In August of 2013 a development permit had gone up on Pacific Avenue regarding the intended development of Vancouver House. I started documenting the neighborhood. I had a front seat on a radical change process.
By September of 2015 all the buildings had been removed, the businesses relocated, & the site was ready for excavation.
These workers understood the historic moment at hand.
So here is the building & the site growing in time-lapsed images.
Most are taken from the north end of the building, the pointy end.
The first is just before the Big Pour. The excavation was complete, going 7 floors down.
The day of the Big Pour (500 cement trucks to empty into the ground in one day): March 19, 2016.
...later...
Built: 7 floors of parking spaces & getting up to street grade.
Floor by floor it grows.
Above you can see the slanted roof of one of 4 triangular buildings is shaping up. The tower is going up behind it.
...& then more of the exterior goes on..
& you can see the north pointy end of the building flattening out as well.
The BIG picture! [That's an inside joke.] Bjarke Ingels is the architect and his firm is Bjarke Ingels Group: BIG
These aren't totally in time order, but this is where things stand more or less right now. The other triangular sites are in various stages of excavation.
The specialized trades are here too: surveyors, quality control man for concrete, the hearing testers keeping tabs on workers, the ProTech surveys who document the whole process & the Putzmeister, who pushes stuff around [I think].
The workers, ah, my romance with the workers.
The short story of the Vancouver House banner:
Then this little sticker appeared....on the banner.
It always cracks me up a bit that this huge project is called "Vancouver House".
I mean really, a house? Hardly!
This summer: the last large street home I've seen.
The building gets the last word.
I'm not yet sure if I like it, but I have enormous respect for the complexity & enormity of the project.
That's it for now.
