If cities are like human bodies, as Paul Merrick says, then West Vancouver is the city’s long left arm thrown out into Burrard Inlet. Marine Drive, the road that hugs much of West Van’s coast, is the ticklish inner arm, and I’m driving it into the city’s heart. The Lions Gate Bridge, recently widened, is like a glittering stent in a subclavian vein — the Stanley Park Causeway — that pumps in traffic, and I am stuck in that traffic. By the time I pick Merrick up at the Harbour Air seaplane terminal, deep in the garage guts of the brand new Vancouver Convention Centre, it has taken me longer to drive the sixteen kilometres from the North Shore into downtown than it took Merrick to fly here across the Strait of Georgia from Vancouver Island — a fact that greatly amuses him. “They’ve been talking about a bridge to the Island for as long as I can remember,” he says with a chuckle, as he climbs into my car. “But there are lots of people who don’t want the Island connected to the mainland. I’m one of ‘em.”
Merrick himself used to live off Marine Drive in Eagle Harbour, on the way to Horseshoe Bay, in a soaring post-and- beam house he built for his family in the ’70s; it is now pending designation as an architectural heritage site, and has been on and off the market recently. He currently lives in Sooke, on the south- western tip of Vancouver Island, forty kilometres from Victoria, on a plot of land where he and his wife keep two sheep and three dogs, and where he is building the small fixtures for a custom sailboat, his third, in a wood shop next to the driveway.
Since the ’60s, when he arrived on the scene on the heels of the West Coast’s fetish architect, Arthur Erickson, he has actively shaped the skyline with projects like Cathedral Place, built where the Georgia Medical-Dental Building, Vancouver’s first significant art deco high-rise, was demolished in 1989. Other notable examples of his work include the Milano, a mixed-use complex on a busy corner near Davie and Burrard of which he’s particularly proud; and the Governor General’s Award-winning CBC building he designed in the ’70s, which is being updated in time for the Olympics.
Merrick Architecture also specializes in heritage renovations to important historical landmarks, such as the Bank of Montreal building (now Simon Fraser University’s Segal Graduate School of Business) and, more recently, the Pennsylvania Hotel, refurbished into a supportive housing facility for at-risk and homeless citizens. The firm is also one of several building Millennium Water, the 1,100-unit condo development sales materials call “Vancouver’s Last Waterfront Community,” which will house athletes during the Olympics and Paralympics next spring.
With the city sprucing itself up for the Olympics, I’ve asked Merrick to join me on an architectural tour. And as we leave the seaplane terminal, he asks me to pull over almost immediately on Burrard Street, on what used to be the escarpment into the harbour, in front of the spectacular art deco Marine Building, which Merrick Architecture renovated in the ’80s. He glances over his shoulder at the massive shoal of the new Vancouver Convention Centre jutting out into the harbour, a structure he calls “a very sizable lost opportunity.”
“They built out over the water, which I have no problem with. You put piles down into the water, and you can put thirty storeys on top of that if you want,” he says. “Instead, they put this big, ugly plug between the city and the water, and rendered its edges uninhabitable and unusable. Convention centres are great, they cause activity, but it’s very introverted activity. Why put it in front of the best view in town? They could have built the whole thing underground and doubled, or tripled, the waterfront, where people could go for light and air and pleasure.”
We head east on Cordova Street, past the Woodward’s Building condos, with their handsome, forest-motif iron balconies. “An interesting idea,” he says, “though I’m not sure of its application — you’re on the twenty- seventh floor, and you’re looking out your window at that spectacular view through a silhouette image of nature?”
We drive into Vancouver’s oldest neighbourhood, and he likens the city to a teenager whose body is maturing after a long adolescence that has lasted from Expo 86 to next February’s coming-out party. As we turn up Carrall and shuttle along Hastings to Main, he says, “It’s really not that hard to imagine this as a conifer forest, with a few native settlements huddled at the water’s edge. Sometimes, I think about how [this is] a state only twice as old as I am now. When I was born here, the city was only halfway through its present life, and it has, like a lot of things, been growing exponentially. It’s this beautiful place [whose beauty] went very much unrecognized until halfway through its recent history. In inhabiting it, we’ve done more to malign the beautiful place than to enhance it. That is changing, but that’s where we’re coming from.”
Merrick’s family has a long history in coastal British Columbia. His great-great-uncle, Will Roberts, homesteaded Roberts Creek on the Sunshine Coast in 1889. His grandfather, Frank Roberts, was an engineer on the ferry boats that used to run from West Vancouver, around Stanley Park’s Prospect Point to the Vancouver harbour, before they built the Lions Gate Bridge over First Narrows. Merrick grew up near West Van’s Ambleside strip and has vivid memories of riding in the engine room as a child. He also remembers riding the ferries with his father when he accompanied him to the downtown workshop where he taught industrial arts at King George Secondary School.
After graduating from high school in 1956, Merrick got a job as an EA1 (engineering assistant) in the city of Vancouver’s traffic administration department, where he drafted road systems and won a cross-country competition to design pictographs for universal traffic signage (he designed the school zone and pedestrian crossing signs we still use today). At UBC, he chose architecture over engineering and, after earning a degree, travelled to Berkeley, California, to see the work of architects Bernard Maybeck, Warren Callister, and Charles and Henry Greene. When he returned to Canada, it was to work with Ron Thom on Montreal’s Expo 67 and the design of Trent University in Peterborough.
