Commonsense Architecture

SELCO Community Credit Union’s North Redmond branch, by Robertson/Sherwood/Architects pc (image by Steve Smith Photography)

One of the more visually striking buildings in Vancouver, B.C. is Vancouver House, designed by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG). I previously commented on the project back in 2018 as the tower was first making its mark on the downtown skyline. I am revisiting the subject of its design again, prompted by my recent opportunity to see it in person once more, but also because it serves as a textbook case for why lauding such a jaw-dropping, challenging structure is suspect absent more careful consideration.

Problems have plagued Vancouver House since its completion. Condominium owners complain of poor workmanship, fit, and finishes, inconsistent with the premium quality promised by the developer’s marketing materials. A catastrophic failure of the building’s “water systems” caused a deluge of water to pour out of pipes, onto many floors, rendering both individual units uninhabitable and some of the elevators nonoperational. Is the complex form by BIG to blame? The quick answer is no. Such problems could have arisen in a condominium tower of similar scope and cost featuring a far less adventuresome design. On the other hand, Vancouver House’s geometry exacerbated the water damage issues, and will exponentially inflate the costs of remediation (estimated to be many millions of dollars).
 

Vancouver House (photo by Haatu, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

 
Writing for TreeHugger, former architect and developer and now sustainable writer and design instructor Lloyd Alter cited Vancouver House in his article Why Do We Make Everything So Complicated? We Need Radical Simplicity Right Now. Alter noted the following:
 
. . . In Vancouver, Bjarke has designed a building where every single balcony is the roof of another unit. Every jog and every corner is an opportunity for failure. Every living room there has four surfaces exposed to weather; at least it is temperate Vancouver, but he did the same thing in Calgary. And don’t even get me started on the upfront carbon emissions produced by designing a façade with twice the surface area that you actually need to enclose the building.
 
As Alter goes on to state, he learned as an architect that you should not reinvent the wheel for every project, but rather use tried-and-true, tested methods of building. I came to the same conclusion early in my career. An overabundance of creative imagination is not always a good thing if it flies in the face of commonsense, practical, and time-tested strategies for keeping water out, controlling how daylight comes in, holding the building up, or minimizing our carbon footprint. Complicated geometries may be visually striking but if working out how to realize them proves puzzling during the design process, I interpret that as a sign that we should pursue a simpler, more practical solution.
 
I will use a recently completed project by my firm, Robertson/Sherwood/Architects, as an example. Our design for SELCO Community Credit Union’s new North Redmond branch is simple. An artless brick and stone veneer-clad box married to a heavy-timber gabled entry, its conventional forms, legible geometry, and exaggerated scale belie the building’s small size. We purposefully minimized the number and complexity of junctures between different building envelope systems—wall to roof, roof to window systems, and so on—to limit the probability of water and air infiltration problems. This was not an exercise in design bravado. Instead, we opted to focus on doing simple well.
 
For lack of a better word, there is dignity to be found in the process of properly developing and executing details. I find it satisfying to sense the craft of assembly in our projects upon their completion. We saw no reason to not specify and design with proven products and systems, in the very types of applications their manufacturers intended them for.
 
Our duty was to deliver a design for SELCO that met their brief for a new, attractive outpost on the north side of Redmond, Oregon, and we did that—nothing more, nothing less. The design is consistent with SELCO’s refreshed branding standards (developed by King Retail Solutions and highlighted within the branch) but also celebrates its setting on the edge of Central Oregon’s High Desert.
 

SELCO Community Credit Union’s North Redmond branch, by Robertson/Sherwood/Architects pc (image by Steve Smith Photography)

The definition of common sense is the application of sound and prudent judgment in practical matters based on a simple perception of a given situation or facts. The application of common sense should be a default condition, especially for architects. Only if a client purposely requests otherwise should an architect consider abandoning convention in favor of ambitious (and risky) experimentation and exploration. Even then, the architect should evaluate whether the client’s intentions may be imprudent or misguided, in which case they might advise them to reconsider their choices.
 
Favoring commonsense architecture doesn’t mean I’m averse to expanding the boundaries possible in architectural design. Technology advances continually, and our understanding about issues on a wide range of subjects impacting architecture likewise expands every year. We need architects devoted to research on the building sciences and more. Their work may lead to the rise of new building forms that serve as previously unimagined paradigms to follow; however, these forms should not be capricious, impractical, wasteful, or nonsensical.
 
By the way, there is a book entitled Commonsense Architecture: A Cross-Cultural Survey of Practical Design Principles, written by anthropologist John S. Taylor. Published in 1983, it is out of print, though copies remain available online. As one reviewer writes, the book “describes architecture with an anthropologist’s understanding of human motivations to build. It describes problems humans have had across cultures with their environment, and what they have built to solve these problems.” The book sounds like one I might have to pick up and read!