Paul Merrick

West Coast Modern Architecture

by Eve Lazarus on June 15, 2018

There is a chapter in Sensational Vancouver called West Coast Modern which explains the connections between artists and architects and the West Coast Modern movement in Vancouver.

Last week I wrote about Selwyn Pullan’s photography exhibition currently on display at the West Vancouver Museum. I focused on his shots of West Coast Modern houses now almost all obliterated from the landscape.

But Selwyn also did a lot of commercial photography and one of his largest clients was Thompson Berwick Pratt, the architecture firm headed up by Ned Pratt who hired and mentored some of our most influential West Coast Modern architects. Arthur Erickson, Ron Thom, Paul Merrick, Barry Downs and Fred Hollingsworth all cut their teeth at TBP, and BC Binning consulted on much of the art that went along with the buildings.

BC Electric from the back cover of Sensational Vancouver. Courtesy Selwyn Pullan, 1957.

Ned Pratt’s crowning achievement was winning the commission to design the BC Electric building on Burrard Street—a game changer in the early 1950s. While the building is still there, now dwarfed by glass towers and repurposed into the Electra—a few of the firm’s other creations are long gone.

There was the Clarke Simpkins car dealership built in 1963 on West Georgia that demonstrated Vancouver’s growing fascination with neon.

CKWX (News 1130) building designed at 1275 Burrard in 1956, demolished 1989. Replaced by The Ellington. Selwyn Pullan photo 1956

Our love for neon also showed up in the former CKWX headquarters at 1275 Burrard Street. According to the Modern Movement Architecture in BC (MOMO) the building won the Massey Silver Medal in 1958. “This skylit concrete bunker was home to one of Vancouver’s major radio stations until the late 1980s. The glassed-in entrance showcased wall mosaics by BC Binning, their blue-gray tile patterns symbolizing the electronic gathering and transmission of information.”

The building is long gone, replaced by a 20-storey condo building called The Ellington in 1990.

The Ritz Hotel at 1040 West Georgia was originally a 1912 apartment building. It was remodeled into a hotel when this photo was taken in 1956 and demolished in 1982. It was replaced by the 22-storey hideous gold Grosvenor building. Selwyn Pullan photo

I wonder what happened to the murals?

The Exhibition runs until July 14.

Top photo: Clarke Simpkins Dealership, 1345 West Georgia. Built 1963, demolished 1993. Selwyn Pullan photo, 1963.

Tags Arthur Erickson, Barry Downs, BC Binning, BC Electric Building, CKWX, Clarke Simpkins, Electra, Fred Hollingsworth, Ned Pratt, Paul Merrick, Ron Thom, Selwyn Pullan, Thompson Berwick Pratt, West Vancouver Museum

Finding the Rhea Sisters

by Eve Lazarus on March 17, 2018

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

I was driving along Hastings the other day when I saw a huge statue in the yard of Ital Decor in Burnaby. It looked suspiciously like one of the WW1 nurses that guarded the 10^th floor of the Georgia Medical-Dental Building before it was imploded in 1989.

Mario Tinucci of Ital Décor, says the one in his yard is a fibreglass version that he cast from an original nurse, and made in 1990. It was the first of four that were replicated—the other three are attached to Cathedral Place, the Paul Merrick-designed tower that replaced the GM-DB.

The three “Sisters of Mercy” were affectionately known as the Rhea Sisters—Gono, Pyor and Dia.

Ital Decor , 6886 Hastings Street, Burnaby

According to newspaper articles, the eleven-foot-high terra cotta nurses, designed by Joseph Francis Watson, weighed several tonnes each and were in rough shape when they came down. The cost to fix them was upwards of $70,000 each.

Instead, developer Ron Shon donated all three to the Vancouver Heritage Foundation. He also donated some of the terra cotta animals, spandrel panels and chevron mouldings from the main entrance, and the secondary arch (the main one is in the Bill Reid Gallery which is currently closed for renovations).

In 1992, the VHF had their first fundraiser at the Museum of Vancouver’s parking lot and sold off pieces of the GM-DB’s terra cotta.

Maurice Guibord, who was manager of community affairs for the MoV, paid $100 for a piece of the archway, now in his garden, and which came with Certificate of Authenticity #92.

The VHF donated one of the nurses to the MoV in 2000, and later sold the two original nurses to Discovery Parks at UBC.

Nurses on the Technology Enterprise Facility Building at UBC. Courtesy UBC

Wendy Nichols, curator of collections at the MoV, says their nurse is at UBC on a long-term loan agreement. I’m told all three original nurses are attached to the Technology Enterprise Facility 111 building completed in 2003, although only two are visible in this photo.

