Despite this widespread support of the cause, many of us lag at times—doubts arise about the earnestness of all this policy and prohibition. Our intentions are focused, our craft is sound, but must going Green remain a civic duty for architects rather than a passionate embrace, a ritual obligation rather than profound inspiration? Come the return of good times for builders, will the progress of the past few years be lost if architects do not become excited about the design virtues of sustainability, not just its environmental benefits?

These were the questions that prompted a number of us Vancouverites to recently propose and conduct an open ideas competition called FormShift. Vancouver’s previous mayor, Sam Sullivan, had pushed through an ambitious EcoDensity Initiative in 2008 after several years of study and public meetings, while his successor, Gregor Robertson, has pledged to carry on making Vancouver “the Greenest city on the continent.” With these successes on the civic policy and urban planning fronts, eyes have turned towards architects: How will these good intentions turn into buildings?

FormShift Vancouver was devised to give maximum latitude for designers to do their best. As organizers, we wanted to remove every possible impediment for designers to explore what the new policy landscape means for changing architectural form itself—hence the name we devised for the contest. Entering the FormShift competition did not require professional licenses or academic credentials of any kind, despite being co-sponsored by the Architectural Institute of British Columbia. Our hope was to enable students and citizens to send in their ideas, and sure enough, non-professionals were among the 97 entrants, winning several prizes.

In addition, we threw away the zoning book and other land use controls, despite our other key sponsor being the City of Vancouver’s Planning Department. While land use categories, set-backs and so on were ignored, we did ask all entrants to look at green initiative documents, including our city council-ratified “Eco-Density Charter” (www.vancouver-ecodensity.ca) and its more recent follow-on, the “Climate Change Action Plan” (www.vancouver.ca/sustainability/climate_protection.htm.) These two documents (plus related publications such as the “2030 Challenge”) became the “soft program” for the competition—general statements of sustainability targets that did not include specific architectural solutions.

We charged everyone who entered a modest fee to discourage trivial entries, but in turn, committed to post every submitted design on our competition website (www. formshiftvancouver.ca.) Our jury included photo-based artist Stan Douglas, Vancouver planning director Brent Toderian, University of British Columbia Senior Campus Planner Nancy Knight and Canadian Architect Magazine editor Ian Chodikoff. (Seattle’s David Miller was unable to serve as juror as planned due to a family emergency.) Winners were announced April 15, and a lively public panel on May 6 brought organizers, jury and winners together for a discussion on “where to go from here?”

Now that the competition is concluded and my duties as one of the co-organizers are complete, here are some entirely personal comments and speculations about the winners.

1. Vancouver Primary Winner: “Re-Think Surfaces” by Sturgess Architects of Calgary
Calgary architect Jeremy Sturgess was deemed by the jury to have the best ideas in the arterial street “Vancouver Primary” category. Sturgess is one of Western Canada’s most highly regarded designers but has not done a building in the city of Vancouver since co-designing the Alberta Pavilion at EXPO 86. The Albertan was attracted to the potential of arterial streets as the focus of new green design; “We entered because the issues here are similar to ones we are dealing with in Calgary,” said Sturgess. The Calgary team’s proposal, dubbed “Re-Think Surfaces,” takes on one of the tired clichés of sustainable design – the green roof – and invigorates it formally and spatially. “Future buildings must produce rather than consume,” states their explanatory text, “THINK of the building as a variety of productive SURFACES.” Their design maximizes exposed surfaces, proposing that all of these areas be put to work as decks, green roofs, gardens, bases for windmills and so on. The most intriguing form-making from the Sturgess team is the Swiss-cheese like holes and gaps set through the bulk of the project. These increase the amount of surface area available for other uses, while also maximizing the penetration of daylight deep into all corners of the project.

Their proposal rises eight to ten stories along the arterial street bearing underground rail transit, but eases down in steps towards the nearby single family residential areas adjacent. Formally, the proposal is an intriguing amalgam of a Soviet Constructivist style apartment block, a motel village and a Latin American courtyard maze. The jury was drawn to the scheme because it demonstrates that building massing – the bulk and substance of medium-density construction – can be manipulated to advance sustainability aims. Not just clip-ons of adding solar collectors and green walls, not just invisible improvements to wall and window construction standards, but form shifting of building massing itself inspires some bold architecture here.

