The project under investigation here is a museum facility to house the full collection of historic Canadian trains currently on display at the existing Canadian Museum of Rail Travel located in Cranbrook, British Columbia. The site of the proposed museum is on a narrow strip of vacant land bordered along one edge by an operating railway yard and on the other by Highway 3/21 the major transportation route through Southern British Columbia. The intention of this siting is to allow the proposed museum to act as a backdrop to the city providing both a buffer between it and the industrial developments beyond the rail yards, as well as a reconnection of the City to the railway on which its history and development has been so dependant. The building itself is organized as two buildings (or layers) lying along side each other like rail cars on a series of tracks. The first building (entry building) houses the public activities of the museum including entry and information, gift shop, tea room/ cafe, temporary gallery, administration offices, archives, shipping/receiving and entrance to the orientation theatre. The second building (the train shed) houses the body of the collection and museum including the restored train sets and cars, elevated discussion space, orientation theatre, and restoration workshops. These two main buildings are connected by a long narrow spine which provides circulation from the entry building through the orientation theatre into the train shed and the collection itself. The spine also houses display areas and visible archives along its length which provide the passing viewer with further explanation of particular aspects of the museum's collection.

The hybrid nature of the building's program became the central idea behind the design of the project. The combination of office, retail and library funcions was an attempt to investigate the possibility of integrating a public amenity space directly within a private building. The implication of such a collision of uses was not only the potential for public cost savings and the promotion of public construction, but as well a possibility of the creation of a symbiotic relationship between these two forces. The private spaces of the building could make use of some of the public, while the public spaces could make use of some of the private. The project took on a diagramatic and absract nature early on, detatched architecturally somewhat from surrounding site conditions in order to investigate the possibilities of connecting and overlapping the building's public and private uses. An early series of diagrams and sectional sketches began to shape the building in its beginning. The three major elements of the program (office, library and retail) were initially separated vertically in space. The retail occupied the ground floor, the library the second, and the offices the final and third. However, the idea of interrelation of the spaces required a greater extent of overlapping and mixture. Thus, the strategy of a split-level shceme started to emerge. The three separations remained somewhat intact, however separated by intermittent split levels. These split levels contained spaces which could relate to either the floor directly above or below. The idea was that these 'shared' spaces could contain elements of the program which could be used by both library and retail, or by both office and library. The net result was a 'saving' of space, as well as a mixing of public and private functions. Yet, with the mixing of public and private uses came the architectural issue of building security. How could a public book enter and leave a retail store? How could a private office be contained from public access? Would the separate retail units truly relate with the library space? Were there more possibilies for more double uses? The library took on the role of both public amenity and private retail enterprise at this point in the project. The move seemed to satisfy both issues of security and interrelationship between public and private functions. The security system of the library would double as the cash desk; the library stacks would contain both borrowable books and commercial retail goods for consumption; the seating for the library would also provide for the in-house cafe-bar; library staff would also function as staff for the shared smaller offices on the second floor. In this sense, the combination of private and public functions not only reduced the need for excess (publically funded) space, but aslo presented the idea of a saving of maintenance and operational costs. The location of the building in Whistler village was done for two main reasons: the town, at present, is currently without a permanent library for a rapidly growing full-time population; and the town, as a resort municipality, relies heavily on its commercial activity in order to energize its main, public pedestrian outdoor mall. The specific site of the building was a point in the village which related both directly to this pedestrian mall as well as an adjacent shopping centre, intended for the vehicular traffic and use of the more full-time residents of Whistler Village. Here the full time residents coming in to use the library could perhaps discover its second commercial nature, while tourists may make use of the public use of the building while going in soley to shop. The building would then be a place where both full-time residents and incidental tourists could both come, interacting within the same building for an array of different reasons. Architecturally, the building was a modest success: the issue of security had been adressed and overlapping of private and public functions was explored in the building. However, the notion that a library would become a highly commercial retailer still seemed improbable; even in an age of decreasing government spending and reliance upon the private sector for public services, the difficulty in motivating a traditionally public sector into an entrepreneurially self-sustaining enterprise prevented the likelihood of its construction.

