Jack Shadbolt

Selwyn Pullan Photography: What’s Lost

by Eve Lazarus on June 9, 2018

I finally got a chance to drop by the West Vancouver Museum yesterday to check out the latest exhibition on the photography of Selwyn Pullan. Assistant curator Kiriko Watanabe has done an amazing job, not only pulling out some of Selwyn’s most interesting work, but also displaying the cameras that he used to shoot them with.

After serving in the Canadian Navy during the Second World War, Selwyn moved to Los Angeles to study photography at the Art Center School in Los Angeles where Ansel Adams taught. He worked as a news photographer at the Halifax Chronicle, and when he moved back to Vancouver in 1950 he found a new movement of artists and architects who were reinventing the house.

Selwyn reinvented architectural photography.

When he found that the Speed Graphic was inadequate for the movement needed for photographing West Coast Modern architecture, Selwyn built his own camera. Eve Lazarus photo

Several years ago, I asked him how he went about taking these photos. “I just look at the house and photograph it,” he said. “It’s a journalistic assignment not a photographic one.”

Many of his photos were taken in the 1950s and ‘60s. They evoke a sense of time, optimism for the future, and perhaps even a new way of thinking. He intuitively understood the work of the architects he photographed, emphasizing light and space and often pulling in the homeowners and their children to show how the architectural and interior design fit with family life.

His pictures show Gordon Smith painting in the studio designed by Arthur Erickson; there’s a young Erickson lounging in his own adapted garage; and Jack Shadbolt is photographed painting in his Burnaby studio. His stunning portraits of artists and sculptors include E.J. Hughes, George Norris, Bill Reid and Roy Kiyooka.

While the photos in the exhibition showcase Selwyn’s work, they are also carefully selected to show our missing heritage—building after building both residential and commercial that no longer exist. The loss is particularly apparent in West Coast Modern.

Go see this exhibition—it runs until July 14. There’s a guest talk by Donald Luxton on Saturday June 30 at 2:00 p.m. which will be well worth your time.

Selwyn died last September, after spending 65 years in his North Vancouver house, where he worked in his Fred Hollingsworth-designed studio, and where he parked his jaguar under a Hollingsworth-designed carport.

Fred Hollingsworth designed Selwyn’s North Vancouver home/studio in 1960.

Top photo caption: Birks Building. Architect Somervell and Putnam. Built 1912, demolished 1974.

Tags Arthur Erickson, Bill Reid, E.J. Hughes, Fred Hollingsworth, Geoffrey Massey, George Norris, Gordon Smith, Jack Shadbolt, Kiriko Watanabe, Roy Kiyooka Birks building, Selwyn Pullan, West Vancouver Museum

West Coast Modern on Display

by Eve Lazarus on June 28, 2015

There is a chapter on West Coast Modern Artists and Architects in Sensational Vancouver.

If you love West Coast modern like I do, check out the art and architecture exhibit at the West Vancouver Museum this summer.

Work from all the greats is there—Fred Hollingsworth, Arthur Erickson, B.C. Binning, Ned Pratt, Ron Thom, Gordon Smith, Len Norris, Jack Shadbolt, Bill Reid and Zoltan Kiss and documented by photographers Selwyn Pullan and John Fulker.

I had spent time in the houses of Barry Downs, Ned Pratt and Selwyn Pullan while writing Sensational Vancouver and it was great to see their work highlighted. I didn’t know that Hollingsworth and Pratt designed furniture, Kiss made pottery, or that cartoonist Len Norris was originally an architectural draftsman.

Len Norris, 1955. Reproduced from the original

Ned Pratt of Thompson Berwick Pratt, may be the most important architect to come out of Vancouver. He hired and mentored some of the most influential architects of the time—Erickson, Thom, Downs, Hollingsworth all cut their teeth at TBP.

Pratt’s crowning achievement was winning the commission to design the B.C. Electric building on Burrard Street—a game changer in the early 1950s.

Fred Herzog photo of B.C. Electric building in 1959

Pratt built his own home on an acre lot in the British Properties in the ‘50s.

