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/1471305
W hen I went to visit a friend in very suburban Tsaw- wassen recently for the first time in years, I felt bad for him as I parked in his building's lot. Sigh, I thought. Another bland and boxy apartment that plonks hapless residents right on a heavy-traffic street with not much around. But that gloomy take flipped on its head when I got to his place on the third floor. Besides the fact that Pierre, an architect, had created a beautiful designer- y space, the apartment felt, unexpectedly, like a sanctuary. Its south-facing windows and sundeck looked out over an in- terior courtyard, a small green oasis with a stream burbling through it. Traffic noise had dis- appeared. Overall, delightful. It was a revelation to be in an apartment like that in Van- couver, where I have (sadly) come to expect that crazy land prices, the tight econom- ics of building anything and a general propensity to stick with conventional design have produced a lot of big rectan- gular boxes filled with rows of long, narrow apartments that can feel like lab-experiment cages. When there is any out- door space, it's for useless front and side lawns that match the single-house pattern of useless front and side yards. It turns out, as I discovered by putting out the call on Twit- ter to my dedicated urbanist Court Challenge Despite their social and environmental benefits, courtyards remain rare in Vancouver apartment buildings. A few architects and developers are bucking the trend by Frances Bula L A N D VA LU E S As single family homes (very slowly) give way to more space for people to live in a housing crisis, court- yards will become an avenue in which to embed some natural outdoor space into apartment life RAY CHAN PHOTOGRAPHY ( the informer ) ity to make dinner with com- munity watching kids play," said Janet Moore (Main and 19th). "Always looks great in the snow, and the cross ventilation in the heat wave was ," wrote Madalinavich Kanidi-Parotski about her home near Royal Oak in Burnaby. It's a form of building you'd think planners—well, really, everyone—in Vancouver would be all in for. After all, this is a city where the fear of riling up the traditional house-and-yard neighbourhoods is so terrifying for many councils that apart- ments are often relegated to 1) former industrial land, 2) exist- ing apartment zones (which means old stuff is torn down for new), but mostly, 3) major traf- fic routes. That last menu item means apartment dwellers end up becoming a form of human dike protecting the house-and- yard people from car emissions and noise. The obvious solution, if that's how we're going to allot space to people in the region, is to do everything possible to make those apartments more livable within themselves. followers, that there are more than a few of these hidden around the region, some of them legacies of a less frantic housing situation in the city, some of them very, very new. People excitedly sent me aerial shots of a couple dozen build- ings, showing the tree-filled inner courtyards. There were a few love letters to them. Our friends got mar- ried in this courtyard in our co-housing building in North Van, said Brady Faught. "So many families adore this place because of the courtyard—abil- JULY/AUGUST 2022 BCBUSINESS 23