I want to make this absolutely, entirely, unequivocally, clear. I do not share the contemporary concern with ‘facadism,’ I do not condemn it, I do not condone it. I share the urban environment with it, as I share that environment with other ‘movements’ as they occur – part of the natural life cycle of cities.
For those of you who are unaware of the term, or the reality, ‘facadism’ is the somewhat derogatory term applied to the process of building renovation that merely maintains the original street frontage/elevation while completely destroying, and building a new structure behind the mask of tradition and history.
Vancouver is currently undergoing a real estate boom that rivals, as a percentage of ‘change,’ anything in the City’s history. In terms of ‘absolute,’ inflation-adjusted dollars, the current spending spree is probably well ahead of any period of boosterism-driven development on record.
One of the problems with the pace of change is the difficulty that citizens have in maintaining personal contact with the newly developed spaces. Towers that spring from former brownfield sites may make the required concessions to public amenity space, but the towers themselves deny the humanity of the occupants, and of the passers by on the streets below. And, when sites such as Concord Pacific’s development along False Creek, and the ‘Yaletown’ area in particular, are overseen by one company (and their associated architects, ‘vision,’ budgets, and choices in market segment) all the buildings tend to come out looking virtually identical.
Now, I have to admit, these buildings are not quite as soulless as Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis, or various representative bits of Soviet-era housing in the worker’s paradise. But the architectural responses to the kalidescope of demands have been reduced to a minimum, an architectural monoculture.
Some developers, and in some areas of the city, have tried to make money in other ways. And, remember, along with ego, money is a (the) driving force here. When money is the driving force, success is relatively easy to calculate. Money returned less money invested equals profit.
Granted some of the returns may not appear on the ledger directly, such as density transfers, but they will show up, eventually.
Vancouver often grants a sympathetic view to ’sensitive’ redevelopment, particularly in the Gastown area, the City’s oldest commercial zone. Indeed, much of the building stock is heritage listed, at one level or another, and may include certain restrictions with respect to height, FSR (floor/space ratio, a measure of the building area/lot area), and conformity to design guidelines relevant to the area.
And this helps give rise to ‘facadism.’ The retention of the original street-wall, complete with architectural detail ’as built’ lends a sense of visual and cultural continuity to the street frontage; and helps to maintain a sense of scale that reflects human action/interaction both in the buildings and outside on the public street.
Very often the buildings are allowed a vertical addition, sometimes of one or two stories, with a set-back that hides much of the vertical addition from the street-level viewer. The developer wants this additional space to maximize profit, the City may gain tax revenue, and there is an argument that the additional space benefits the local business/residential community with a greater pool of people.
And the buildings are often exemplary in the attention to detail; rooftop green-spaces, geothermal heating systems, and other contemporary details complement the century-old visage that graces the street. The ‘new’ building has a full complement of modern services, of up-to-date amenities, of positive changes to construction methodologies.
The anti-facadists, in their fascistic navel-gazing decry the ‘lie’ that the public sees. They maintain that this new building is, in some sense, a misrepresentation. They complain that a perfectly good, old, building has been destroyed for the nominal profit available through the redevelopment/rebuilding process. They squawk about the loss of heritage detail in the interiors; the loss of old tile floors, the loss (though often reclaimed by specialist recyclers) of old timber, brick, and stone. And they complain that it is new.
But the anti-facadist fascists, in their own ideological verve, have never had to replace all the plumbing in a hundred-year-old building. They have never actually done the math to determine the cost of up-grading, up-dating, up-coding every single system in an old building to reflect the demands not only of modern city codes, but the even-more insistent needs and demands of modern consumers of space. And the actual consumers of space, those corporations and individuals that pay the final tab, want ‘new.’
The romance of old buildings disappears in the middle of a Vancouver winter, when your staff expects heat, and gets instead the banging and gurgling of old heating systems. Original elevators, if the building had elevators, were tiny. You had best be on very good terms with anyone else using the cage. New elevators are bigger, faster, and (possibly) safer. And if they aren’t qualitatively safer, at least you can talk to the ‘operator’ if things get jammed up.
People forget that when most of the building stock in Vancouver was built, or at least the buildings where ‘facadism’ is an issue, electricity ran light bulbs, elevators, and not much more. It certainly didn’t drive recirculating hot-water heating systems. And I don’t hear any clamouring for what is euphemistically termed ‘gravity feed’ hot water heating, which depends on the temperature gradient (and hence specific gravity difference) between hot water and cold to drive the circulation throughout the entire system.
I know of at least one building in the Downtown East Side that is six stories high, still has that gravity system, and the top floor is, shall we say, a little less than comfortably warm in the middle of winter. But the heating system is genuine, it is an antique, and it should be where the anti-facadists huddle while bemoaning the more up-to-date technologies they so fervently disavow.
After you up-grade the heating system there are a couple of other areas of concern. The electrical service. We now expect duplex receptacles every few feet of linear wall surface. We expect to be able to plug in a hair dryer, toaster, microwave, computer, adding machine, general and spot lighting, and a variety of other electrical loads without ever being inconvenienced by something so tawdry as a breaker tripping. Or, perhaps, the nay-sayers would prefer screw-in fuses?
What about the vast array of other, hidden, details? What about high-speed internet cabling? What about security system wiring? Do we just run all this stuff along the base boards, in an attempt to cut the installation costs? What about floors that are not level, rooms that are not square, renovations done by any number of incompentents over the pre-existing life of the building. What about the leaking skylights, or light-wells, as applicable? What about the dry-rot in any, endless, variety of hidden spaces?
My suspicion is that the vast majority of anti-facadists are taking a small amount of architectural knowledge, mostly ‘theoretical,’ drawing on various anti-humanist ‘post-’ positions to generate an inadequate, and perhaps juvenile, Arcadian view of architectural perfection – something the buildings in question never aspired to, let alone reached.
They have fond memories of some quaint detail in an old building, like the memories we have of the first place we lived without ‘adult’ supervision – it was great at the time, but we would never consider putting up with it now.
But the fascist anti-facadists want me to put up with their ideologically perfect building. It maintains the original facade, while maintaining all that is wrong with the building in terms of today’s wants, needs, and expectations.
And I disagree, fervently.