The project under investigation here is a museum facility to house the full collection of historic Canadian trains currently on display at the existing Canadian Museum of Rail Travel located in Cranbrook, British Columbia. The site of the proposed museum is on a narrow strip of vacant land bordered along one edge by an operating railway yard and on the other by Highway 3/21 the major transportation route through Southern British Columbia. The intention of this siting is to allow the proposed museum to act as a backdrop to the city providing both a buffer between it and the industrial developments beyond the rail yards, as well as a reconnection of the City to the railway on which its history and development has been so dependant. The building itself is organized as two buildings (or layers) lying along side each other like rail cars on a series of tracks. The first building (entry building) houses the public activities of the museum including entry and information, gift shop, tea room/ cafe, temporary gallery, administration offices, archives, shipping/receiving and entrance to the orientation theatre. The second building (the train shed) houses the body of the collection and museum including the restored train sets and cars, elevated discussion space, orientation theatre, and restoration workshops. These two main buildings are connected by a long narrow spine which provides circulation from the entry building through the orientation theatre into the train shed and the collection itself. The spine also houses display areas and visible archives along its length which provide the passing viewer with further explanation of particular aspects of the museum's collection. / Applied Science, Faculty of / Architecture and Landscape Architecture (SALA), School of / Graduate

In the pursuit of originality, some interventions consciously stand in opposition to the existing. The approach I've taken is more holistic; rather than pursue the novelty of the moment, I've taken the stance that creativity in art and architecture is part of a continuum. With that in mind, I've attempted in this project to make this evolution apparent by bridging the existing to the new without reverting to historical mimicking. My design is not a heritage preservation project. I wanted to take what exists, re-think it, and build upon it. My proposal is for a downtown student residence for both individuals and families. It would take advantage of new developments in the area such as the new S.F.U. conference center, the new B.C.IT. complex, and other institutions already in place such as the S.F.U. at Harbor Center, and the Vancouver Community College. This student residence would be an inter-university residence, accepting students from all of these educational institutions as well as U.B.C. and Emily Carr. Its aim would be to establish greater social and academic links between the city's post-secondary educational institutes. This project feeds on what has already started to happen in the area and can re-introduce a residential population to the city core, generating new life and new activity which in turn will contribute significantly to the wealth of the urban fabric. In short, one can imagine the formation of a lively downtown university quarter. My proposed residence would be one seed sown in this larger vision. Besides feeling that I felt the project should be a dense urban scheme, it appeared imperative to me that my design foster a real sense of belonging, permitting the development of a small community within a community. In addition to public commercial space, the new program demanded realms of privacy, and more importantly a core, or center, around which a community could begin to form. From this organizational idea of a core the design started to take shape. The existing building opened up in the rear toward a court. A lane intersected it providing access and making it a space that could be both place and pathway for activity. The program turned towards this space marking it as the center, and animating it with the activity of daily life. The existing urban aesthetic informed my design language. Urban context is characterized by wall as a dominant element, tall vertical spaces, steel stairs and railing, hanging wires, and a strong demarcation between front, sides and rear accentuated by a change of brick at the corners. All these elements were to some degree absorbed, assimilated and reinterpreted in the work. The relationship of 'part to whole' became an important part of the process. Likewise, terminology in how I started to speak and think about the project. Words like old vs. new stopped being used as they aggravate the dichotomy between the parts. An effort was made not to mimic the existing building which would have produce a neo-historic building, this was not my goal. An effort was made not to objectify the existing building, rendering it a precious object. Nor did I deliberately attempt to contrast it, this would be counter-productive to the concept of the whole. Contrast aggravates the gap between then and now, disavowing integration and synthesis. My approach was rather one of complementing and complicity. Complicity is an interesting concept because it implies that two or more parties or parts come together toward a common goal, It also implies a dialogue. This is very different from contrast, for example, that is unidirectional. A dialogue receives and gives, and both parts form and are informed. / Applied Science, Faculty of / Architecture and Landscape Architecture (SALA), School of / Graduate