I never saw the GM-DB, and neither did Maurice, but on Thursday he, Tom Carter and I took a field trip to Cathedral Place. Tom prefers Cathedral Place to the original art deco building because he says the back was unfinished, and the building was only ever designed to be viewed from the front.

Maurice and Tom inside the Cathedral building with the mystery head

Robin Ward described the GM-DB’s “Mayan/Hollywood style lobby” in 1988. “It’s like a film set for a bank robbery in Mexico City,” he wrote.

I get what he means. The lobby in Cathedral Place is very similar to the Marine Building complete with brass doors on the elevators. (The Marine Building and the GM-DB were both designed by McCarter and Nairne architects).

The Hotel Vancouver from the courtyard. Cathedral Place on the left, Christ Church Cathedral on the right. Eve Lazarus photo.

It’s easy to appreciate Merrick’s skill when you get into the monastery-like courtyard that joins Cathedral Place to Christ Church Cathedral and the Bill Reid Gallery. He has used a similar CP Hotel-style roof to complement the Hotel Vancouver’s copper lid, and gothic touches and cloisters to connect the buildings together.

Now the questions remain:

- Is the head that is displayed at Cathedral Place terra cotta or fibreglass (we couldn’t tell) and where did it come from? (There were three original nurses that are now at UBC and four fibreglass moulds—three are attached to Cathedral Place and one is at Ital Décor)
- What is the connection between the Technology Enterprise Facility Building and BC’s nursing history?

Tags Cathedral Place, Georgia Medical-Dental Building, Ital Decor, Joseph Francis Watson, Mario Tinucci, McCarter and Nairne, Paul Merrick, Ron Shon, Technology Enterprise Facility Building 111

The Georgia Medical-Dental Building

by Eve Lazarus on May 27, 2017

On May 28, 1989, we blew up the Georgia Medical-Dental Centre, a building on West Georgia designed by McCarter & Nairne, the same architects behind the Marine and the Devonshire Apartments.* What were we thinking?

The Devonshire was first, designed as an apartment building in 1924. Next came the 15-storey art deco medical building. The Marine Building was completed in 1930—the only one left standing.

Leonard Frank Photo, 1929 — Leonard Frank photo in 1929 showing the Georgia Medical-Dental Building under construction, next to the Devonshire and the Georgia Hotel.

What were we thinking?

As this more recent photo shows, the HSBC Building now sits where the elegant Devonshire Hotel used to be. The GMDB was blown up or perhaps blown down is more accurate—to make way for the twenty-three-storey Cathedral Place.

Cathedral Place replaced the Georgia Medical Dental Building

Paul Merrick, designed Cathedral Place, renovated the Marine Building, the Orpheum Theatre, and converted the old BC Hydro Building to the Electra. I quite like Cathedral Place. It’s nicely tiered, the roof fits in with the Hotel Vancouver across the street, and it even has a few nurses, gargoyles and lions pasted about as a reminder of the former building. Everyone over 35 likely remembers the three nurses in their starchy World War 1 uniforms looking down from their 11^th storey parapets. Known as the Rhea Sisters, the terra-cotta statues weighed several tonnes each. Later restored, the nurses are part of the Technology Enterprise Facility building at UBC.

But here’s a thought. Instead of honouring a heritage building by sticking fibreglass casts on a new building, why not keep the original one! The Georgia Medical-Dental Building was only sixty after all—hardly old enough for its unseemly demise, but old enough to represent a significant part of our history.

Cathedral Place designed by Paul Merrick — Fibre glass nurse at Cathedral Place

The Devonshire:

I never saw the Devonshire, but I love one of its stories. According to newspaper reports, after being kicked out of the snotty Hotel Vancouver in 1951, Louis Armstrong and his All Stars walked across the street and stayed at the Devonshire. Walter Fred Evans, a one-time member of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra built the Devonshire, and supposedly Duke Ellington, Lena Horne and the Mills Brothers wouldn’t stay anywhere else.

* McCarter & Nairne also designed the Patricia Hotel, 403 East Hastings; Spencer’s Department Store (now SFU at Harbour Centre); the Livestock Building at the PNE, and the General Post Office on West Georgia.

For more posts see: Our Missing Heritage

Tags Cathedral Place, Devonshire Hotel, Georgia Medical-Dental Building, Marine Building, McCarter Nairne, Paul Merrick, Rhea Sisters

Five Eccentric B.C. Houses

by Eve Lazarus on April 18, 2015

Here are five of my favourite eccentric BC houses that still stand (or did at the time of research).

