Putting up a good facade in Vancouver

By the looks of the development application notice staked to the front lawn at 2975 Oak Street it would appear the old Santa Fe apartment’s days are numbered. But in Vancouver’s real estate market looks can be deceiving.

If the developer has their way, the Santa Fe you see today will be completely rejuvenated and restored — at least the parts you see here — the west and north facades of the building. The rest of the building will be demolished to make way for an 11-story pedestal tower.

CEI Architecture Planning Interiors has applied for permission to develop an 11-storey, 50 unit residential concrete building with two levels of underground parking. From CEI’s project description:

The design of the new eleven storey tower recognizes the value and significance of the existing Santa Fe building on the site, originally constructed in 1929 and  and presently evaluated as a “B” heritage building by the City of Vancouver.

Our scheme proposes to save the Oak Street and 14th Avenue facades, to incorporate into the new design. These facades will remain in their existing locations, completely rehabilitated to contemporary standards for residential buildings with in the City of Vancouver.

The development application information is online here with plenty of 3-D renderings of the proposed development.

An example of movie set-style preservation in Hollywood North

The Santa Fe apartments today, looking southwest.

Visualization of proposed Santa Fe development using the original west facade.

The effect of the proposed use of the the old Santa Fe’s facades is clearly to blunt the visual impact of the new Santa Fe pedestal.

Looking at the proposed finished product from two of the three possible views: west down 14th Avenue, or north down Oak, it will look like nothing much has changed, except for the better. The two visible sides of the Santa Fe will be pristine, and the landscaping will no longer be reminiscent of a Grimm’s Fairy Tale.

Putting up a good facade of heritage conservation

fa-cade: 1. The face of a building, especially the principal face. 2. An artificial or deceptive front.

Facadism is the architectural practice of keeping just the front skin, or facade, of an interesting or historically important old building and sticking it in front of a new building, or if you prefer, sticking a new building behind the facade of an old building.

As far as heritage preservation goes, it looks as convincing as the best Hollywood movie set and is just about as sincere. Critics argue the practice of facadism is a way to use the look of familiar old buildings to wallpaper over the ugly new ones.

Proponents can say that it provides an important sense of continuity in a changing urban landscape; that often it’s the only practicable way to preserve architectural history, and that it’s a way to to use the look of familiar old buildings to wallpaper over the ugly new ones.

The Santa Fe development’s use of facade is not an attempt at heritage conservation, it looks rather like a clumsy attempt to distract the eye from an otherwise bland and uninspiring building development. And maybe that’s a good thing in and of itself.

A  million storeys in the naked city, and one of my own stories

The Fairview neighbourhood of Vancouver is full of old three-storey apartment buildings; virtually all of them built sometime in the first 70 years of the Twentieth Century. They provide what passes for affordable rental housing in an otherwise expensive neighbourhood.

But, full as they are of memories and history — and renters — these three-storey jobs are all wrong economically. Today height is what’s right.

Vancouver is a popular place to live that happens to be surrounded by water on three sides. That means its real estate market has nowhere to go but up. That also means these stubby old apartment buildings will all be replaced by 10- to 12-storey pedestal towers — it’s inevitable.

I’ve watched this on-going cycle of densification since moving to Vancouver in 1980.

My first summer here, at my first newspaper job — with the Westender — I was tasked with running all over the downtown West End neighbourhood, sketchpad in hand, to draw the old single-family homes which were being demolished daily to make way for low-rise stucco and concrete multi-unit condos and apartments.

The cycle is reminiscent of “Dem Bones.” Houses are demolished for three-storey apartments and condos. Three-storeys are demolished for the 12-storey pedestals. Pedestals are demolished for 50-storey towers.

It’s wonderful and never-ending, assuming material science can keep up: the richest people will always pay to be on the top, where the sunshine and the views are.

Real estate is really everything in Vancouver

One of our recent mayors (2005-2008), Sam Sullivan, currently the MLA for Vancouver-False Creek, coined the term “EcoDensity, in a wasted effort to repaint the green money tree of Vancouver real estate development with the more acceptable colour of leaves and grass.

Why he bothered I don’t know, but in part EcoDensity is sugar to coat the slightly bitter pill that real estate rules in Vancouver.

No civic administration can truly act against the interests of real estate developers and survive, and why would they? Development was the horse many of our politicians rode in on. One former developer, Gordon Campbell, was able to coax his nag first to City Hall then all the way to the Premier’s office.

Portrait of the Santa Fe as a young apartment

Van Arsdel Apartments, 1931. City of Vancouver Archives (1399-617)

When the Santa Fe was brand new in 1929 there was no Burrard Street on the south side of False Creek because there was no Burrard Bridge yet. The current City Hall on Cambie hadn’t been built either. In fact, the Santa Fe wasn’t even called the Santa Fe.

This photograph from the City of Vancouver Archives [CVA 1399-617] shows the building now known as the Santa Fe, back in 1931; just two years after it was built in 1929. It started out as the Van Arsdel Apartments, and even in a monochromatic photo, we can tell it was originally painted in at least two colours rather than the all-white paint job currently peeling off its exterior.

It’s hard to see in this scaled version but at higher resolutions the signage on the entrance door and side glass panes is visible.

Today the lettering on the door reads “Santa Fe,” not “Van Arsdel.” but the original signage on the side panes directed at “tradesmen” and “agents and solicitors” is still there, after 82 years!

Another detail we can see in the photo — just barely — are the homes either side of the Van Arsdel, that filled the streets off Oak. Almost all those homes are gone today — replaced by three-storey apartments. The Van Arsdel itself may have replaced a single-family home.

What’s left of the Van Arsdel Apartments today is hardly appealing. rather it’s a peeling, dismal-looking structure. It’s not really worth preserving in its present form as a sort of dead white sepulcher.

However, if CEI’s plans for architectural taxidermy run towards recreating the Santa Fe’s facade as it really looked back in its two-tone heyday — along with some contextual signage — then I would have to say hooray!

After all I’m homeless. All apartment buildings are basically just facades to me. They might as well be nice to look at. Click the images to enlarge them.

Time has not been kind to the Santa Fe.