“Barry Downs has created architectural spaces that enhance the livability and well-being of his community. An architect and early contributor to the West Coast Modernist style, he has incorporated elements of the natural landscape into the design of his buildings. His portfolio includes a wide array of projects including houses, institutions and innovative community master plans, as well as the award-winning Rayer Residence. He has also shared his time and knowledge as a long-standing member of the City of Vancouver’s heritage and civic design panel.”
— Order of Canada citation for Barry Downs
Indoor and outdoor spaces are inextricably linked in the mind of West Vancouver architect Barry Downs.
When he was awarded the Order of Canada earlier this year, the Governor General’s appointment cited Downs “for his contributions as an architect who creates spaces that meld buildings with their natural surroundings.”
Born in Vancouver in 1930, Downs studied architecture at the University of Washington and then returned home to begin his professional career at Thompson, Berwick, Pratt & Partners in 1954.
With Richard Archambault in 1969, he started his own firm, Downs/Archambault & Partners, now known as DA Architects + Planners, after the founding partners retired in 2008.
The iconic structures that Downs and company designed over six decades are all around us. Vancouver landmarks he had a hand in building include: the Carnegie Community Centre Renovation (1980), Vancouver Convention Centre East/Canada Place (1986), the Yaletown Roundhouse Neighbourhood (1993), Beatty Mews (1997), Vancouver Public Library Square (1995) and Vancouver Convention Centre West (2008). Familiar North Shore landmarks
Downs designed include North Vancouver Civic Centre (1974) and Parkgate Civic Centre (1995-1999).
The special relationship between landscape and architecture seen in Downs’ work was the focus of an exhibit, Melding Architecture with Landscape: A Collaboration in Design, put together by West Vancouver Museum in 2013. The exhibit featured 14 projects, including both homes Downs built for his own family, that illustrate the architect’s organic approach to design and his lifelong fascination with landscape as an essential part of the process.
“That’s been with me ever since I designed our own house in the Dunbar area in 1958,” says Downs in conversation with the North Shore News.
“It was very much then a house in the garden, a big room with a high ceiling, three sides of glass and garden courts filled with plantings. There were seasonal delights that we hadn’t expected at all, so that living, in a sense, in the garden was great. That was the beginning of thinking of landscape as really being a major part of architectural design.”
Early on, Downs was influenced by the work of Richard Neutra, an Austrian-born, southern California-based architect who worked briefly with Frank Lloyd Wright before establishing his own firm in Los Angeles. Known for his modern sensibility and custom, client-pleasing touches (such as the moat he included in film director Josef von Sternberg’s house, later bought by novelist Ayn Rand), Neutra visited Vancouver several times in the 1940s and was a guest speaker at UBC.
“It was his buildings that influenced me a great deal,” says Downs. “There’s aspects of that in the Dunbar house and the gardens of Japan in the use of stone and gravel and natural materials such as Vine Maples.”
The Dunbar house also featured an unnatural material — bamboo — that Downs obtained from a horticulturalist at UBC.
“He said, ‘Sure, just go dig it up,’” recalls Downs. “It was called Golden Bamboo and it must have been 20 feet high, even out there, but it sends runners out that can be annoying and hard to deal with if you want to get rid of it. The bamboo sadly grew into the neighbours on both sides. One of the neighbours is still there and has a 30-foot high stand of bamboo in their back garden.
“It’s shocking because the house was built on a peat bog and bamboo loves water.The new owners of the house are wonderful folks and they got rid of all the bamboo. It must have been a major task.”
Downs’ projects over the years came in many shapes and sizes — from major developments down to 1,500-square-foot residences — all executed with the same care and attention to detail.
Starting out as a watercolourist and designer at Thompson, Berwick, Pratt & Partners, he worked mainly with Ron Thom, Ned Pratt and Roy Jessiman. His first commission to design a house as lead architect came in 1957 from his good friend Art Phillips in West Vancouver.
Once it was built, photographer Selwyn Pullan immortalized the Phillips house in a Western Homes and Living magazine photo spread that celebrated the emergence of a distinct West Coast Modernism north of the border. The architecture was similar to what was being done in L.A., San Francisco, Portland and Seattle but with its own stylistic elements unique to Vancouver.
Several books published over the years have helped put Downs’ contribution to West Coast Modernism in context. The West Vancouver Museum explicitly illustrates the significance of landscape in the 2013 catalogue accompanying the exhibit of his work, and Rhodri Windsor Liscombe’s 1997 study, The New Spirit: Modern Architecture in Vancouver: 1938-1963, looks at how the development of architecture played out in Vancouver in the post-war decades.