2. Vancouver Secondary Winner: “Harvest Green” by Romses Architects
The turn to urban agriculture is also a feature in the winning scheme for the lower density “Vancouver Secondary” category. One of the proposals of Vancouver’s EcoDensity initiative was a city-wide initiative to redevelop the land in all singlefamily residential blocks that is taken up with mid-block lanes, flanking garages and parking pads (approximately one third of each residential city block). Laneway housing is thought to be a relatively painless way to double residential densities in single family areas while maintaining their look and feel. Laneway housing reduces sprawl (those new houses would otherwise be built in suburbia); recoups prior public investment in infrastructure like roads, parks and schools; and makes public transit more viable. After experiments in laneway housing over the past two decades, the planning department is now green-lighting and rolling out this strategy over much of the city.

As other architects propose ways of putting small houses where garages alone once stood, they would do well to carefully study Scott Romses’ plans. At the core of his scheme are “mobile nomadic prefab laneway homes,” an awkward phrase thankfully boiled down to “ModPods.” The recent fad in architectural culture for high-end modular housing has tended to locate them solely on bucolic or exurban sites and has resulted in little more than airy talk about affordability. The Romses scheme is ingenious in showing how modular constructions – those ModPods – can be packed tightly and in multiple variations along laneways, maximizing the use of urban land. Packing more livable dwelling units into existing streetscapes is much more the key to affordability than the last decade’s obsession with glorified mobile home technology draped with Neo-Modernist imagery in gallery showings and magazine coverage of new modular housing.

The core of the Romses proposal is a glorious rendering similar to the Sturgess scheme in that it shows how every nook and cranny can be devoted to green living. The designers demonstrate just how many themes and variations can result from tipping, turning and rotating their ModPods. The heterogeneity of the resulting lane streetscapes seems very right, an echo in miniature to the always diverse collections of styles and construction periods found along Vancouver’s residential streets.

3. Vancouver Wild Card: “Dencity” by Go Design Collaborative (Jennifer Uegama and Pauline Thimm)
The near complete flexibility of the “Wild Card” category inspired a scheme from two young architects who graduated a few years ago from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Jennifer Uegama and Pauline Thimm. Their FormShift competition win has since prompted them to found a new design firm—Go Design Collaborative. (New alignments of practitioners are a happy, if unexpected, side benefit of architectural competitions.) Their scheme has a critical edge, pointing out how a crucial bit of Fraser River-flanking land remains under-used, while at the same time proposing a radical hybrid of urban functions there.

The site they explore is just off Vancouver International Airport, as one passes over the North Arm of the Fraser River heading downtown. The designers thought the recent dedication of much of this area to bus barns was the wrong idea for an entrance portal to the city. Moreover, there is no civic urban design framework there, despite a rapid transit station opening in a matter of months. One reason city planners and politicians have not been able to come to terms with this site is Vancouver’s accelerating conversion of industrial lands and other workspaces into housing areas. The young designers were concerned that Vancouver succeeds brilliantly as a place to live, but increasingly fails as a city that creates new spaces to work. The Uegama-Thimm design proposes the retention of industrial uses on the ground plane but carpets them with an undulating green roof. This artificial landscape of green-topped industrial lands (even bus barns could go in there) is flanked at its edges by multi-use towers taking advantage of this riverside close to the airport. Dencity is a clever and very timely proposition.

Getting Things Built

What now?

The May 6 Vancouver public panel about the FormShift competition was filled with suggestions about how to take the ideas generated by winners and other entrants and push them towards constructed reality. For his part, planning director Brent Toderian has already shown the results to the city council and is using them in meetings with community groups and other city departments as a way of prompting needed debate about what is possible. Developers at the meeting saw potential in some of the ideas, and there is no doubt that architects will be borrowing each others’ notions of what new forms are appropriate to emerging sustainability concerns. FormShift Vancouver was one “open ideas competition” that lived up to its name.

Form your own conclusions about which schemes are truly innovative, which are unduly derivative and which might even be examples of “greenwash” by going to the competition website, www.formshiftvancouver.ca.