spaces between, beyond, behind, or otherwise outside the scope of authority. You see it in neighbourhood back alleys and in the gaps between buildings all over the world: small, bold, personal gestures. It may start with a graffiti tag (I was here, The Man can stuff it) and evolve into jaw-dropping unauthorized artworks. It may start with that one condo-dweller with no outdoor space who drags a chair down to the street to do some sketching or practise guitar. Last year some folks down the block put out a table at the corner park and had a sit-down neighbours’ potluck dinner. Down another block is a Country Lane, one of just a handful of alleys transformed into a garden-like thoroughfare in a pilot project with the City back in 2002.

Day after destruction: Giant doily on the bulldozed community gardens in Kitsilano (Carlyn Yandle photo)

And so it has come to pass. Where bloom-perfumed weeknight evenings in spring normally draw out elderly food-growers, young adults on after-class dog walks, tots trying out their new walking legs and commuter-runners with backpacks now there is barely a soul. “It’s so futile,” a neighbour said, hands on hips and gazing around at the remnant plant-bits fighting for traction in the bulldozer tracks. “This is just big male egos at work.”

My community, like all Vancouver communities increasingly hemmed in by one glassy, luxury edifice after another, is under threat of becoming no place in particular.

Living directly across the street from a swath of rubble, I think about the Field of Dreams line, “If you build it they will come.” Except in the case of the formerly thriving community gardens obliterated by CP Rail last month, it’s more, “If you destroy it, they will vamoose.”

Vancouver's downtown alleys are typically sketchy, soulless spaces. (Photo: Jonathan Hayward , Canadian Press)

These small acts are claims on our community. There’s nothing like an obliterated cherished social space to make us rethink this expectation that city planners or developers or Translink or the provincial government will make our corners of the world livable. That’s up to us. It requires a little courage and some questioning of authority. It may involve a little risk and the understanding that it’s easier to get forgiveness than permission.

Livable Laneways has taken on the west alley on Main Street north of Broadway, with various temporary installations and community events.

This is how I came to move a couple of wrought iron chairs from my deck to the acres of dead dirt across the street. I wanted to see if they would be confiscated or destroyed. Instead, they’re being used, to rest for a spell, to soak up the rays, to down a beer. It’s a small act but even two empty chairs are an invitation, a potential conversation.

I’ve been researching creative ways to carve out social spaces in the face of the residential-investment spree that’s taken over Vancouver. Even in the tightest spaces -- or especially in the tightest spaces – humanity can grow and thrive. From the thinnest walkway container gardens in Kyoto to a laneway festival in one of our city’s dumpster-blighted back alley, there is potential in occupying a lost space.

Don’t just say something; sit there.

A laneway in Melbourne, Australia (Photo by Corbis via traveller.com.au)

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Thinking outside the rain barrel

5/24/2013

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I can barely remember this city before community gardens. They're so integral to my neighbourhood, and I don't even have a plot of my own.

Aside from the obvious benefit of providing people ways to grow their own food, community gardens are also spaces of engagement, contemplation and innovation that attracts people of all ages like bees.

Which is why I was so taken by one Industrial Design student's final project at Emily Carr University's grad show last week.

Theunis Snyman has taken on the city-issue rain barrel in a poetic re-think of our weird watering ways in this watery part of the world.

The green poly rain barrel is designed to connect to downspouts to divert 341 litres of water away from the storm sewers for use in outdoor plants and lawns. Trouble is, that system isn't too useful when it comes to watering community gardens. You could stick one of the rain barrels out there on the land to catch the water directly out of the sky but the downspout hole is too small to collect much rain, and there's also the problem of overflow.

The South African-born Snyman might just have the answer, in the Utixo Kinetic Rain Harvester, named after the Bushman rain god in South Africa. Four petals made from reclaimed materials

act as funnels for rain into the rain barrel. According to the promotional materials at the show: "as the tank fills, an interior float mechanism closes the petals/leaves to stop the harvesting process. As the rain barrel is drained, the float moves down and pulls open the flower again, ready to receive replenishment."

No batteries, no high technology, no noise — just a lovely example of sculptural form meeting simple function in this part art installation, part garden innovation. An accompanying image (at left) at the graduation show reveals the sculptural beauty of the enhanced rain barrels in action here in Vancouver.

As if we need another reason to get back to the gardens:

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Garden art beyond the whirlygigs

5/10/2013

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I know I should be researching or finishing or conceiving or cleaning or thanking or discussing or working on proposals. But like everyone else in the northern Northern Hemisphere, I can barely remain indoors these fine days. Because — and I hate to be the bearer of bad news here — the days will be getting shorter in six weeks. The time to make a break for it is NOW. Out, into the city gardens and the public beaches and the urban forests.

You know you're aching to get going/growing when you and your artist friends are more enthused about a trip to Home Depot for potting soil than an art show opening. You know it when your desktop is suddenly stacked with images of art that lives outdoors, in the midst of natural and tended landscapes. We want to make, we want to be inspired but mostly we want it to all happen out there.

Artists' gardens I have known may be overgrown shambles or even slightly freaky spaces but they are never manicured hedges and putting greens. They are spaces of adventure and surprise and they take me back to my artist father's East Van oasis, where my brother and I would get lost in the winding path that held treasures like his concrete head planters with greenery erupting out of the heads like Sideshow Bob hair. Artist gardens often have the feel of public art spaces in miniature, spaces of experimentation with form and materials, maquettes for possible large-scale works.

The discovery of these tiny simple sculptures in a garden would create surprise through unexpected form and the power of multiples, while referencing their particular space.

Having just finished a course in public art I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes garden art successful. Stuffing the space with curios feels like a clutter problem on summer migration. (The large-scale version of that is the charity eagle/bear/orca sculpure...thingies. Even monumental bronzes of horse-mounted Lords on expansive rolling lawns can be overlooked because they don't resonate.)

It's the site specificity and the element of surprise that makes any outdoor space sing, whether that's in the use of materials and scale, like the giant pinecones (above) that Ontario metal artist Floyd Elzinga fabricates from shovels, or the juxtaposition of the object and the natural surroundings, like the firepit below. (I'm filing this mass-produced, buy-online item, credited only to "an artist" in Tennessee, under Accidental Art.)

It's something to contemplate while I look at all the unidentifiable weedy things already going to seed in my little space.

This globe fire pit will not be ignored — not because of scale or materials but concept. That and the scary inferno.

This hose topiary references its particular space through use of materials and is just weird enough that it works for me. (Artist's name lost in the Pinterest jungle.)

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Home isn't someone else's investment unit

Time is ripe for Occupy Neighbourhood movement

Thinking outside the rain barrel

Garden art beyond the whirlygigs

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