“Both Thom and Hollingsworth, followed by Downs, contributed from the early 1960s onward to the intensification of Picturesque and Organic elements derived from Wright and oriental precedents. The triumph of lyricism over rationalism was signaled in the awarding of Massey Gold Medals in 1964 to Hollingsworth and Downs for their Maltby and Rayer houses in West Vancouver, buildings that were curved and textured where their predecessors a decade before had been angular and plain.”
A new collection, The West Coast Modern House: Vancouver Residential Architecture, edited by Greg Bellerby, further explores the development of mid-century modern Vancouver residential architecture and its continued influence on contemporary practice.
“(Bellerby) taps into Western Living, which all of us were out to be published in way back in that mid-century moment,” says Downs. “There’s some great photos and a wonderful essay by Ned Pratt, of all people, who’s been overlooked over the years. The BC Electric Building was mostly his building. He and Berwick hired me and others. He hired everyone: Erickson, Hollingsworth. Everyone worked there — it was sort of the graduate school.”
Pratt’s essay, Contemporary Domestic Architecture in British Columbia, included in The West Coast Modern House and originally published in 1947 in the Journal of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, defines what would become West Coast Modernism. Much of what he wrote is still relevant today except houses then cost in the $3,500 to $5,000 range. (For an interview with Greg Bellerby click here).
“West Coast Modernism started in the late 1940s,” says Downs. “Great proponents here were Pratt and Bob Berwick — and Bert Binning had a hand in that he was the artist. Bertie and Ned were good pals and they influenced others. At first the school of architecture out at UBC was in army huts and then I helped Roy Jessiman design the building which is where the architectural school is today. Within the design of that building were aspects of modernism.”
Downs taught briefly at UBC, along with Arthur Erickson and fellow West Vancouver architect Woodruff Wood.
“The Harvard/Bauhaus school of thinking created this sort of simple flat-roofed house,” he says. “Those influences found their way into California and up here and so our modernism was a little different — post and beam. The Phillips House was perhaps the first boxy house I ever did and in that instance and in the Oberlander House are good examples of where landscape started to creep in.”
The Oberlander House, designed in 1969 by Downs with husband-and-wife architects Peter and Cornelia Oberlander, and the design/production team of Beans Justice and Fred Dalla-Lana, is built along the edge of a forested ravine. The house has been described as a “Cubist pavilion” surrounded by trees and flowers.
“That house of theirs represents the Harvard modernist school,” says Downs. “The houses of Erickson, and some of mine with flying beams and walls out into the gardens or into space, were more a part of the California influence — Neutra with a dash of Frank Lloyd Wright.”
The forest and the ocean were major considerations when Downs designed the second home for his own family in West Vancouver in 1979. “We saved all the trees and they’re enormous now. We are on the edge of the sea out here. We have arbutus and fir and one dogwood — so this is still very much a house in the forest, which for me is preferable living.”
Downs has designed more than 40 houses in the Lower Mainland and on some sites he had to supplement what was there as the land had been cleared of trees. Larger projects, such as Concord Pacific’s development of the Expo ’86 site, meant introducing the concept of landscape architecture on a grand scale into the master planning, which was right in Downs’ wheelhouse of expertise.
He collaborated with Ian Davidson in the initial stages of Concord Pacific’s massive project. Development of the False Creek area began in 1972 with Thompson, Berwick & Pratt responsible for the first phase from the Cambie Street Bridge over to about Spruce Street.
“From Spruce Street on to the edge of the Granville Bridge was our second phase,” says Downs. “If you go there now, just across from Granville Island, it’s wonderful. It’s grown up. The parks board have kept this wonderful environment going. People are running on the track and cycling and walking at the edge of False Creek. Behind, there’s multiple housing and a growth of trees and gardens. I’m very proud of that effort because it set a pace for the Expo lands.”
After involvement on that project, Downs had a hand in master planning several downtown neighbourhoods, including The Roundhouse and Yaletown.
“(Former city planner) Ray Spaxman was a strong advocate for a more livable scale for the new towers and the lower buildings that were happening around them. We call them the townhouse and tower prototype. It’s the lower buildings that soften some of the overwhelming size of the towers and offer front doors on the street and overviews of the street from the two levels or sometimes four levels of the townhouses. I think it was a wonderful solution and part of the reason why ‘Vancouverism’ is so highly regarded.”
Downs received his Order of Canada from David Johnston, Governor General of Canada, at a special ceremony at Rideau Hall in Ottawa on Feb. 13.
For more about Barry Downs: Ten Iconic Downs Landmarks click here and Revisiting the Modern in Selwyn Pullan’s Photographs, Q & A with Barry Downs click here.