This thesis project, a Museum of Contemporary Architecture in Vancouver, offers solu tions to architectural design problems resulting from the placement of an institutional use, the museum, within the social and physical framework of the city. The emphasis of this project is to integrate two polar opposites. On one hand resides the bureaucratic elite of a cultural institution: the curatorial machinery of contemporary architecture. On the other hand are the contradictory forces of the city: the wandering of the diverse population through the site, the intrusion of other uses within the body of the building, and the shifting of museum uses onto adjacent noninstitutional structures. The method of research has been through a three month iterative process of reading, draw ing and modelling, following consultation with the thesis committee. Represented here is the third version of the project, in it’s most resolved form. For a record of the thesis preparation, please see the design study, directed by Professor Sherry McKay, held in the Architecture Read ing Room. The conclusions of this thesis project resulted from aggressive reworkings. First, the uses of the building were interrogated and then condensed into their simplest form. This involved deleting most of the traditional museum functions. Libraries and bookstores, meeting rooms and cafes and staff offices were transplanted offsite or given away to other businesses. This allowed a new underground film room and night club to intrude in the basement, and an estranged office and residence to hover over the small exhibition spaces. Second, the massing of these uses needed separate identities. Finally, out of a desire for an open urban expression, the building mass was reduced further to introduce empty floors between uses, and a two meter setback between the building and the next structure on the block. Light and air, infiltrating these intersti tial spaces of the design, emanated towards the street. A concrete structure holds this composi tion together, with steel struts bracing against earthquake forces. A double row of street trees filter the resultant vision, layering the building in the urban context. The subject of this thesis was prompted by a comment by Thom Mayne’s during his visit to UBC in 1993. Mr. Mayne felt that the traditional scope of contemporary architecture could be improved, especially when contrasted to the breadth of issues in the fine arts. This project helped me to investigate the architectural possibilities of institutional expres sion in the urban core. / Applied Science, Faculty of / Architecture and Landscape Architecture (SALA), School of / Graduate

The hybrid nature of the building's program became the central idea behind the design of the project. The combination of office, retail and library funcions was an attempt to investigate the possibility of integrating a public amenity space directly within a private building. The implication of such a collision of uses was not only the potential for public cost savings and the promotion of public construction, but as well a possibility of the creation of a symbiotic relationship between these two forces. The private spaces of the building could make use of some of the public, while the public spaces could make use of some of the private. The project took on a diagramatic and absract nature early on, detatched architecturally somewhat from surrounding site conditions in order to investigate the possibilities of connecting and overlapping the building's public and private uses. An early series of diagrams and sectional sketches began to shape the building in its beginning. The three major elements of the program (office, library and retail) were initially separated vertically in space. The retail occupied the ground floor, the library the second, and the offices the final and third. However, the idea of interrelation of the spaces required a greater extent of overlapping and mixture. Thus, the strategy of a split-level shceme started to emerge. The three separations remained somewhat intact, however separated by intermittent split levels. These split levels contained spaces which could relate to either the floor directly above or below. The idea was that these 'shared' spaces could contain elements of the program which could be used by both library and retail, or by both office and library. The net result was a 'saving' of space, as well as a mixing of public and private functions. Yet, with the mixing of public and private uses came the architectural issue of building security. How could a public book enter and leave a retail store? How could a private office be contained from public access? Would the separate retail units truly relate with the library space? Were there more possibilies for more double uses? The library took on the role of both public amenity and private retail enterprise at this point in the project. The move seemed to satisfy both issues of security and interrelationship between public and private functions. The security system of the library would double as the cash desk; the library stacks would contain both borrowable books and commercial retail goods for consumption; the seating for the library would also provide for the in-house cafe-bar; library staff would also function as staff for the shared smaller offices on the second floor. In this sense, the combination of private and public functions not only reduced the need for excess (publically funded) space, but aslo presented the idea of a saving of maintenance and operational costs. The location of the building in Whistler village was done for two main reasons: the town, at present, is currently without a permanent library for a rapidly growing full-time population; and the town, as a resort municipality, relies heavily on its commercial activity in order to energize its main, public pedestrian outdoor mall. The specific site of the building was a point in the village which related both directly to this pedestrian mall as well as an adjacent shopping centre, intended for the vehicular traffic and use of the more full-time residents of Whistler Village. Here the full time residents coming in to use the library could perhaps discover its second commercial nature, while tourists may make use of the public use of the building while going in soley to shop. The building would then be a place where both full-time residents and incidental tourists could both come, interacting within the same building for an array of different reasons. Architecturally, the building was a modest success: the issue of security had been adressed and overlapping of private and public functions was explored in the building. However, the notion that a library would become a highly commercial retailer still seemed improbable; even in an age of decreasing government spending and reliance upon the private sector for public services, the difficulty in motivating a traditionally public sector into an entrepreneurially self-sustaining enterprise prevented the likelihood of its construction. / Applied Science, Faculty of / Architecture and Landscape Architecture (SALA), School of / Graduate

