Vancouver Especially (A Vancouver Special scaled to its property value in 1973, then increased by 8 fold) by Canadian artist Ken Lum is the first commissioned work presented at Semi-Public. The installation is a 1:3 scale replica of a mass-produced, Vancouver architectural style of homes known as the “Vancouver Special”, popularized from 1965 to 1985 with an estimated 10,000 homes built.

The scale of the artwork is determined by the $45,000 artwork production budget, comparable to the value of a Vancouver Special in the 1970s. Buying a Vancouver Special with that budget today would be tiny in size (a small relief in the front of the platform shows the actual scale), thus the artwork was multiplied eightfold. Therefore, the artwork would be most appropriately considered an ‘enlargement’ of accepted value. 

As a housing typology, the Vancouver Special is unique not simply because of its characteristically ‘box-like’ structure, low-pitched roofs and balconies that cut across the house, but also because they were designed and built without architects. What does it mean to make a city without architects?

In the 1980s, Vancouver’s city council implemented a socio-economic policy called Living First, putting in place measures to slow the construction of Vancouver Specials and turn towards urban densification, primarily through condominiums—thin 25 to 35-storey concrete-and-glass residential towers atop a base of commercial storefronts. In contrast to the gradual proliferation of individual Vancouver Specials (which offered homeowners a certain amount of control through the application of ad-hoc embellishments to individualize their homes), the podium-style towers, now ubiquitous in Vancouver, were largely precipitated by a single sale of 8 million square feet of city land to Hong Kong-based billionaire Li Ka Shing, after Expo ‘86, in exchange for the promise of a regulated urban master plan.

Increasing the downtown core’s population from 20,000 to over 100,000, the master planning efforts managed to reverse the sub-urban sprawl common in North American cities. The new density coupled with a hyperactive real estate market resulted in accelerated increases in property value. Living First, with its podium-style towers and heavy design restrictions, galvanized enough world interest to earn the moniker ‘Vancouverism’. While lauded as a global model, local architectural critics regard the towers as banal, vertical, ‘gated communities’ devoid of architectural variation or contextual awareness. Like the Vancouver Special, the podium tower model isn’t designed by architects, but by urban planners and developers that arc towards an ideology of globalization, where notions of ‘livability’ are flattened into a global metric. Vancouver is consistently listed as one of the most livable places and one of the most unaffordable places in the world—a perverse marker of success for investors who make money from the struggles of affordability.

Urban planners used the masterplan as a functionalist approach to the city; modelled on the ‘average’ human, where the mathematics of density in relation to social-good was highly considered, employing deterministic formulas of percentage for allowable commercial space, leisure space, social housing, child-care facilities, public art and even including well-calibrated sight lines to maximize on the view of the mountains. But the city’s adoption of Living First, and the legacy of its socioeconomic mathematics, has led Vancouver, an impressively multi-ethnic city into a monocultural architectural logic of investment. The de-centering of the the city from a well-meaning (although Eurocentric) functionalism towards the excesses of an investment market has given wealthy visible minorities an opportunity to amass capital in Vancouver, bringing about renewed anti-Asian sentiment and Canadian-European claims to dominance.

Here in Vancouver we remember Eurocentric histories, an open wound stemming from settlers in the late 19th century (whose validity is still popularly glorified and falsely granted), who violently took this land from pre-existing communities of the indigenous Squamish (Sḵwxwú7mesh) people. We also remember an ethnically-diverse community—often identified as the largest African-Canadian community in Vancouver, located just across the street from 271 Union St—destroyed in 1972 to make room for the Georgia Viaduct off-ramp. And we can easily remember the new developments in the neighbourhood, which have proudly misappropriated Chinese motifs and sayings—such as the ‘Ginger’ condominium’s grammatically charged marketing tag-line “Some like it hot. You like it spicy”, or the Westbank development, which during its pre-sales marketing dwarfed the neighbourhood by covering a half-city-block with massive red letters reading “Ni Hao” (‘Hello’ in Mandarin Pinyin), welcoming only those with money. The pressure on Vancouver’s development industry to deliver third-party social-good has little bearing on the the lived experience of the people who will soon be displaced, and instead exacerbates an unqualified and highly problematic ‘soft’ preservation of Chinatown.

With city plans underway for the replacement of the Georgia and Dunsmuir Viaducts across the street for what will likely continue Vancouver’s monocultural trajectory, Lum’s Vancouver Especially gives us the ability to imagine an insubordinate architecture of the future by looking to the past.

Photo Documentation