Some travellers want to be where all the beautiful people are. Readers of the Wallpaper City Guides want to know where all the beautiful places can be found.
Wallpaper the people behind the highly respected design magazine commissioned local writer and architecture enthusiast Hadani Ditmars to introduce travellers to the beauties of Vancouver. But instead of concentrating on the natural splendour that provides the citys visit-inducing backdrop, she explores what our architects, designers and store owners have done to bring grace and style into our lives.
We meet on the steps of the Vancouver Art Gallery overlooking Robson Square, the de facto public square of the city. The fifth-generation Vancouverite wants to take me to her favourite Arthur Erickson building in the downtown core. (Her favourite local building designed by the revered architect is the Museum of Anthropology but its not within walking distance.)
Ditmars says that she is a product of Ericksons architecture because she grew up at his Simon Fraser University campus, where her parents were charter students. His work has infused her awareness of form and design, and of the way architecture can strongly influence what we feel about our environment, whether were aware of it or not.
As we walk along Hornby Street towards the Vancouver court house, she tells me about her writing assignment in Baghdad, where she explored the Bauhaus influence for Wallpaper. Erickson visited the city too, and had the dream of creating a version of Robson Square there. That dream was never realized and, instead, or maybe in lieu of, Ditmars says Erickson gives her a sense of being in Baghdad as she follows the tree-lined entrance to the building with its cascading wall of Cornelia Oberlanders garden and vaulted glass ceiling.
Three of the five buildings she highlights in the guide were designed by Erickson. But the book also invites you to walk through the entranceways to dozens of Vancouver buildings so you explore beyond the citys facades. Theres a chapter on hotels, restaurants, boutiques such as Gastowns Old Faithful and Bombast, and designers such as Martha Sturdy. She writes about various neighbourhoods and districts, and also invites you for a day trip beyond the citys borders. (She likes Baldwin House on the shores of Deer Lake in Burnaby.)
Our built environment is part of our cultural environment, she says. Its about how we experience public space and personal space.
The Wallpaper guide is a celebration of architecture and design in Vancouver. Instead of simply walking past buildings, she asks us to be aware of how the people who have designed them, inside and out, have handed us a mirror in which we can view ourselves. Ditmars handily puts these accomplishments into perspective, giving us a hint of their history and provenance. (For a somewhat more critical view of where were at architecturally, pick up the September issue of Architecture Review. In her View from Vancouver she writes, The skyline is a long way off from our patron saint of architecture Arthur Ericksons visionary 1955 sketch of a city of skyscrapers by the sea.)
Ditmars Wallpaper guide to Vancouver is available at local bookstores such as Chapters and also as an ebook at Phaidon.com. You can purchase a signed copy at HadaniDitmars.com.
