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1550 Alberni Public Art

We have been working with the City of Vancouver for a number of years to reimagine the zoning in this area, in recognition that the very nature of industry has fundamentally changed. It was important to maintain the industrial land-use but at the same time, our industrial-zoned land base needed to be retooled to respond and adapt to a changing industry. So, we teamed up with Gregory Henriquez, also the architect on TELUS Garden, Woodward’s and many other projects across the country, to design workspace for the creative economy. 

Now, four years later, we have produced Main Alley, a new creative economy campus in the heart of Mount Pleasant, Vancouver’s creative and technology district.

Main Alley reflects our commitment to playing a meaningful role in the transformation of Vancouver’s creative economy and help shape one of the city’s pivotal neighborhoods. We’re creating a new campus in one of North America’s fastest growing innovation hubs on one of North America’s coolest streets, curated with the vision for the future of this vibrant, creative community.

Main Alley

Located in Vancouver’s most prestigious waterfront location, Rogers Tower is the city's premier office tower, with a unique live/work zoning designation, comprised of 24 stories of condominiums on top of a 16-storey office building. Situated in Coal Harbour and adjacent to Harbour Green Park, the Vancouver Convention Centre and extension of Vancouver’s Seawall, Rogers Tower is Vancouver's only waterfront office building, home to 4 of Western Canada's leading companies: Rogers, Ledcor Construction, Pattison Group, and Westbank’s head office. 

The residences, with interiors by the late Robert Ledingham and a separate lobby from the office building, set the standard for a luxury mixed-use project.

When Rogers Tower was completed, it was the tallest building in the city, until the completion of Shangri-La Vancouver. Rogers Tower, with its light installation by Diana Thater, has become a landmark signature of the Vancouver Skyline, along with Canada Place.

To this day, Rogers Tower is regarded as the premier office building in Vancouver and home to the most valuable workspace and residences in the city.

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Rogers Tower

First Light is our first project in Seattle with longtime collaborator architect James Cheng and John Hogan, a Seattle-based artist who works predominantly in glass. The design for First light exemplifies three of the core themes we have been exploring for decades; the design philosophy of layering that we began with architect Kengo Kuma, the natural progression of Gesamtkunstwerk or the total work of art, which we began with Bjarke Ingels at Vancouver House and broadly, the idea of bringing nature back into cities. The resulting project has been completely designed by James Cheng and John Hogan as a work of art in and of itself; integrating art and architecture, infused with nature and deeply layered with many details that reveal themselves subtly throughout.


The second Shangri-La Hotel in Canada and one of the most successful hotels in Toronto, the Shangri-La Toronto developed in partnership by Westbank and Peterson comprises a 202-room hotel and 395 residential homes. 

On the border between the entertainment and financial districts, the homes and hotel suites at the Shangri-La Toronto offer residents and guests the convenience and vibrancy of urban living within 5-star luxury accommodations. Chosen in 2014 by Wallpaper Magazine as the top Urban Hotel in the world, the project offers owners and hotel guests a host of amenities including a pool, fitness centre, function spaces, wellness spa and specialty restaurants, one of which is Momofuku, a three-storey and tri-concept restaurant by lauded New York chef, David Chang. Next door, Soho House Toronto - which has set up a permanent home in a 10,000 square-foot space on Bishops Block inhabits a building dating back to the 1800s. The building, which was originally one of Toronto’s first ever hotels, has been carefully restored brick by brick by Westbank as part of the development.

Public art by international renowned artist Zhang Huan, Rising, marks the front entrance of the hotel, unifying the ground plane, podium and upper floors of the building in a visually stunning sculpture that extends skywards from the streetscape, creating an artistic moment for the city of Toronto.


Shangri-La Toronto

The Shangri-La Vancouver, to this day the tallest tower in the city at 646 feet, comprises a 119-room hotel and 307 residential homes. The first Shangri-La Hotel to open in Canada, it has consistently been one of Vancouver’s most-sought after hotels and one of the top three in the country. 