1. The Hobbit House(s)

There are two in Vancouver and one in West Van designed by Ross Lort in the early 40s, and against all odds, all survive. Hobbit house at King Edward and Cambie is now part of a town house development. The future looked shaky for The Hobbit House on West Broadway when it sold to a developer six years ago, but instead of razing the place, James Curtis did a deal with the City where he sunk close to a million dollars into renovating the house, designated it, and in return was allowed to subdivide and build a second house on the large lot.

2. The Rotating House

Barney Oldfield (1913-1978) was a mechanical genius and inventor. In 1969 he built a 12-sided rotating house out of steel on the Old West Saanich Road on Vancouver Island. This house rotates at a complete 360 degrees, can spin at two speeds and reverse. His other inventions include a specialized 24-ton logging truck, bulldozer blades and a custom-built aerodynamic car he built in 1940 called “the spirit of tomorrow.” When I took this photo in 2010, the house was still in the Oldfield family, but renters had hooked up a television in a way that interfered with the houses mechanics and stopped it from turning.

3. Chuck Currie’s Polka Dotted house

Chuck Currie moved here in 1989 and painted his house three years later — 2105 East 3rd Avenue

Technically, the only thing that’s eccentric about Chef Chuck Currie’s house is the paint job. But it’s so startling that it rates a spot on this list. Chuck bought the house at 3^rd and Lakewood in 1989 and painted it white with huge red polka dots a few years later. It was a joke, he says. A friend who owned a painting company went on holidays and came home to find that his friends had painted his house with purple polka dots. Chuck loved the idea and thought it was a great way to spruce up his neighbourhood.

4. The Steel House

When I wrote about this house in December 2010, Shaun Torontow, its designer and owner had it for sale. I suspect he still does. At 35 feet long and three levels, the house comes in at just over 1,000 square feet. And at just nine feet wide, it’s one of the skinniest houses in Canada (The Sam Kee building in Vancouver’s Chinatown holds the record at just under five feet). Shaun, an artist and welder, built his house out of steel and outfitted it with steel furniture, a bathroom that looks like a laboratory and an elevator to an underground pool.

5. Paul Merrick’s Tree House

Architect Paul Merrick designed this West Vancouver for his family in 1974. The original structure was less than 900 sq.ft. Later Merrick added a major addition incorporating cedar stone and glass and recycled building materials. There are soaring ceilings, multiple levels and exterior decks that blur the indoors with the outdoors. Because it’s built on a rocky promontory and nestled within private forest much of the house has the feel of living in a tree canopy. The current owner describes it as “part tree house, part Winnie the Pooh.”

“Living in this house is a lifestyle, it is your life and it becomes who you are,” she told me for my chapter about West Coast architects in Sensational Vancouver.

Tags 210 East 3rd, 3112 Steel Street, 5321 Old West Saanich Road, Barney Oldfield, Chuck Currie, Hobbit House, James Curtis, Paul Merrick, Shaun Torontow, Switzer House

The Orpheum Theatre and a conversation with Paul Merrick

by Eve Lazarus on August 23, 2014

Dan Rickard photo. www.danrickard.ca

Dan Rickard photography

A couple of weeks ago, Judy Graves, Tom Carter and I took a behind-the-scenes tour of the Orpheum Theatre.

The “new” Orpheum was designed in 1927 by Marcus Priteca, a Seattle-based architect who fashioned the theatre in a Spanish renaissance style and gave it an opulent air with some sleight of hand tricks.

For instance, if you tap on a colonnade it’s hollow, made from precast plaster. The ornate Baroque ceiling is made from plaster and chicken wire.

Priteca introduced a range of different influences including Italian-inspired terrazzo floors and travertine walls, crests of British heraldry and 145 Czechoslovakian crystal chandeliers.

We got to climb up on a catwalk way above the domed ceiling, visit the projection booth—and we went up on the stage—the same one where Jack Benny and W.C. Fields once performed.

Tom played the original organ.

I didn’t realize how close we came to losing the theatre. In 1973 Famous Players wanted to replace the Orpheum with a Multiplex cinema and it sparked off what was probably the biggest heritage protest in Vancouver’s history. City Hall received 8,000 letters from angry citizens and petitions with thousands of signatures. Ivan Ackery, the Orpheum’s long-time manager bounced back from retirement and joined impresario Hugh Pickett to stage a benefit concert.

The City bought the Orpheum for $3.9 million and poured another $3.2 million into a renovation by Paul Merrick, the same architect who designed Cathedral Place, renovated the Marine Building and converted the BC Electric building into the Electra.

