CITYSPACE: LANDMARKS, PINNACLES, PASSAGES

Continued from page 1

Most Picturesque City Still in Search of Architecture: Vancouver

Vancouver's chief urban planner, Larry Beasley, has resigned as uber-playmaker to become one of the principal eco-advisors to the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi. Meanwhile, a 38-year-old planner from Calgary, Brent Toderian, has taken up the challenge of creating a 21st-century city of sustainability in Vancouver - a laudable mission, especially if the city can also solve the problem of its crack heads and heroin addicts.

The sad reality is that visionary architecture has been largely value-engineered out of the Olympic venues, though the athletes' village in False Creek holds some promise as a model sustainable community. For inspired architecture, look to a series of community centres spearheaded by Vancouver's Parks Board. Architects commissioned to bring new life to the play houses of the community include Gregory Henriquez, Peter Busby, Walter Francl, Arthur Erickson and Nick Milkovich, Roger Hughes and Darryl Condon.

The Sunset Community Centre, at Main and 52nd streets, is a visually charged facility designed by local hero and international designer, Bing Thom. At $12-million, its budget may be small but its impact large. The venue is set within a series of gentle knolls created by the excavation of the site. The roof resembles the petals of a flower when viewed from the air. Experienced on the ground, there is a light-filled gymnasium, youth room, fitness centre and preschool, all designed with geothermal heating and cooling, radiant floor systems and high-efficiency glazing, allowing it to qualify for a LEED Gold environmental rating.

On Mortality: Kisho Kurokawa, Herbert Muschamp and Macy DuBois

We lost Kisho Kurokawa on Oct. 12. Kurokawa was one of those sages fuelled by the energy of an ageless, vibrant mind. A famous Japanese architect, dreamer, failed politician and tireless self-promoter, he handed me three of his monographs during an interview several years ago in Toronto.

His Nakagin Capsule Tower, Tokyo (1972) expressed a commercial and residential building as a series of stacked "capsules" that could be inhabited in singles or multiples to suit the needs of the occupants. The highly flexible structure was made of prefabricated pods that could be clipped into the main tower; it best exemplified the Metabolist movement that Kurokawa founded with Arata Isozaki. That the tower was constructed with asbestos has apparently doomed it to the wrecker's ball.

Kurokawa designed irreverent gestures: glorious stadiums and an exhibition hall for the Fukui Prefectural Dinosaur Museum as a perfect, steel-clad oval. During a visit to Malaysia this September, I flew into the Kuala Lumpur International Airport (1998), designed as a hyperbolic paraboloid-shell pavilion supported by mushroom-shaped columns. A rain forest was captured at the heart of one of its satellites. Most airports are deliberate acts of sterility, but this one, though it is one of the world's transportation giants, re-energized this tired traveller with evidence of nature and the human hand. I knew this must have been the work of Kurokawa. One month later, his heart stopped.

Herbert Muschamp died, too, on Oct. 3. At 59, his brilliance was extinguished too early. Muschamp was the architecture critic for The New York Times from 1992 to 2004. He penned reviews with the passion of a Robespierre calling people to go to the front lines and do battle in the name of the city. He demanded iconic architecture: the swirling, provocative forms to rise at the front of the metropolis.

To that end, Muschamp trumpeted endlessly the powerful gestures of his favourite designers: Rem Koolhaas, Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Greg Lynn. These names appeared with increasing regularity in his columns and though that became predictable, his roiling, philosophical mind made him one of the few critics worth clipping.

Closer to home, the Toronto architect, Macy DuBois, is also gone - although the bravery of his Ontario pavilion at Expo '67 will live on.

And Apparent Immortality: Oscar Niemeyer

For his 100th birthday this year, Oscar Niemeyer, the legendary Brazilian architect, turned up at his office to sketch, smoke cigars, visit with family, and enjoy a leisurely lunch. For more than half a century, he has defied the hard lines and slab towers of modern architecture, to create sculptural, iconic buildings.

For his own house outside Rio de Janeiro (1953), he designed walls of serpentine glass and curved wooden enclaves protected by a giant floating roof. As architect of the main state institutions for the new city of Brasilia, Niemeyer conjured a complex defined by pure platonic forms at the Plaza of the Three Powers (1958). His latest building, the Teatro Popular, is a sexy wisp of a thing rendered - remarkably - in concrete. It opened this year across the bay from Rio in the city of Niteroi as part of an eight-building cultural complex that spans Niemeyer Way.

Women have always inspired the titan of the curve. He once received Frank Gehry into his studio and, during their visit, revealed a desk covered with pictures of topless women sunbathing on the beaches of Rio. Last year, Niemeyer married Vera, his long-term assistant, who is 38 years his junior.