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Grellmann, Andrew

This thesis explores the potentials of design when starting from brokenness and impermanence, rather than newness and innovation. 439 Powell Street, a culturally and socially significant site located in the Downtown Eastisde Oppenheimer District of Vancouver, serves as a site to explore scales of repair in architecture and urbanism. In section I, an argument is made against contemporary modes of production, and how it can be alienating to the care-taker's bodily encounter of care. Material deployments, design, and divisions of labour are investigated for their contributions towards perceptions and experience of architectural care-taking. In Section II, four precedents are analyzed in how they challenge contemporary cycles in architectural production. Finally, Section III examines the execution and response to the previous two sections in the form of a speculative narrative that proposes an alternate future to 439, using existing structural engineering reports as a point of insertion, while ultimately critiquing Vancouver city policies that exclude the safeguarding of important cultural sites in their definitions of heritage. The project serves as an investigation of repair, as it flows between moments of loss, transformation, hope, and optimism.

Downtown-Eastside (Vancouver, B.C.)

Text

University of British Columbia. ARCH 549

Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library

10.14288/1.0422913

Applied Science, Faculty of; Architecture and Landscape Architecture (SALA), School of

Unreviewed

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/