BCBusiness

July/August 2022 - The Top 100

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.

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Some architects and develop- ers are already excited about the idea. For Richard Wittstock, CEO of Domus Group, the ap- peal is in providing a way for people to have social connec- tions. His company just opened and rented out a building in North Vancouver designed around that. The Victoria, from the out- side, doesn't look all that dif- ferent from the other '60s-style apartments in the area, except for having less square footage of useless lawn surrounding the building. But when you go through the front entrance, you're immediately in an open- air courtyard punctuated with benches and trees. There are outdoor metal staircases and walkways everywhere in the building designed by architect Sandra Moore and UBC archi- tecture professor Inge Roecker. Besides the courtyard, it has a large roof deck with planter boxes, plus two more outdoor plazas on other levels. "I think it's a better way to do rental buildings," Wittstock says. "You see people multiple times a day. You get to know each other." Parents are often the biggest fans of buildings with courtyards, because those semi-private interior spaces give them a place to let their children play that they can monitor easily. Ryan Bragg, an architect with Perkins&Will who's in- volved in the design of a court- yard apartment building for PCI Developments in Port Moody, is a fan for another reason: "En- vironmentally, they're a huge benefit." The cross-ventilation that happens when an apart- ment has windows on two sides means air conditioning is needed less, or not at all. There's more light. And there's less requirement for expensive, energy-consuming mechanical systems to provide cooling. Vancouver's former chief planner, Brent Toderian, is also an enthusiast. He lives at the Espana in Chinatown, a 1,000-person complex with a tower and stacked townhouses that has a large courtyard on the second floor. (Apparently, Vancouver is a leader in the concept of the elevated court- yard.) "We use it as a secondary park," Toderian says. But he also cautions that this doesn't mean courtyards should be in every building. Size and details are important. A water feature in the Espana's courtyard provides instant, calming white noise that blocks the sound of the SkyTrain, crowd cheers from the nearby stadiums and street traffic. A courtyard that is too small, not well planned, dark because the well it's in is too deep—that's not going to make anything more livable. Shared common spaces can be noisy, too, in a not-neigh- bourly way. For three years, Robbie McDonald lived in the Rise near Cambie and Broad- way—a place normally beyond her household's means, but her partner got an artist live/work award. McDonald appreciated the cherry blossoms she could see in the courtyard and the communal herb garden, but she found that the lawn and barbecues were "taken over by the young party kids on the weekend." So there might be some unintended consequence if city planners decided to start requiring courtyards in every new apartment building. However, there seems to be little chance of that so far. The City of North Vancouver is encouraging them by, for example, allowing the outdoor stairs and walkways to be ex- empted from the typical calcu- lation of the limit on buildable space. But that's not the case ev- erywhere. In Vancouver, inner courtyards are specifically banned through design guide- lines in areas like the densified Cambie corridor and Norquay Village district. And, realisti- cally, many developers don't even consider them elsewhere because they say they can't make the budget calculus. So when families go look- ing, as UBC health researcher Wyeth Wasserman did, there's not a lot to choose from. He eventually found a beautiful, award-winning complex from the '90s at Kingsway and Slo- can, the Duchess, with two sets of 10 townhouses framing two courtyards. Wasserman and his family love it. But, he admits, it's unlikely that any developer could build something similar today, given land prices. £ ( the informer ) T E R M S + C ON DI T ION S Our contribution to the language of business and beyond TOP: RAY CHAN PHOTOGRAPHY; BOTTOM: ISTOCK North Vancouver's Victoria building works to maximize its space 24 BCBUSINESS JULY/AUGUST 2022 White Col•lar Claw When an executive gets moved from CEO "upstairs" to president or chairperson. Broad•weigh Plan Newfangled diet in which you try not to consume any seafood towers or high-rise sandwiches. Gi•ant Los•ers People who were mad when the Vancouver Giants selected North Vancouver's Chloe Primerano, making her the first female skater ever picked in the WHL draft. Mu•se•um of Hor•rors The PR backlash that happens when a government decides to upgrade a museum.

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