“The Orpheum is a good example of a building that has begged, borrowed and stolen characteristics from all over the world,” Merrick told me. “There’s a dozen different styles going on top of each other, from Spanish to late Edwardian to who knows what, it was just a case of playing some more with it.”

Merrick said the Orpheum was one of “the earliest large adaptive reuse projects” and was more extensive then it appears because the whole of the Vaudeville stage entrance was taken out and redone using a larger version of Priteca’s original design to accommodate a 100-plus orchestra.

“Adapting buildings involves paying all the respect and every respect you can to what it is and what it was and why it’s worth taking trouble with, but that doesn’t mean being stultified or precious about it,” he said. “The focus of architecture is to make a building and when it’s all said and done, buildings need to be objects of utility, to service the people’s uses and needs inside them. They are there to provide shelter, but they are also concerned with affording delight. I always thought if you could make pieces of the city—which is all a building is just another piece of the city—if we can make an environment that we’re happy to leave to our descendants, then that’s as good as you can do.”

Tags Cathedral Place, Hugh Pickett, Ivan Ackery, Jack Benny, Judy Graves, Marcus Priteca, Marine Building, Orpheum Theatre, Paul Merrick, Tom Carter, W.C. Fields

West Coast Modern and Architect Barry Downs

by Eve Lazarus on July 5, 2014

Barry Downs architect designed his gorgeous West Coast Modern house in West Vancouver in 1979. He lived there until his death in July 2022 at 92.

From Sensational Vancouver

Barry Downs and the West Coast modern house he designed in 1979

Barry Downs house sits on top of a cliff 120 feet above West Vancouver’s Garrow Bay. The house is almost invisible from the busy street and built on multiple levels, with lots of glass that connects the indoors with the out.

Rapidly disappearing:

Most people don’t think of these gorgeous mid-century homes as “heritage,” but many are listed on the Heritage Register. Because they are typically small houses on large view lots, they are rapidly disappearing.

Barry figures we’ve lost about 50 percent of our mid-century housing stock.

Each step through the Downs’ house is like a journey of discovery. A window in the bathroom looks out onto the forest. Another window gives a view of Bowen Island, and another a glimpse of the rocky exterior. But it’s not until you step into the dining room that you can truly understand the brilliance of Barry’s design. The Strait of Georgia, Vancouver Island and the B.C. Coast line leaps out through floor to ceiling glass windows, and just for a moment it’s disorienting, like being suspended in space.

Marine Drive, West Vancouver. Barry Downs photo

Focus on the landscape:

“To me, it’s all to do with emotion, and you derive that from the building and its setting,” says Barry. “The focus for me has always been the landscape, the garden, the seasonal world.”

Barry trained at Thompson, Berwick and Pratt and worked with some of the city’s most exciting and imaginative architects. Arthur Erickson, Ron Thom, Fred Hollingsworth, Paul Merrick and B.C. Binning, at one time all worked under the guidance of Ned Pratt. Barry left to form a partnership with Fred Hollingsworth in 1963, and six years later he and Richard Archambault launched their own company with residential houses as their mainstay.

Barry Downs architect

“We built on narrow lots with simple and affordable post and beam houses. We designed houses that pushed up through the trees, that revolved around the idea of the big room, surrounded by the garden, and the view of the changing seasons,” he says.

Barry, a softly spoken man now in his 80s, is as low key as the houses that he designs. He’d just like to see more of them remain.

Tags Arthur Erickson, B.C. Binning, Barry Downs, Berwick Pratt, Fred Hollingsworth, Paul Merrick, Richard Archambault, Ron Thom, Sensational Vancouver, Thompson, West Vancouver Museum

Ned Pratt’s West Coast Modern House

by Eve Lazarus on October 6, 2013

Peter Pratt renovated and restored the house his father designed in 1953

I spent the afternoon with architect Peter Pratt at his home in the British Properties yesterday. Peter’s father Ned Pratt designed the house in the early 1950s and lived there for most of his life. You’ve likely never heard of Ned Pratt, I hadn’t until recently, and I find that really interesting because he may just be the most important architect to come out of Vancouver. Pratt was a principal at Thompson, Berwick, Pratt and he hired and mentored some of the most influential architects of the time. Arthur Erickson, Ron Thom, Paul Merrick, Barry Downs, Fred Hollingsworth, and artist BC Binning, all worked there at one point.

