An update to one of the most significant projects in a spate of recent high-profile Canadian luxury residential developments as Heatherwick Studio has unveiled its upgraded designs for the 1700 Alberni towers complex. The revised proposal follows community feedback taken from Vancouver’s Shape Your City public web forum.
Marked by its intricate latticework and gentle lines, the towers make up a distinctive silhouette contrasted against the city’s rezoned West End skyline. The new plans call for a repositioning and resizing of the towers to create less restricted views of that skyline, in addition to expanding the biophilic outdoor living and pedestrian spaces which give the overall development its green character.
“We saw an opportunity to reflect on the past two years and show a more dynamic and contemporary way to live in the city of Vancouver,” Partner Stuart Wood said in a statement. “Our design offers a profound new flexibility for residents to live and work through the creation of generous and flexible outdoor rooms. We have taken influence from the repetitions, rhythms and softness found within the surrounding nature to find a more welcoming and less imposing addition to the Vancouver city-scape.”
The development is the firm’s third in terms of large-scale residential projects such as Singapore’s EDEN high-rise and the Lantern House in New York. The update also detailed that a proposed daycare facility and shopping areas would be replaced by additional townhouses.
The original plans were unveiled a year ago and are being developed in unison with the Bosa Group.
Construction timelines for the project are not available at this time.
17 Comments
Man, Heatherwick really likes taking a small scale object - there's a famous screen design that looks exactly like this - and then blowing it up to a building scale with no additional details in between.
Has there ever been an architect that works this way? It really speaks to his background as an industrial designer.
LMAO indeed. Their tulip balcony trope is also straight out of the '60s. I think BIG, Heatherwick, and their contemporaries are formally very similar to the brutalist designers decades before - trying to sculpt buildings out of discrete units. Whereas the brutalist designers worked with concrete blocks, the cool kids now design with glass pixels and curved (but still unitized) panels.
The balconies are very elegant but stacking them repetitively is chaotic monotony and swelling them at the base and top does not an elegant composition make. Too bad as there are nice parts to the building.
Heatherwick ignores the subtlety, delicacy, and intricacy of nature to create something that is wholly artificial and architecturally maladroit. His work is monumental kitsch. Look, too, at his 1000 trees in China.
Cf:
Talk about composition!
Ugh. Another FLW image.
I’ll repost my thoughts on this building from that other website we won’t mention that wrote a write up about it today.
I like the breaded texter the towers have with the columns of each floor flowing into the next.
I wish that the balconies had more relation to one another than not.
It doesn’t bother me that they’re not mathematically related to each other, more so that each balcony has its own scale based off of form rather than program.
Also there’s a scale issue of the face. You can make something so beautiful on the outside but how is it as a livable space. Sunlight & the jepordey of actual living space vs unique thick facade as an iconic building.
I like the breaded texter the towers have with the columns of each floor flowing into the next.
I wish that the balconies had more relation to one another than not.
It doesn’t bother me that they’re not mathematically related to each other, more so that each balcony has its own scale based off of form rather than program.
Also there’s a scale issue of the face. You can make something so beautiful on the outside but how is it as a livable space. Sunlight & the jepordey of actual living space vs unique thick facade as an iconic building.
now I'm curious, what website?
interesting project. grotesque, like some kind of tree fungus. mirrors the type of person who would live there. their 3d modeler must have had a fun year.
Sorry, my immediate visual take on this was a pair of pustule engorged
appendages. [Yeah, I know, I need to seek professional help.]
The richer you are the higher up you live and you may have a more elaborate and conspicuous balcony in these mushroom towers. This is a vertical ghetto for the rich. The folks who service and care for these towers may be living somewhere else, miles away in builder designed housing. Is this how the urban fabric should be imagined and designed?
I grew up in a balcony culture, meaning, I spent a lot of time in a warmer Mediterranean climate and the balconies are where you eat, drink, and sometimes sleep. I appreciate they exist as a building component when not used as storage for rusting stuff.
This one proposed for Vancouver is an expensive project for the expensive market.
Besides those, architects designed a nice building with indoor-outdoor living amenities and who wouldn't like to have a garden scale balcony on a highrise as if each unit is a penthouse?
I would wish the units are bought by the people who are really wanting to live there as if it's a social experiment like some of its predecessors. But this one is not that kind of a housing thing, it is a purely real estate development with typical market calculations of its class. And from what I read over and over, people buy these things to park their money and they rarely live in them.
I predict there won't be much of a balcony life other than the marketing material/photoshoots.
If these designs were done for general middle to low-income people with the support of social housing programs, then I would look at it more sympathetically. (Like this more useful and well-used one for the populations, I am talking about.)
Heatherwick Studio is very talented but I keep seeing beautiful designs for the wrong places and for the money people clients.
I hope they get poorer clients. I hope that for a lot of current star architects from my good meaning heart.
These will make nice 4th and 5th homes for foreign investors.
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