‘Green’ Olympic village to rise in Vancouver

After a clash over architectural styles, an eco-urban neighborhood is developing fast.

Vancouver, British Columbia, is rushing to build an eight-block project on the edge of downtown that will serve both as housing for athletes in the 2010 Winter Olympics and as a model of environmentally sustainable neighborhood development. The project, on 17 acres of reclaimed industrial land in an area called Southeast False Creek, is Vancouver’s latest attempt to combine pedestrian-scale streetscapes with a generous helping of contemporary architecture.
Early last September it looked as if New York architect Robert A.M. Stern, dean of Yale School of Architecture, was going to play a prominent role in shaping the Olympic Village. Millennium Properties, which paid the city what was described as a king’s ransom to obtain the acreage, brought Stern in to examine the site and help set its architectural character.
Stern voiced opinions that would strike many new urbanists as perfectly reasonable. “I am a great believer in traditional architecture as having a great deal still to offer us by way of example,” he told The Vancouver Sun.  “I think there are too many glass towers in Vancouver,” he said. “…They try to look different, but somehow they all look exactly alike, so I think there’s a kind of boring uniformity.”
Bob Rennie, Vancouver’s foremost marketer of condominiums, who will be handling real estate for Millennium, gave the Sun this interpretation of Stern’s approach: “The whole idea is, instead of defaulting to the ultra-contemporary, to build a classic fishing village,” at least on the portion facing the False Creek waterfront.
Some Vancouverites objected to the “fishing village” idea, though it’s not clear whether Stern himself was comfortable with that description of his intentions. Others feared he would impose a Neoclassical look on the project — Stern had earlier designed a West Vancouver condo tower with historical flourishes, such as a vaulted pediment at its peak. Scot Hein, manager of the city’s urban design studio, told a newspaper that the character of most Stern buildings “is not expressive of sustainability in Vancouver.”
Soon Stern lost the commission. A spokesman for Stern told New Urban News that Stern never got to the point of being asked to present a design. The spokesman suggested that Vancouverites had made wild guesses about the direction Stern would take.
After Stern’s departure, Millennium owner Shahram Malek turned to local talent such as Stu Lyon of Gomberoff Bell Lyon Architects Group and Roger Bayley of Merrick Architecture for design leadership. Vancouver’s Arthur Erickson, 83, Canada’s most internationally celebrated architect, is to design two of the most prominent buildings in the Olympic Village, one of them a community center, the other residential.

Architectural excitement
Erickson, a key figure in the emergence of Canadian Modernism, should give the village “some real architectural excitement, some color,” says Vancouver Planning Director Brent Toderian. “Our lineage is West Coast Modernism: light, views, opening up,” Hein says. The development is to employ active and passive solar design and to incorporate “urban agriculture” — growing food on the buildings’ roofs and elsewhere. The thought is that “they should be contemporary buildings that were very forward-looking,” says Hein.
The city’s Planning Department and its urban design panels wield considerable power over how Vancouver is built, especially the core. The planners have “strong street-wall attitudes,” according to Hein. “The lowest 35 feet of any project should have such things as setbacks, layering, stoops, correct rhythms, good materiality.” Above that, architects and developers enjoy more freedom to do as they please.
The Olympic Village, accommodating about 2,800 athletes and officials, will consist of “low-mid-rise” buildings, Hein explains. The housing must be ready for Olympic athletes by November 2009. By April 2010 the Olympic activities will be gone, and the housing will converted to occupancy by Vancouverites. There will be a mixture of 1,100 market-rate and affordable units, accompanied by retail and commercial uses and the conversion of the old Domtar Salt Building to public use.
The 20 to 25 “building-size pieces” on eight city blocks will be a mix of many three- and four-story structures, some buildings rising to nine or ten stories, and a few topping out at 13 stories. Residents will be within walking distance of goods, services, and transit. Buildings of seven or eight stories are expected to frame a central plaza. Toderian and Hein say that because a number of architects are involved, the new precinct will have variety.
Millennium paid $193 million CN ($181 million US) for the land — a record, for Canada, of $200 per square foot. To set a new standard of neighborhood development for Vancouver and Canada, all the buildings must meet the LEED gold standard, and the community center will be LEED platinum. A developer can add space or massing to increase a building’s energy savings and not have it count against the permitted building volume. Toderian says some buildings will have deep balconies and extra-wide corridors that are sun-lit and ventilated. The extent of natural ventilation will be unusual for North American urban buildings.

A model for development
Information is being collected on what kinds of foods can be grown on the green roofs, in public spaces, and elsewhere. Toderian thinks the ideas implemented there could influence future high-density developments in Vancouver and other communities. Food production will be designed to be “tidy, neat, and attractive in highly visible spaces,” a set of design principles states.
The Olympic Village and the overall 80-acre South East False Creek area — projected to be home by 2018 to 12,000 to 16,000 people — will have a “district energy system.” The system — a first in North America but previously employed in Europe — will pass raw sewage through a heat exchanger to transfer its heat to hot water for space heating and to domestic hot water for all the buildings in the district. Supplementing the system will be natural gas boilers. The overall price that residents pay for energy will be competitive with what they would pay for conventional fuels, but there will be environmental benefits, since production of greenhouse gases will be greatly reduced.