The full-height grids of luminescent panels on the corner façades are proprietary to this project. They are a composite comprised of a luminescent coating, chromatic ﬁlm and textured glass that absorb energy from daylight and surrounding light sources and then glow from that energy in the evening. They change colour when viewed from different vantage points and under different weather conditions. These luminescent grids are intended as veils, held off the glass surface on the corner façades and in practical terms, they conceal the building exhaust vents in the curtainwall skin behind. They require no wiring and consume no energy.

The Shangri-La Vancouver is an anchor for Alberni Street, having led the street’s transformation into the city’s luxury row and the most desirable downtown address for residents and retailers by bringing a global brands and fine dining to the street. Today, the project features a mix of retail and restaurants at the podium including an Urban Fare and on the second floor, the newly opened Miantiao, by our collaborator Kitchen Table Restaurants.

The Shangri-La is also home to the Vancouver Art Gallery - Offsite, an outdoor public art exhibition space curated by the Vancouver Art Gallery, which transforms the hotel’s public realm every few months with rotating installations by local and international artists. Located on Georgia Street at the entrance of the hotel, Offsite serves as a platform for contemporary artists to explore issues and subject matter of the current context in the midst of an active urban environment.

As with all of our hotels we are constantly renovating, updating and revisiting each and every aspect, in the goal of creating something that could be considered as among the best in the world. Over the next few years we will be conducting a significant renovation of the public areas of the hotel, with architect James Cheng. 


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Shangri-La Vancouver

The design for Museum House embodies the concept of “creative tension,” it consists of two seemingly leaning towers joined by an elegant, thin bridge, suspended 300 feet above the ground. A grand lobby will showcase rotating art pieces. Shifting screens on the building’s façade will create a pattern inspired by the placement of framed artwork in the Salon of the Frye Museum, allowing residents to interact with the building’s exterior animation.

Part of a broader contribution to the city of Seattle planned with our collaborators at Creative Energy, Museum House will mark the start of an aggressive approach to the climate crisis, to housing diversity, and inspiring design. A community of homes within one of Seattle’s most liveable neighbourhoods. A project that hits well above its weight.


Museum House

Kensington Gardens is an integrated urban community comprised of three unique residential towers, a collection of townhouses and a residential podium, linked by an elevated landscaped courtyard, a new park, lane and plaza. 

Spacious, light-filled and highly functional, living spaces at Kensington Gardens are refined and elegant, with contemporary floorplans and generous outdoor spaces designed to enhance everyday living for singles, couples and families.

One thing that will definitely stand out is the public art installation, 108 Steps by Khan Lee, a ladder whose rungs extend upwards into the sky, inviting viewers to reach higher and to imagine what seems otherwise unattainable.

Kensington Gardens

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Developed in partnership by Allied and Westbank, Calgary House is another collaboration with Bjarke Ingels Group, another LEED Platinum showcase, a landmark public art installation and simply, a game changing project for Calgary. The city’s downtown will be defined by a new silhouette on the skyline, shaped by a double program of living and working; the compact volume for working slimming to become a slender tower for living.

Calgary House features a fully programmable public art installation by author/artist Doug Coupland, titled Northern Lights, which extends the length of the north and south façades. Using integrated LED lighting wrapped around each window frame or “pixel” of the building, Coupland has created a series of animation sequences which illuminate the project. The animations create patterns of colour and light designed to complement the building’s curved skin and mineralogical underlying structure, transforming the project into a living sculpture, that reflects the beauty of constant change.


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Calgary House

The redevelopment of the Woodward’s site has revitalized the streetscape of the immediate area and is serving as a catalyst for the economic, social and physical revival of the Downtown Eastside. Covering almost an entire city block, this site, once a major department store, serves as the city’s historic and social heart.

For most residents of Greater Vancouver, the Woodward’s department store had special signiﬁcance. The department store closed down in 1993. A very important element of the Woodward’s project was the heritage conservation plan.

Our redevelopment plan differed signiﬁcantly from previous attempts at redeveloping by concentrating our efforts on the original 1903 – 08 building at the corner of Hastings and Abbott rather than attempting to save what was in fact a series of alterations and additions dating from 1903 to 1956. In addition to this restoration we carried out a number of interpretive zones, including: audio-visual stations; display windows; display cases; fragments from the original building, including a display of the original W sign placed on top of the tower in 1956. Installation of a new W sign on top of the restored 1903 building as well as the public art installation by Stan Douglas, Abbott & Cordova, 7 August 1971.