The basic intention of this study is to show that the research findings in the field of restorative environments can be used in the design of high-density housing to develop healthy living environments. This study explores the possibility that providing public, semi-public and private landscaped open spaces in and around the dwelling units, can improve the living conditions in a low-rise, high-density housing design. It is primarily concerned with the relationship which people in the high-density settings have with their outdoor environment and explores the possibilities of design and management of the nearby natural area in ways that are beneficial for people and appreciated by them. The study uses the literature on restorative benefits of nature and housing to develop criteria for the design and management of housings at high densities and illustrates the significance and implementation of the design criteria through comparative analysis of the existing and the proposed housing design.

Ideas of typology are pursued, expanding on popular preconceptions of automobile culture and strip architecture. The elements of type are investigated through an analysis of their physical, social, and economic relationships. An argument of complicity is developed as an alternative to the traditional "eurourbanism" common to many municipal design guidelines. This position seeks to work within the context of the existing city, taking pleasure in its margins, gaps, and adjacencies. Considering the particular physical, cultural and economic conditions of the City of Richmond, this project is framed as the identification of an emerging spatial conception and program/use. The physical space of the city is seen to be shaped most directly by the inclusion of the automobile. The cultural influences of immigration are read on the surfaces of the city and through building programme. Economic realities shape the space of the city as a commodity to be constructed, marketed, and consumed. Through the analysis of the site and contextual conditions, strategies of spatial investigation emerged: the folding of the plane of the city (street) into the space of the building, the horizontal framing of the space of the city (serving as reference and dis-locator to both the automobile and the body as these move through the spaces of the project), and the assemblage of existing types to produce hybrid/mutant types.

My project investigated the spatial concepts of Japanese architecture to see if they offer a particular insight into the design of the emerging model of live/work. The search embodied in my directed study and the subsequent design, therefore, was testing this hypothesis. Among many other concepts, Japanese spatial sensibilities include harmony in crowded environs, expansion of experiential space over limited physical distances, and tripartite physical thought. I felt that in the context of evolving models of dwelling and a desired urban densification, we could learn from nations that have already dealt with similar situations. The design addresses the complexity of the social fabric of the Downtown Eastside by taking a Japanese approach to the nature of public and private space. Like an upward spiral of Kyoto storefront houses, the units cluster around a "vertical street," meant to be an extension of Dunlevy Street. During normal business hours, the public may enter the plaza level, participate in the "vertical street" and interact with the people living and working in the units. The transition between the public and private realms is thereby multi-layered. The visitor passes through an indoor/outdoor atrium space, along the "vertical street" and into the units through forecourts and implied work zones fronting the "vertical street." This "onion-like" approach to a layering of public to private space is echoed in the outer skins of the building with a double facade concept. As the atrium space creates an inside/outside ("Ma") zone for the complex itself, the double facade creates an inside/outside zone for the units themselves. This "Ma" zone can function as an extension of the inside or as a room unto itself. The sequential layering of units as discrete "gates" along the "vertical street" is another Japanese spatial idea. The passage along this "street" becomes a series of events culminating at the rooftop gallery and sculpture garden, where the experience of the multi-layered north view is realized. The events along this route and the destination provide the impetus for movement along the route itself. The completed design integrates key Japanese spatial concepts into a western context and location, resulting in a unique model for the design of live/work: one that creates community with personal privacy, yet allows commercial interaction by actively engaging the public.

This Thesis Project began as an exploration of the architectural, philosophical and psychological nature of dwelling. From this exploration I have made an argument about the nature of dwelling based on several premises. First, that dwelling is determined by the boundaries between public and private space. Second, these boundaries of dwelling may only be adjusted or determined by a political operation- the mediation between private desire and public consensus. Third, the successful mediation of these boundaries depends on two basic conditions: equality and communication, principally speech. To test this thesis I looked for a dwelling typology where everyone was equal and where there was a minimum condition of private space. These conditions create the largest potential for dwelling in the terms of my argument. I chose the Travellers' Hotel, a changing typology that brings together people from around the world who share all the space of the building including the kitchen, and the two most private spaces of a dwelling; the bedroom and the bathroom. I chose a site in downtown Vancouver, the corner of Davie and Granville Streets, that is the intersection of major transportation and pedestrian axes of the city and major demographic, economic, and physical changes in the fabric of the city.