When Peter Pratt, also an architect, took over the house after his father’s death, it had started to leak and rot. “I don’t know how many times I heard ‘it’s a tear down Pratt you can’t save it’,” he said in Sensational Vancouver. “This is our home, it’s not so much an asset, it’s our home. It has a sense of place.”

Peter Pratt in front of the mural designed by Ned Pratt and Ron Thom made from paper, coloured dyes and fibreglass. Eve Lazarus photo, 2015

Peter not only saved much of the family home, he built his own post-and-beam home right next door.

Hollingsworth just died a few months ago at age 98. His wife Phyllis still lives in the North Vancouver house he designed in1946.

Barry Downs, who was recently awarded the Order of Canada, still lives with his wife Mary in the gorgeous West Vancouver house he designed for them in 1979.

Eve Lazarus and Barry Downs. Tom Carter photo, 2015

A huge Gordon Smith painting hangs in the dining room. The artist is a good friend of the Downs’ and lives nearby in a house designed by Arthur Erickson.

Ironically, Erickson, who was probably the most famous of all, chose not to design his own house, but bought a large corner lot with a small cottage and a garage in Point Grey out of which he created a 900-square-foot home, and lived there for 52 years.

Arthur Erickson. Selwyn Pullan photo, 1972

The West Vancouver Museum is at 680-17^th Street in West Vancouver. It’s located inside the Gertrude Lawson House, a 1940 stone house built in the Colonial Revival Style.

Tags Arthur Erickson, B.C. Binning, B.C. Electric building, Barry Downs, Bill Reid, Fred Hollingsworth, Gordon Smith, Jack Shadbolt, John Fulker, Len Norris, Ned Pratt, Ron Thom, Selwyn Pullan, Sensational Vancouver, Thompson Berwick Pratt, West Coast modern, Zoltan Kill

In and out of Vogue: A Vancouver art deco story

by Eve Lazarus on February 14, 2015

The Vogue Theatre opened in April 1941 and was designated as a national historic site in 1993.

From Vancouver Exposed: Searching for the City’s Hidden History

Dal Richards opened:

On April 15, 1941 the Dal Richards Big Band was the opening act for the Vogue Theatre, a combination vaudeville and movie house located on Granville Street near the Commodore. A screening of the movie “I See Ice,” followed, and nearly 1,400 people filled the Odeon Theatre that night, with almost as many again gathered outside attracted by the spotlights, the lighted marquee, and the huge neon sign.

The day after the opening the Vancouver Sun captured some of the excitement: “Swinging searchlights cut the sky above a gleaming modernistic façade swathed with flags and banners, floodlights glared and hissed, crowds surged against lines held by police and commissionaires, motion-picture cameras whirred and flashbulbs flared, as the guests passed into the theatre, notables among them paused, bowed and spoke brief acknowledgements of introductions into waiting microphones.”

Missing mural:

While sleuthing through the files at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Jason Vanderhill found this photo of Jack Shadbolt and Paul Goranson painting a mural on one of the walls of the Vogue in 1940, a little before it opened. My other pal Aaron Chapman searched the building, its plans and old photos, but if the mural still exists, it’s well hidden.

Toronto-based Kaplan and Sprachan architects designed the art deco building for Harry Reifel. Inside, the auditorium ceiling was tiered and back lit with neon tubing to resemble waves, and when it first opened, giant golden mermaids were painted on the walls, and the washrooms sported art deco aquamarine and orange tiles.

Outside the Vogue’s distinctive neon sign is topped by a 12-foot figure of a kneeling goddess Diana that looks suspiciously like a car hood ornament. She’s the second Diana, the first was made of sheet metal and covered in gold leaf by artist Bud Graves and commissioned by Harry Reifel for $500.

When Odeon Theatres renovated the Vogue in the 1960s the goddess was in rough shape and sent to the scrap heap. A distraught Reifel immediately commissioned a second statue at ten times the price.

“The front of the theatre without her was like a Jersey cow without horns,” he told a Vancouver Sun reporter at the time.