Woodward's is comprised of approximately one million square feet of market and non-market residential, institutional, retail, office and community uses including the new home for the Simon Fraser University (SFU) Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, above two levels of parking.

Woodward's

Taking inspiration from its historic setting, Main & Keefer, is a mixed-use residential and retail project in Vancouver’s historic Chinatown neighbourhood.

Comprising residential, contemporary amenities, mixed-use retail and services, this project takes inspiration from Chinatown’s past while looking to its future. The brick podium and precast concrete cornice are characteristics of architectural expressions found throughout Chinatown, while the taller tower component is symbolic of the new emerging architectural form in Chinatown. The ornamental residential entry is inspired by a traditional Chinese Moon Gate and incorporates heritage style pavers and modern glass elements.

 The feature concrete wall on the tower is home to a public art installation by accomplished Vancouver artist Ron Terada. 


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Awarded Future Project of the Year at the World Architecture Awards in 2015 for its innovation and beauty, and named one of CNN’s most anticipated buildings in 2020, Vancouver House has attracted attention from around the world. Completed in the spring of 2020, the Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) designed project includes both high-rise and low rise structures, with the tower rising 59-storeys at the corner of Beach and Howe above 3 additional buildings between the offramps of the Granville Street bridge. Vancouver House includes 375 residential homes, 106 rental homes, as well as new retail, workspace and amenity space, forming the core of a new waterfront community, the Beach District.

The design of any building should be a function of the particular constraints and characteristics of each site and in the case of Vancouver House, the solution that BIG arrived at is very much a direct response its site. To accomodate complex site restrictions, a slender base forms the nine-storey podium, ultimately widening into the residential tower as it rises to meet the sky. 

The net result is a unique building typology for Vancouver. From Vancouver House, to Vancouver's House, this is a project that has become quickly become a part of the city's identity. When the Beach District is complete and Rodney Graham's Spinning Chandelier is illuminating the vibrant public realm beneath the Granville Street Bridge, we hope people everywhere will recognize this as city-building at its best.


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Vancouver House

Granville at 70th, designed by Henriquez Partners Architects, redefines Vancouver’s West Side, creating a new community at the southern edge of the city, anchored by a Safeway grocery store.

Off Granville Street, the project's two residential towers rise skyward, offering panoramic views in all directions, while street-side townhomes amid lush gardens provide a more intimate experience. The community of Granville at 70th is defined by a host of amenities including live green-walls, rooftop groves and gardens, an outdoor yoga pavilion, indoor/outdoor entertainment lounge, a putting green, library, theatre, and "The Granville Club", with gym facilities, steam room and sauna. The development is anchored by an expansive new Safeway and additional retail, contributing to the growth and vitality of the community.

Westbank has created a significant public art program with the Musqueam Nation for this project, enmeshing the art into the architecture in locations throughout.

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Granville at 70th

Envisioning this important city block, bounded by Georgia St, Richards, Seymour and Robson, as an integrated whole, rather than a series of development sites was the concept of TELUS President and CEO, Darren Entwistle. Westbank was chosen to partner with TELUS and bring that original vision to reality. There are so many aspects of this project which excite us, including using new technologies to achieve a LEED Platinum designation. We believe this may be one of the most important developments in Vancouver’s recent history and Gregory Henriquez and his team are giving it their best work to date.

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TELUS Garden

Ironwood Plaza has been strategically situated to take advantage of the strong growth in the City of Richmond. Reminiscent of a relaxed Westcoast theme, the project’s design is unique in the Lower Mainland and was awarded with the City of Richmond’s Design Award of Excellence in 1998.

The retail side of our business has been dominated by a few key anchor relationships, including London Drugs and Overwaitea Food Group, a continuation of relationships made while working with the late Rod Schroeder at Schroeder Properties.

