an interesting little article - from last month...
A 1970s triumph, can Granville Island do it again?
Think of Granville Island as downtown Vancouver in miniature. Like the place across False Creek we now have come to call "the downtown peninsula," Granville Island was once truly an island — a sand bar, truth be known.
The 20th century saw bridges connect the area that had become a maritime industrial zone to the rest of the city. Like downtown, Granville Island was pretty scruffy looking until Liberal federal governments of the 1970s invested $20-million to improve infrastructure and streetscapes.
We all know Granville Island's resulting urban argot: wooden docks alive with cadging seagulls; seagoing-grade bollards, posts, sign-pipes and street lighting done up in the bright primary colours of light industrial drag; sidewalks banned in the name of egalitarian hippie anarchy, with cars, pedestrians, and buskers all passing within inches of each other.
It worked.
But the Island's significance for locals peaked in the 1980s, and has been in decline ever since, largely due to the benign neglect of its unfocused land-lord, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. Granville Island is now, in my opinion, our city's most over-rated urban zone, filled with stale crafts (can you say macramé?), timid arts groups, second-rate restaurants and way too many tourists trying to find the Aquabus.
The Island's architecture, streets, businesses, programming and broad identity have lost connection with the surrounding workaday city, focusing instead on the needs of high-end gourmands and weekend visitors from Washington state.
Only a small part of the unfortunate current state of the Island is due to its dated urban design. More crippling has been the steady neglect by its management and federal overlords. They have allowed the retail mix to go stale, been unable to attract edgier arts resident groups and programming, or made it matter to immigrants (or even Asian tourists), nor given it the accessible-to-all public transit service it deserves. Every year, Granville Island matters less and less to many Vancouverites. We mutter, guiltily, that "we hardly go there any more."
All of this places Norman Hotson and Joost Bakker in a difficult position, as they celebrate the 35th anniversary this week of their architectural firm. The two formed their partnership not long after their urban design work re-made Granville Island. Here, they creatively borrowed from Dutch architects such as Herman Hertzberger and Aldo van Eyck, evolving a notion of urban "infill and support" — demarking, but not controlling functions and visitors to the island.
Once their plan was built, Hotson-Bakker maintained long-term urban design oversight for Granville Island under a CMHC contract. This 30-year association has deservedly made both of them world-famous among the shapers of urban markets and metropolitan happy-zones.
This success also makes Mr. Hotson and Mr. Bakker the Ellen Pages of the Vancouver architecture world. No matter what brilliant new buildings they do — and there have been some, especially after Bruce Haden and Allan Boniface joined their firm as full partners in 2001— their out-of-the-gate success will forever brand them as "those Granville Island guys," in the same way the young Canadian movie star will be eternally labelled "that Juno girl."
After their 30-year duty as urban overseers, they have now landed the key design contract in Granville Island's current renewal process. I think this a mistake — for Granville Island management, but even more so, for their own architectural firm, now known as Hotson Bakker Boniface Haden.
By selecting consultants from within the family, CMHC is following the same safe, overly local, and resolutely establishment architectural formula as that chosen by VANOC (ours will be the first Olympic Games in decades without a design competition for even one site), BC Housing (none of the dozen social housing design commissions recently granted went to young and innovative firms), and our downtown tower developers (who dole out jobs to the devils they know).
During a brisk walk across the island, it is apparent the architects believe most of their original thinking was on target. Mr. Hotson's suggestions for improvements lack verve: a new hotel; a double cinema; an enlarged market building; a night-life zone under the bridge.
Let me state it plainly: I rank Hotson-Bakker's original plans for Granville Island as among the most brilliant city-building in all of Canada in the 1970s. What irks and hurts is my realization that, under the timid architectural ethos prevailing in Vancouver today, there is zero chance that a new pair of hot-shot architects would ever get the chance to risk anything as bold.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servl..._gam_mostemail