Stunning contemporary houses illuminate the enduring and evolving influence of the West Coast Modern architectural style in B.C.
Decades after gaining international recognition through the work of practitioners such as Arthur Erickson, Ron Thom, and Barry Downs, the West Coast Modern style remains widely celebrated and highly influential for residential architects in British Columbia and beyond, even as its expressions evolve and adapt to contemporary contexts. What are the contours of its legacy today—and has a new Cascadia regional style emerged?
To explore these questions, Clinton Cuddington, co-principal of Measured Architecture, invited dozens of B.C.-based architects to share residential projects that best exemplified their design process. Their responses range from palatial mountain chalets to cabins sitting lightly in the forest to oceanfront retreats to sensitive urban renovations. Each house is presented through full-colour photos by professional photographers including Andrew Latreille and Ema Peter, and accompanied by short essays by curator and critic Michael Prokopow that draw on visits to each house and interviews with the architects to elucidate the many aesthetic and programmatic accomplishments on display. The houses are grouped by typology within Mountain, Forest, Shore, and City sections, and followed by profiles of each firm with photos of additional work.
As Prokopow details in an incisive essay, each house is necessarily also a response to the conditions of its creation, notably its site—locations include the Sea-to-Sky Region, Vancouver and the Lower Mainland, Southern Vancouver Island, the Gulf Islands, and the West Kootenays—as well as its social and cultural context, and so is revealing of modern ideas about home and family, leisure and vocation, ecological concerns and communion with nature on Canada’s West Coast.
With thoughtful, deeply informed prose and over 300 considered photos, Reside is an absorbing and inspiring tour of some of the most exceptional houses in the country, and a portrait of how the unique character of the region is expressed in built form.
