West Vancouver Museum

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

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

Switzer House (1960-1971)

by Eve Lazarus on February 25, 2017

The Switzer house of West Vancouver was designed one Sunday, painted pink, and received attention from all over the world.

North Shore News, August 19, 1994. Courtesy West Vancouver Museum.

840 Mathers:

In 1960, the Taylor Way interchange on the Upper Levels Highway looked radically different than it does today. That year, local builder Henry Switzer placed his shocking pink house at 840 Mathers Avenue at the end of 9^th Street. The futuristic-looking house quickly became a North Shore landmark, and locals called it the helicopter house, the airplane house, and the Jetson’s house because it appeared to have wings.

Even though the house was only there for eleven years, it seems to have resonated with everyone who saw it.

Henry Switzer house — 840 Mathers Avenue, West Vancouver. ca. 1970 courtesy Daryl Parsons

“I lived on the same street as the Switzer house,” recalls John Oberhoffner. “I was eight and I cried when they tore it down.”

Alice Brock says that she and her four brothers called it “the Windmill House” because each wing reminded them of the blade of a windmill. “We would always look for the house when we were driving on the Upper Levels in our ’54 Chev Bel-Air,” she says.

Experiment:

The house was a radical experiment designed to be built on a rocky building site or steep slope. Switzer designed it one Sunday afternoon, and it attracted attention from all over the world.

The Switzer house shared many of the elements of Googie architecture, a southern Californian movement born out of the car culture of the 1950s and influenced by the space race. Googie was popular among roadside motels, coffee shops and gas stations and typically featured swooping rooflines, brightly coloured geometric shapes, glass, steel and neon.

“The Switzer house was unusual in design with four elevated cantilevers supported by a central column where the front entrance was located,” says Kiriko Watanabe, curator at the West Vancouver Museum.

It was also the second house of its type that Switzer designed. The first predates it by four years, and although renovated, still exists on Inglewood Avenue in Sentinel Hill.

Watanabe organized a West Coast Modern house tour this summer featuring the first Switzer House. “It isn’t elevated like the second one, but the roof line is raised in the middle part of the house and the overall shape looks like open wings,” she says. “It’s very symmetrical when you look at the house from the distance.”

Ironically, the house that was built on car culture was expropriated and then demolished in 1971 to make way for the widening of the Upper Levels Highway.

Top photo: North Shore News, August 19, 1994. Courtesy West Vancouver Museum.

Tags Henry Switzer, Switzer House, West Vancouver Museum

Fred Hollingsworth’s Sky Bungalow

by Eve Lazarus on November 7, 2015

Fred Hollingsworth designed the Sky Bungalow — Sky Bungalow in the Bay’s parking lot on Seymour 1949

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

If you read my blog regularly, you know that I’m a huge fan of West Coast Modern, and especially of Fred Hollingsworth, an amazing North Vancouver architect who died this year at age 98 after changing the face of architecture.

But it wasn’t until I was at the West Vancouver Museum this summer that I heard the story behind the Sky Bungalow. So instead of writing up a talk for my book launch on Thursday, I decided to go check out the house.

The amazing thing about this house, apart from the fact that it exists at all—is that it started life in a downtown parking lot.

Fred Holllingsworth — Sky Bungalow, 3355 Aintree Drive. Eve Lazarus photo, November 2015

In 1949, Eric Allan, a developer, came up with the idea of building a house in the Hudson Bay’s parking lot to promote the new Capilano Highlands subdivision. The Bay agreed, but only if the house took up no more than three parking spots. No problem, said Hollingworth. He perched the wooden house on beams and floated it over the cars. In a 2004 interview Hollingsworth said: “The space below is just as important as space above. The whole building belongs to the site, in an organic sense. It should look as if it grew there and is just as comfortable as the plants are.”

Fred Hollingsworth — Sky Bungalow in the Bay’s parking lot on Seymour 1949

The Sky Bungalow was a huge hit. Thousands of people paid their 10 cents to tour the house—and the money was donated to the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra.

The house sold and moved to its current address on Aintree Drive.

Not only does the Sky Bungalow still exist, but it is surrounded by contemporary bungalows that have stayed with the scale and the feel of the area. It was pouring today and nobody was out, but the whole street screams community, and it’s easy to imagine it filled with kids on nicer days.

The house is also just blocks away from the house that Hollingsworth designed for his own family in 1946. And, even though he became highly successful designing projects that ranged all the way to Nat Bosa’s West Vancouver waterfront mansion (ranked by Vancouver Magazine as the second most expensive property in BC in 2005) and the building that houses UBC’s Faculty of Law, he stayed in his Ridgeway Drive house all of his life.

For more about Fred Hollingworth see:

The book: Living Spaces: The Architecture of Fred Thornton Hollingsworth
My blog: Our Missing North Vancouver Heritage

Tags 3355 Aintree Drive, Fred Hollingsworth, Nat Bosa, UBC Faculty of Law, West Coast modern, West Vancouver Museum

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

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