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Ironwood Plaza

Designed by Henriquez Partners Architects, Blood Alley is comprised of 62 market and 80 non-market rental homes, an underground restaurant/lounge and performance space, retail and a public plaza, called Blood Alley Square. The project will retain the historic character of the existing Stanley Hotel and the New Fountain Hotel, through the rehabilitation of the entire original façade, and features retail at grade designed by OSO, as well as two floors of below-grade restaurant/lounge space. A breezeway running through the project will interconnect Blood Alley Square with Cordova St, inspired by the Corso Como of Milan.

We are creating Blood Alley with the goal of establishing a new, dynamic gathering place in the community, with arts and culture focused programming that will enrich the cultural landscape of our city.

Blood Alley

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In the summer of 2006, Westbank commenced construction on one of the last remaining development sites in Coal Harbour to add yet another landmark building to Vancouver’s waterfront.

The Fairmont Pacific Rim fuses the luxury brand of Fairmont Hotels and Resorts with Westbank’s reputation for quality design and construction. This property consists of a world-class 367-room Fairmont Hotel and 175 luxury residential homes with unparalleled views along with amenities and services for which Fairmont is famous for. This exciting new development is now Westbank’s latest stamp on the Vancouver skyline.

Canada’s top hotel opened for the 2010 Winter Olympics, and British Artist Liam Gillick’s installation “….lying on top of the building the clouds looks no nearer than when I was lying on the street” integrates art and architecture, a defining element indicative of Westbank's higher experiential focus. Patrons are encouraged to mingle among the many fine art installations, enjoy custom curated cocktails crafted by the award-winning lounge team, and enjoy access to exclusive fashions shows or grab a seat at one of the Bob Dylan-inspired tables and catch a live performance on the custom designed Fazioli piano.

The Fairmont Pacific Rim also features experiential and culinary offerings: Willow Stream Spa, giovane - an Italian cafe, the Lobby Lounge and RawBar, and Botanist – Vancouver’s newest restaurant featuring four diverse spaces – a dining room, cocktail bar and lab, garden, and a champagne lounge.

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Fairmont Pacific Rim

This high-end residential development on Alberni Street is comprised of two elliptical towers containing 272 homes.  The development of this project was undertaken by Westbank projects on behalf of the Kuok Group of Hong Kong.

Developing the Palisades involved the implosion of three existing high-rises on the site. One of the largest implosions of its type, it was a harrowing experience which fortunately, went fairly well.

Gwen Boyle’s installation, New Currents and Ancient Streams, was our ﬁrst foray into the public art scene. While not as ambitious as our later work, it is consistent with the maturity of the team at the time. It’s an elegant piece that complemented the strong landscape architecture of the project.

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The Palisades

One of Toronto’s most iconic sites, Westbank purchased Honest Ed’s in 2013. Founded by Ed Mirvish in 1948, Honest Ed's brought people together from all walks of life, creating a community and catalyzing collective memory-making. We began designing Mirvish Village by thinking about how we could live up to that legacy.

Honest Ed’s was beloved for bringing the community together in any and every way possible. A place for festivals, street parties, theatrics, food, crafts, games and a sense of humour, this site has acted as a centre of the Annex, Palmerston, Harbord, and Seaton Village neighbourhoods for over 65 years. The history of these lands is also multi-layered, and has meant many different things to many different people—as a landing pad for waves of Jewish, Italian, Portuguese, Jamaican, and many other immigrants, as an artists’ colony, as a model of entrepreneurial success, and even simply as the place where many young university students bought their first frying pan.

We learned about each of these layers and the community’s priorities for redevelopment via three years of community engagement: dozens of open houses, community meetings, ‘walkshops,’ workshops, and over 30,000 in-person interactions at Markham House, our on-site engagement centre—all in partnership with City Planning and the area residents’ associations. The product is a fine-grained, innovative project that we hope will continue to serve as a centre of community—a living room for the neighbourhood. 

In total, 24 heritage buildings will be conserved across the site. Markham Street will be restored, and will be re-landscaped as a pedestrian-first  street with vibrant restaurants, boutiques, generous patios, trees, public seating, and a new public park. 

