With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1181452
32 BCBUSINESS NOVEMBER 2019 COURTESY OF WESTBANK Admiration and envy Michael Geller feels ambivalent about Ian Gillespie. "I look at him with a mixture of admiration and envy," says the Vancou- ver architect, planner, real estate consul- tant and developer. "Admiration because whether you like the person or not—and he certainly doesn't go out of his way to be the most likable or ingratiating person; that's not his style—you have to admire the mag- nitude of his projects, and also the balls." And the envy? "I like to make money, but I've also been interested in trying to cre- ate beautiful projects," Geller says. "Ian, I think, has been very successful at creating beautiful projects." One of Gillespie's early collaborators is architect James Cheng, whose firm designed Westbank buildings such as the Residences on Georgia, the Shaw Tower and the Shangri-La Vancouver and Fair- mont Pacific Rim hotels. Cheng recently began working with him again, on First Light, a 459-unit condo development under construction in downtown Seattle. "He is the most impactful developer in Vancouver in terms of creativity," says the founder of James KM Cheng Architects. Gillespie tries to bring something special to every project, Cheng notes, including public art efforts that grow ever more ambitious. "He's one of the rare people who pay a lot of attention to art and community." Larry Beasley, Vancouver's co-director of planning from 1994 to 2006, dealt with Gillespie extensively at city hall. "Ian is a developer who, I think, takes a much lon- ger view," says Beasley, who now runs his own Vancouver-based international plan- ning and urban design consulting firm. "I don't think he just sees development as a business. I think he sees it as a calling, he sees it as a mission, and he sees his projects as city-building and city-changing projects." Do anything but study business Ian Gillespie grew up in a 700-square-foot house in Port Coquitlam, at the foot of Burke Mountain, with his parents, Norma and Don, and four siblings. His mother and father, who worked as a psychiatric nurse at Riverview Hospital and a chemist at the Gulf Oil refinery in Port Moody, still live in the home, which is heated with a woodstove. Both parents retired early to become full-time environmentalists; now in their late 80s, they devote 50 to 60 hours a week to a handful of organizations. For 20 years, Don and Norma have also fought to preserve the Riverview Lands as a botanical garden. A g ifted middle-distance runner with Olympic ambitions, Gillespie attended California State University, Fresno, on a track scholarship before an injury forced him to end his athletic career in 1984. "What it gave me was the discipline and the work ethic," he says of running. Back home, he finished his commerce degree at UBC. "I was undecided between that and math- ematics, and I sold out," recalls Gillespie, who also earned an MBA from UofT. "And COMMUNITY CENTRE Gillespie envisions the new Oakridge, expected to finish construction in 2027, as a cultural hub