It was Pratt who designed the BC Electric building (BC Hydro) on Burrard Street and the Dal Grauer Substation next door, both game changers in architectural design in those early ‘50s. Binning did the murals for the building and Pratt helped Binning build his West Vancouver home—the house credited for kick starting the West Coast modern movement in BC.

“Pratt convinced BC Electric that a local firm with no experience in skyscraper design could handle the monumental task,” wrote architectural critic Robin Ward, in Pratt’s 1996 obituary. The drawings alone, if spread out would have covered five city blocks, noted Ward.

Mural designed by Ned Pratt and Ron Thom

When Peter took over the one-acre property and his childhood home, the house 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. “This is our home, it’s not so much an asset, it’s our home. It has a sense of place.”

Against all advice he decided to save what he could and restore it, keeping features such as a mural that Pratt and Ron Thom made from fiberglass and paper. Peter has moved walls around, taken out rooms, added skylights and put cork on the floors. He added bench seats out of reclaimed wood from the Pantages Theatre to go with a table his dad built.

Then Peter built his own post and beam home right next door. One side of the newer house is sheer glass and opens up onto the garden and a large water feature filled with fish. A courtyard connects the two houses and there are angles everywhere you look that give hints of what’s to come, what Peter calls “a process of discovery” that’s characteristic of these West Coast modern homes.

Ned’s house is 1,200 sq.ft. Peter’s is only slightly larger. Both are a nod to simplicity and scale and the importance of landscape. Proof that we don’t have to rip down these beautiful houses because they don’t fill out the lot.

View from Ned Pratt's living room — View from Ned Pratt’s living room

Tags Arthur Erickson, Barry Downs, BC Binning, Fred Hollingsworth, Ned Pratt, Paul Merrick, Peter Pratt, Ron Thom, Thompson Berwick Pratt

Our Missing Heritage — What were we thinking? (Part 1)

by Eve Lazarus on September 8, 2013

The Marine Building is one of Vancouver’s most treasured buildings, a gorgeous example of Art Deco. So why did we destroy our other one?

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

The Devonshire Apartments, the Georgia Medical-Dental Building and the Marine Building were all designed by McCarter & Nairne architects.* The Devonshire was first, designed as an apartment building in 1923. Next came the 15-storey Art Deco medical building—and the only one left standing—the Marine Building completed in 1930.

As this more recent photo shows, the HSBC Building now sits where the elegant Devonshire Hotel used to be, and the medical building was blown up or perhaps blown down is more accurate—to make way for the 23-storey Cathedral Place.

I quite like Cathedral Place. It’s nicely tiered, the roof fits in with the Hotel Vancouver across the street, and it even has a few nurses, gargoyles and lions pasted about as a reminder of the former building. Everyone over 35 likely remembers the three nurses in their starchy World War 1 uniforms looking down from their 11^th storey parapets. The Rhea Sisters, as they were known, were made from terra-cotta and weighed several tonnes each. The nurses were restored and are now part of the Technology Enterprise Facility building at UBC.

But here’s a thought. Instead of honouring a heritage building by sticking fibreglass casts on a new building, why not just keep the original one!

Paul Merrick, the architect who designed Cathedral Place, and who did such a nice job renovating the Marine Building, converting the old BC Hydro Building to the Electra, and fixing up the Pennsylvania Hotel on Hastings, could have easily designed Cathedral Place someplace else. The Georgia Medical-Dental Building was only 60 after all—hardly old enough for its unseemly demise, but old enough to represent a significant part of our history.

I never saw the Devonshire, it came down in 1981, but I love one of its story. According to newspaper reports after being kicked out of the snotty Hotel Vancouver in 1951, Louis Armstrong and his All Stars walked across the street and were immediately given rooms in the Devonshire. Walter Fred Evans, a one-time member of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra built the Devonshire, and supposedly Duke Ellington, Lena Horne and the Mills Brothers wouldn’t stay anywhere else.

Our Missing Heritage is an ongoing series. Please also see:

Our Missing Heritage (part two) Mid Century Modern North Vancouver

Our Missing Heritage (part three) The Empress Theatre

Our Missing Heritage (part four) The Strand Theatre, Birks Building and the second Hotel Vancouver

Our Missing Heritage (part five) The Hastings Street Theatre District

Tags BC Hydro building, Cathedral Place, Devonshire Hotel, Electra, General Post Office, Georgia Hotel, Hotel Vancouver, HSBC Building, Livestock Building, Louis Armstrong, Marine B, Marine Building, McCarter Nairne, Patricia Hotel, Paul Merrick, Pennsylvania Hotel, Rhea Sisters, the Georgia Medical-Dental Building, Walter Fred Evans

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