Rather than a single monolithic building, the project stiches back together the historical fine-grained streetscapes of Bathurst and Bloor with narrow shopfronts at street level that form the character of the new buildings with varying façade typologies, including low and mid-rise buildings and a series of micro-towers. 
At street level there will be new pedestrian laneways and public spaces, and, anchoring the site, a public market featuring the best of Ontario’s local food entrepreneurs, artisans and daily live music. Inspired by the bazaar-like quality of Honest Ed’s, we hope that this market becomes a gathering place and living room for all Torontonians. And to extend the entrepreneurial legacy of the site, Honest Ed’s Alley will feature a dedicated micro-retail incubator, developed in partnership with the Centre for Social Innovation. 

Designed to be a truly complete community of purpose-built rental housing, more than 10% of the units will be deeply affordable. Markham Street will host a new daycare with outdoor playspace, a bike hub with dedicated bike valet, and public art installations curated in partnership with David Mirvish.

Mirvish Village will also be one of the most sustainable new developments in the City of Toronto, targeting up to 30% reductions in energy use than typical buildings, along with the LEED Platinum Neighbourhood and TGS Tier II standards. Creative Energy is providing a district heating, cooling, and microgrid system to nearly 1M ft2 of purpose-built-rental and affordable housing. Our integrated electro-mechanical energy platform prioritizes resiliency and demand-response to minimize Global Adjustment costs from the Ontario power grid.

Each one of these components could stand alone as precedent-setting for the City of Toronto, but together, they provide the building blocks for a project that we hope sets the standard for city-building and lives up to the legacy of Ed Mirvish.


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Mirvish Village

Designed by renowned Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, Westbank’s Alberni project is shaped by its environment. The 43-storey tower is carved by two emphatic scoops that form deep balconies furnished in wood. In both instances, the carvings create semi-enclosures that strengthen their relations to the street and to the views, connecting to its urban and geographic context while optimizing neighbouring views past the project.

Because of the way the otherwise orthogonal tower is carved, its silhouette constantly changes, creating illusionary profiles of arching cantilevers. The reality is far more structured as the carved deductions are diagonally symmetrical, the lower portion helping to counterbalance the hanging volume above.

The tower meets the ground with two intersecting domes that embrace Alberni and Cardero. Under the arching structures, an extensive moss garden defines the entrance and flows upwards to the swimming pool above. In keeping with Japanese spatial traditions, the emphasis is on the atmosphere rather than the object: without drawing attention to a particular point laden with meaning, the void elicits a serene visceral experience that can be shared by all.

Alberni by Kengo Kuma integrates intricate design details in woodwork throughout and within the interior design of the residential tower. The project’s amenities include a Kengo Kuma-designed Fazioli piano, a listening room, a fitness centre an expansive moss garden and swimming pool as well as a soon to be announced contemporary Japanese restaurant concept, inspired by the Japanese culinary art form of Kaiseki.


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This development scales across two towers with 36-floors each and sets a benchmark for technological and architectural innovation. The Residences on Georgia was chosen by the City of Vancouver as one of its ‘projects completed in the past decade which have made significant contributions to the urban design of their respective precincts or neighbourhoods and enhanced the city’s emerging form’.

Designed by James Cheng, this feature project has been awarded the 1998 Gold Georgie Award and the 1998 Lieutenant Governor’s Gold Award.

Completed in 1996, Residences on Georgia was one of the first projects designed with what became known the world over as the Vancouver building typology, which consists of a townhouse podium with a tower above, and included Westbank's first major public art installation, with Dale Chihuly.

In terms of design, one component that Westbank spends more time designing than any other is the public realm. The Residences on Georgia is a good example of what we are trying to achieve; it also demonstrates the underlying philosophy behind the integration of our public art into the architecture of our buildings.

Adjacent to the Residences on Georgia sits Abbott House, the heritage structure at 720 Jervis Street which Westbank restored during development, originally built in 1899. It's one of the few West End Vancouver mansions remaining from the pre-first World War era when the area was known as Blueblood Alley. It was built by Henry Braithwaite Abbott, an esteemed CPR executive, who let the contract for the clearing of the townsite of Vancouver. Vancouver's Abbott Street is named after him.

Even today, 20 years later, Residences on Georgia has a timeless elegance about it and its design features have continued to be reused and incorporated in many Vancouver buildings since.