The sign—one of the largest on theatre row’s sea of neon—has changed colours over the years, but is now back to its original red and yellow colour scheme.

Vogue Theatre 1959

Tags Aaron Chapman, Bud Graves, Commodore Ballroom, Dal Richards, Harry Reifel, Jack Shadbolt, Jason Vanderhill, Kaplan and Sprachan Architects, Odeon Theatres, Paul Goranson, Sensational Vancouver, Vogue Theatre

Boyd House

by Eve Lazarus on July 19, 2012

The story of Ron Thom and Boyd house appears in Sensational Vancouver

Kerry McPhedran is selling the house she bought in 1972. It’s not because she wants to—as a freelance writer, it’s her retirement plan, and because of its tony West Vancouver address, it comes with a hefty $1.9 million price tag—too steep for most of us.

And, that’s a problem for Kerry, because she won’t sell her home to anybody. The house nurtured her when she needed it, she values the part it played in the West Coast architectural movement through its architect Ron Thom, and she loves the aesthetic—one that works with the landscape, rather than imposing itself upon it.

“I want someone who really loves this house and who will be thrilled to be in it,” she says. “If you have lived in one you do feel your life is better having lived in that space.”

I parked on Duchess and climbed the stone stairs to the house, past massive cedars, dogwoods, sword ferns, salal and Oregon grape. You can just see the house from the street—the floor to ceiling glass walls and low roof meld with the surroundings.

Ron Thom

(Photo by Alex Waterhouse-Hayward)

The house was designed by Ron Thom in 1954, and named for its first owners—Joan and Bruce Boyd, artists who studied with Thom at the Vancouver School of Art, along with B.C. Binning, Jack Shadbolt and Gordon Smith.

It was a heady time for art and architecture and the West Coast’s challenging terrain and tight budgets were also the inspiration and career starters for Thom, Fred Hollingsworth and Arthur Erickson.

Because long before he designed the BC Electric Building, Massey College, the Shaw Festival Theatre, and the Toronto Zoo, Thom designed more than 60 houses, mostly on the North Shore. Many of these were bulldozed, including the Lynn Valley house Thom built for himself in 1948.

The houses were dubbed “midnight specials” because Thom and Hollingsworth designed them for $100 each, late at night while moonlighting from their day jobs.

When Kerry interviewed Hollingsworth for a Western Living article in 1990, four years after Thom’s death, he told her that it was an “exciting time.”

“We were doing little wee houses, mostly for people with no money—usually neighbours and art school graduates and staff,” he said.

Kerry is the third owner. Her office is in the same room where the Boyd’s once painted, and where the second owner, a voice coach, kept her piano.

Designed by Ron Thom in 1954 — Kerry McPhedran at Boyd House, 2012. Eve Lazarus photo

The house is small by today’s standards. But the open plan design, tongue-and-groove cedar, massive cinder-block fireplace, and what’s left of the original ox-blood coloured concrete floor, give it a snug, cozy feel.

Kerry has put her own stamp on the house. In 1977 John Keith-King designed a new kitchen and dining room and enlarged the master bedroom. Russell Hollingsworth, Fred’s son, punched in the skylights.

Kerry wants a new owner, not just a buyer who will tear it down, but she’s also realistic. She’s working to have the house included on the Community Heritage Register. And, just to be clear—because this seems to instill fear in buyer’s hearts—being on the Register does not mean designation, it means that a new owner will be eligible for a bunch of incentives, including the potential to build a second house at the bottom of the large lot.

The carpet’s a little tired, the bathroom needs a reno, and the skylights could be updated, but it’s time for someone else to put their stamp on the house and love it as much as Kerry. Maybe even become the house’s custodian for the next 40 years.

Tags 985 Duchess Avenue, Alex Waterhouse-Hayward, B.C. Binning, BC Electric Building, Community Heritage Register, Fred Hollingsworth, Gordon Smith, Jack Shadbolt, Joan and Bruce Boyd, John Keith-King, Kerry McPhedran, Lynn Valley, Ron Thom, Russell Hollingsworth, West Vancouver

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Dal Richards opened:

Missing mural:

Ron Thom

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