Erickson-designed building threatened with demolition
Frances Bula
Sun
VANCOUVER SUN FILES The Evergreen building on West Pender could be the first building by architect Arthur Erickson (right) to be torn down. The project manager calls a deal ‘almost impossible.’
VANCOUVER – Heritage advocates say they plan to keep fighting to save the Arthur Erickson-designed Evergreen building in the next eight months.
“As long as the building’s standing, we’re going to see if there’s a way we can save it,” says heritage commissioner Cheryl Cooper.
She said the commission has received a flood of calls and
e-mails in support of their efforts to lobby both owner John Laxton and the city to find a solution to save the building, a unique terraced structure with greenery cascading down the side, in the 1200 block of West Pender near Coal Harbour.
The building, a precursor to his law-courts design, would be the first of Erickson’s buildings ever to be torn down.
But the project manager for the company that owns it says it’s almost impossible for the owner and the city to come up with a compromise that would allow it to stand.
“It’s highly inconceivable,” said Andrew Wade, of Laxton’s Cathedral Development Group. Wade said that the building has only about eight months of guaranteed life left.
However, Wade hopes that some of the decisions city council made last Thursday in a vain attempt to salvage the Evergreen building will help other threatened landmark buildings in the future.
Councillors voted unanimously to ask that staff work with Laxton to look at any way of retaining the building. They also asked that the city’s heritage register be upgraded and that there be a heritage representative added to the advisory panel of the city’s development permit board.
“If we had had that support at that time, the project probably would have gone through,” said Wade. The company is now looking at designing a new building. So far, Erickson has said he doesn’t want to be involved in the destruction of one of his own buildings.
The city’s development permit board, in a 2-1 vote, turned down a proposal from Laxton last fall that he be permitted to add four storeys to the building while converting it from office to residential space. The proposal had been supported by the city’s urban-design panel and its planning department. Laxton was so confident of approval that he had already emptied the building of most of its occupants and had arranged a presentation-centre launch.
But urban-design panel representative Bruce Haden argued against the addition at the permit-board hearing, and the then-head of engineering, Dave Rudberg, and deputy city manager Brent McGregor voted against central-area planning director Larry Beasley on the design change, saying the extra four storeys detracted from an iconic building.
Although the building is considered a landmark, it was not designated as a heritage building because the register has not been updated recently. Heritage designation would have given both the city and the owner extra negotiating room.
At last week’s meeting, Laxton and his project team said they had discovered several additional problems since they made their original application that make renovating the building economically impossible, even if the city is willing to give it a heritage bonus.
Wade said the building leaks, all the floors have “suffered severe deflections,” which means it would need upgrading to make it earthquake-proof, and there isn’t any way to build or buy enough parking in the area, which is a problem when selling high-end residential units.
© The Vancouver Sun 2005