Residences on Georgia pioneered the start of the Vancouver pre-sale campaign, a sales strategy that found its roots and popularity in Asia. Residences on Georgia was the most successful sales launch in Vancouver at the time and sold out in a matter of days with buyers purchasing "off plan", a first for North America. This sales model has since become the norm in Vancouver and across North America.

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Residences on Georgia

Murals represent something that speaks to the essence of Main Alley – inspiration. The first year of our collaboration with Vancouver Mural Festival we offered up 3 walls, for the creation of these amazing, permanent  art pieces, each by a different artist. We have been adding a mural every year since and as we finalize the construction for M2 and add M4, we will be integrating demountable mural panels serving as canvasses for artwork that will be auctioned off, to raise funds for the following year’s Mural Festival. 

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Rotating Canvas Walls for Murals

The veil at First Light by Seattle-based glass artist John Hogan reflects the beauty of light in all its forms. Hogan has designed a veil of glass discs, for the podium, within a multisensory space, in the lobbies as well as on the rooftop, that together create thousands of luminous moments, casting patterns of light and shadows that will change with the time of day and season. 

The Veil 

Ghosts of Blood Alley

Ghosts of Blood Alley is a high-energy pop expression of recent and past billboards and imagery central to its Blood Alley locale. The past includes not only the building site's former incarnation as the Stanley Hotel, but also fragments of the local neighborhood such as the old Woodward's department store. There are also allusions to the recent past via the sorts of ads painted onto local walls in the twentieth century: soda pop and consumer goods. And of course the building's new incarnation as a musical performance space is addressed.

The structure of the mural takes into account the crimps within the building's façade and its colours themselves are faded, addressing the issue of time and history. “Ghosts of Blood Alley's viewers get to decode a puzzle of sorts, deciding for themselves their own relationship to time and history in a way that is both friendly yet cool.

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Stone Sections

An organic sculptural installation by Swedish visual artist Henrik Håkansson, Stone Sections is comprised of a single local stone, with traces of the sea, positioned within multiple transparent glass sections. Each section will allow a varied reflection and extension of the stone itself and its surrounding environment. The stone is expressed mid-air as being suspended, but clearly held by reflective walls of glass. 

A Rock Divided

One of the world's most important living artists, Frank Stella is recognized as an iconic figure of postwar American art, considered the most influential painter of the movement beyond Abstract Expressionism toward Minimalism. The mural at Mirvish Village is inspired by his painting Damascus Gate, which he created in 1970. Part of Stella's protractor series, Damascus Gate is one of the largest paintings in the series, requiring the viewer to stand at a distance, or walk along its 50 feet. The piece was displayed in David Mirvish's gallery for 35 years. 

David Mirvish's gallery was one of the most vibrant, active spaces in all of Mirvish Village until its closure in 2009. We wanted to preserve and celebrate that history, by bringing the gallery outdoors for everyone to enjoy.

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Star Wall for Ed

Designed by Perkins + Will, the idea for 707 Terry is to extend the Frye Museum into a museum campus, with the museum’s aesthetic running through the veins of a new residential project, creating the architectural expression for the skin of the building as well as animating the surrounding public space. 

Shifting screens on the building’s façade will create a pattern inspired by the placement of framed artwork in the Salon of the Frye Museum, allowing residents to interact with the building’s exterior animation.

Shifting Screens

All that Melts proposes an urban landscape for 2080 as a means of speculating about how things could be. It is one vision of a future history; not simply the image of a scientific model but a mythological space that is inhabited by the consequences of its recent past, a story of the earth as told by the culture which co-produced it. This visually poetic, multi-media installation engages the past, as it reflects on our troubled present, in an attempt to imagine alternative, more desirable futures.

All That Melts: Notes from the Future-Past

__zeph· yr | \ ‘ze-fer \ __
: a soft gentle breeze

To enliven the streetscape of the Davie Street project, Westbank and Crombie REIT have commissioned Vancouver artist Neil Campbell to create a lighting installation for the building’s Davie Street facade. The installation entitled, `Zephyr’, will animate screens of state-of-the-art LEDs that have been designed to highlight the three-storey podium. Inspired by the beautiful natural environment and the colours and light of the West End, Campbell’s piece will act as a living canvas generating a colourful and rhythmic work with the aim of celebrating the neighbourhood’s vibrant and enduring character.

Zephyr

The façade of TELUS Sky integrates over 2.2km / 89,000 pixels of LED lighting wrapped around each window module in an inverted L, forming the canvas for Doug Coupland’s Northern Lights. Coupland has created a series of animation sequences depicting the Aurora borealis in full motion and colour. Whether up close or from a distance, the soothing organic motion of the LED’s will bathe viewers in the sensation of being in Canada’s north. The organic curves of the building help to amplify the motion of the façades’ light sequencing, creating a fully integrated eyeball experience. At the same time, Coupland also acknowledges that Calgary is an important national and international hub by inserting multicolored sequences that exploit TELUS Sky’s geometry in a different way between the Aurora borealis light sequences. Northern Lights aims to generate moods and emotions that are geometric, a bit brash and entirely metropolitan.

The Northern Lights will play every day from approximately one hour before sunset to 11pm (12am during summer months), adjusting with the seasons. 


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Northern Lights

Thirsty is a mural by street artist iHeart. 

iHeart aka I♥ is a Canadian street artist who uses graffiti to voice his opinion on social issues. He created a series of graffiti stencils through which he tries to convey the negative influence of social media on the growing youth, and the ways it is alienating people instead of bringing them closer. The artist is just as elusive as famous British artist Banksy, who's artwork has transcended typical perceptions of graffiti to become high art.

Thirsty 

Still Standing is informed by the succeeding transformations the West End area has experienced since the 1890’s, shifting from a densely forested area to a vivid urban neighborhood. By mirroring specific building methods, Still Standing salutes the previously dominant Victorian architectural aesthetic. It also acknowledges, through the use of the fish scale pattern of shingles, the importance of nature and the role of biomimicry in our interactions with the world. The sculpture is ultimately a reflection on the notion of change, simultaneously considering what was, what is and what will be.

Westbank Pendrell 1096 1770 Pendrell and Art Installation

Still Standing

Inspired by Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience” (1849), Wurm’s Big Disobedience, (2016) makes reference to an often explored theme: political and social correctness. Related in its use of the human form and apparel, Half Big Suit (2016) stems from an earlier series, Cut, that investigates the fragmented body. Fixed in an awkward position, with one leg extended in the air, the static sculpture conveys a sense of distress experienced while undergoing a durational performance or holding a lengthy pose. In their focus on the body and its motions, these works relate to Wurm’s famous One Minute Sculptures series (XXXX), in which viewers enact simple yet absurd poses for one minute at a time.

The relationship between the organic transformation of the body through biological factors and the intentional moulding of objects in Wurm’s work is illustrated in his architectural structure, Flat Iron (2016). Here the artist’s distorted recreation of New York’s iconic Flatiron Building is demonstrated in a melting structure, demonstrating further how the manipulation of volume, scale, form and materiality, can signal transformation in both human and non-human form.

Inspired by Wurm’s performative practice, the Gallery invited Mike Bourscheid, an artist who works between Luxembourg and Vancouver, to develop a series of performative interventions at Offsite: Erwin Wurm.

Big Disobedience

Faith XLVII's mural depicting an African oryx is titled, The Progress of the Truth of Men. An internationally-acclaimed visual artist from South Africa currently based in Los Angeles, Faith XLVII is considered one of the world's most renowned and prolific muralists.

The Progress of the Truth of Men

In 1995 a 6.9 magnitude earthquake struck the coast of Japan with its epicentre at the major port city of Kobe. More than 6,000 people were killed and 200,000 made homeless. A young Tokyo-based architect—Shigeru Ban—known for his innovative work utilizing paper and cardboard tubing as a building material, was invited to respond to the urgent need for temporary relief shelter. His interest in paper, with its low cost, easy accessibility and simple application, provided him with readymade materials to design and build a sturdy, economical and ecologically sustainable home for thousands who were displaced in the disaster. This simple building has become the prototype for similar disaster relief structures built around the world for the past twenty years.

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Paper Log House

Artist collective Polit-Sheer-Form Office (PSFO) explores the possibilities of shared experience through group activities such travelling, eating, reading and physical exercise. At Offsite, they present Fitness For All, a fivepiece set of exercise equipment evoking campaigns throughout the Peoples Republic of China aimed at motivating society to pay more attention to health. In the early 2000s the government began to install exercise equipment in public parks throughout the country, and since then the machines have worked their way into the daily regimen of millions of people.

While outdoor public exercise equipment is common in China, relocated to Vancouver’s urban core, the work has adopts a new social and cultural context. One that allows the artists to examine whether collectivism is really a social need or just a management tool. In Canada, individualism is a fundamental value yet a new understanding of the need for the collective has emerged. Conversely, in China, where collectivism has been a core value throughout most of history, the last decade has indicated an increase in individual pursuits. Through their interactive public performances and happenings, PSFO tests where the desire of collective organization arises naturally from human nature or is an expression of ideology.

Fitness For All encourages audience participation. The work is both purely visual (as contemporary sculpture) as well as purpose built and customized to provide a public service. For PSFO, the fitness equipment is secondary to providing space and opportunity for collective gathering with friends, visitors and passersby, thereby advocating for a model of social organization that benefits the community as a whole.

We is the distinction of I

Created by celebrated Vancouver artist Andy Dixon for the 2017 Vancouver Mural Festival, this mural is an enlarged recreation of a painting depicting his former studio space in Mount Pleasant only a few blocks away. 

Dixon's work has been described as renaissance meets Matisse with punk-rock sensibilities. Most recently, he collaborated with Versace for an exhibition at Milan Design Week.

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Vancouver Studio (After Matisse)

A mural by local artists Amanda Smart and Tia Rambaran, at Main Alley, created for the 2017 Vancouver Mural Festival. 

Lady Mermaids

A mural created as a memorial for artist Holden Maguire by local artists Frank Jones, Ariel Buxton, Hayden Eland, Alex Leder, Filipo Intile and Blake Wydeman, at Main Alley, created at a live graffita jam held by the Vancouver Mural Festival in 2017.

https://www.vancouverfoundation.ca//holdencourage 


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Holden Courage Memorial

Hong Kong artist Tsang Kin-Wah critically addresses some of the complexities
surrounding migration, cultural identity and racism in these site-specific works. At Vancouver Art Gallery’s public art space, Offsite Tsang presents a large-scale
composition using English texts to form floral and animal patterns.

Deceitfully decorative, the content draws from discriminatory language that appeared in newspapers and political campaigns in Vancouver during the 1887 anti -Chinese riots, the mid-1980s immigration from Hong Kong and most recently, the heated exchanges around the foreign buyers and the local housing market.

Tsang’s work combines foul language with beautiful patterns to confront the reality of ignorance that often exists within cities that boast of their multiculturalism and diversity. Tsang covers the walls of Offsite with text composed of adverse rhetoric of Vancouver newspaper editorial columns from the 1980s but also contrasts it with voices of inclusion to compose floral patterns that unravel to form the body of a dragon.

EITHER / OR

According to the City of Vancouver’s Zero Waste 2040 statistics, residents, businesses and institutions threw away approximately 351,000 tonnes of garbage in 2015. Most of this “waste” is considered valuable resource material that could have been conserved, reused, recycled or composted instead of sent to the landfill or incinerator.

New Delhi-based artist Asim Waqif’s site-specific installation at Offsite combines architecture with a strong contextual reference to contemporary urban design and the politics of urban waste management. Concerns of the environment and social responsibility weave through his work, and for this project Waqif has created an immersive architectural experience built out of materials collected from repurpose stores, the transfer station and landfill in the metro Vancouver area. The structure is assembled using timber, roofing, doors, window frames and sections of walls salvaged from recent demolitions and discarded from local residential and office building.

Many of Waqif’s projects respond to an absence of a tactile, experiential aspect in contemporary art by establishing an element of interactivity inside a living, evolving, organic environment. At Offsite he installs mechanical and electronic panels into his maze-like structures to cultivate a multi-sensory experience with sound, light and movement. Visitors are encouraged to move through the installation, allowing them to activate the architecture. This is the artist’s first exhibition in Canada

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