Mahogany panels were salvaged from Vancouver’s first art deco skyscraper.
Author of the article:
The Cardero is one of Vancouver’s most striking new towers. Zig-zags of “origami-like screens” float up and down the 26-storey building, turning it into what architects the Henriquez Partners proclaim is “a modern obelisk” for downtown.
But one of its most unique features can’t be seen from outside: the art deco boardroom on the fourth floor. The drop-dead-gorgeous mahogany panels were salvaged by Drew Ratcliffe’s family during the demolition of the Georgia Medical Dental Building in 1989.
Ratcliffe’s late grandfather, Arne Mathisen, had once owned the building, and when he sold it in 1971 he asked the new owner, Ron Shon, if he could have the boardroom if they ever tore it down.
“They had a handshake deal,” said Ratcliffe. “So sure enough that handshake deal came to fruition in ’89 when the phone rings. ‘Hey, the building’s coming down, come and get the board room.’
“Of course the panels didn’t fit in the elevator, so there was a whole lot of hand (moving). The joys of a family business. We walked it down the stairs. What else do you do on a weekend?”
The boardroom was in the penthouse of the 17-storey building, so that’s a lot of stairs. It went into a garage for a few years before being installed in a building the family owned at the corner of West Georgia and Cardero streets.
Ratcliffe’s family’s company, Arpeg, recently redeveloped the site at 1575 West Georgia St. in concert with Bosa, and the boardroom went into storage again. But it’s been brought back to the new highrise on the site, The Cardero. The mixed-use building has offices, a gym and commercial space on the bottom five floors and condos on the top 21.
Arpeg has an office on the fourth floor, which it developed as part of a new office concept called And-Co, where companies lease space and can use amenities like a wellness centre, a restaurant and the art deco boardroom.
“People would come into our office, see this and then ask, ‘Can we borrow the boardroom for a meeting?’ ” said Ratcliffe. “That really got us started here at And-Co: ‘Well, maybe there is something to this amenity idea.’ Not everybody has this — in fact nobody has this. But people want this. So to come in here for a meeting once a week or once a quarter (is a big selling feature).”
It helped that the mahogany panels had undergone a full-on restoration by Ryan Bahris of Extraordinary League Contracting .
“It was a lot of work, a painstaking amount of work,” said Bahris. “I went through every single wire brush in town.”
The restoration took several months. Originally Bahris and a co-worker hoped to get the panels back to their original glory by a “gentle cleansing by hand” with sodium phosphate. But the more they cleaned the more they realized they had to go further.
“We realized that a finish had been put on in the ‘80s, an orangish disgusting lacquer that wasn’t original,” he said. “It came off, and it revealed the depth and beauty of the real reddish-orangish hues of the Honduran mahogany below. These are big panels, but we thought, ‘We have to redo them all.’ ”
“It’s a meticulous, meticulous restoration,” said heritage consultant Don Luxton, who worked on the project. “This is what I call museum-quality work.”
Indeed, Bahris is such a perfectionist that he sourced period hardware for the room.
“There’s no reproduction hardware in that room, it’s all authentic,” said Bahris. “I took out all the original white brass, which is an inferior brass, and I put actual brass in the room, because the room deserved that.”
It really brings out the beauty of the room, which was constructed in 1932 for Richard P. Baker of Vancouver Properties, which originally owned the building. Luxton said the design is “typical of art deco of the time period.”
“There’s a lot of art deco symbolism packed in there,” he said. “You would see things like sun rays, ziggurats, chevrons. These are the typical art deco motifs that have been worked in. You can read a lot into this stuff. You can read in oil derricks, you can read in stuff that was the technology of the time.
“Art deco was all about technology, speed, but it was all abstracted ornamentation. So often it wouldn’t be completely representational, it would be abstract geometry.”
Ratcliffe went all-out installing the boardroom in its new space. It’s located in the interior of the office, but includes the original windows.
So they added a special touch, going up to the 17th floor of Cathedral Place on the old Georgia Medical Dental Building site and making a video of the view, to simulate what it would look like if the art deco building were still standing.
“When we’re really ready to launch, the original view will be on these screens (behind the windows),” said Ratcliffe.
Asked how much it all cost, Ratcliffe laughs.
“I don’t even want to know. We haven’t finished it. Whatever that number is, the effect of the board room … we’ve had tours, people come in, and everyone comes back to here.”
That said, the designers of the offices initially didn’t think it would work in such a high-tech, ultra modern space as the And-Co offices.
“It’s one of the very few times I’ve had to put my foot down,’” said Ratcliffe. “ ‘Look I know you guys are experts in your field, but we’re going to do this. If we’re wrong, we’re wrong.’ Now the hardest thing we have on-site is keeping people out of here.”
The Georgia Medical Dental Building was designed by architects John McCarter and George Nairne, who designed the Marine Building a year later. The dental building was built for doctors and dentists, and was equipped with its own operating theatre. It opened on Sept. 7, 1929, a month before the stock market crash that triggered the Great Depression.
Nairne’s grandson, Colin, said George Nairne used to complain that the doctors and dentists were quite cheap, which makes Ratcliffe chuckle. His grandfather was a cardiologist who formed a syndicate to buy the dental building in 1954. In 1966, he bought out the syndicate.
“My grandfather was … frugal,” he said. “So he buys this building, and the lobby had too much open space, and not enough rental square feet. The first thing he did was he got rid of the hand-operated elevator, because labour was too expensive. Then he goes to work on the main floor retail. At the time (the first floor) was all travertine (stone). So he strips that all out to do retail.
“The next thing you know, all the family has coffee tables made out of that. To this day, I still have one of them. My kids are, ‘Dad, what is this crazy thing?’ ”
[unable to retrieve full-text content]
Unique art collection on display CTV News Vancouver
Source link
Since joining a community that dreams of an internet free from giant corporations that can exploit users’ time and data, Victoria West’s digital artwork has been exhibited across the globe.
West, a photographer and digital artist based in Burton, 30 kilometres southeast of Fredericton, has had her work shown in Paris, Rome, Barcelona, Townsville in northeastern Australia, Miami, New York City, and even a museum in Albuquerque, N.M., — all through connections she’s made in Web3.
West warned it was a “rabbit hole,” but what she found in wonderland she doesn’t believe she’d find anywhere else.
Web3 is a future version of the internet.
The work of Victoria West, a photographer and digital artist based in Burton, was recently showcased at an immersive exhibit in the Big Apple.
Web1, West said, was the first version of the internet, in which users passively consumed information.
As the 2000s dawned, Web2 emerged, and users could now post their own content — think Twitter, blogs, YouTube. People are now creating more and more in digital spaces, but the downside of Web2 is that corporations are technically still the owners of all that creation, and they could take your data and potentially do with it as they please.
Enter Web3, which still exists more in theory: nobody and everybody owns the internet. This version aims to be decentralized. It doesn’t eradicate the distrust some people have in mega companies like Google and Meta — it just removes the need for it, because no one person or organization can own the blockchain Web3 operates on.
West said within Web3 there’s an art movement, with artists working together and taking control of their work. Imagine if Leonardo da Vinci had an internet connection, as well as Raphael, Michelangelo and Donatello. It’s the renaissance all over again, West said, except it’s happening with digital art.
“And it’s happening online on a much bigger scale.”
Before learning about W3 in 2021, West said she was in a photography bubble.
Photography isn’t the art form West imagined herself pursuing when she was younger. But when she bought a camera after the first commercial digital models arrived on the market in the mid-2000s, she was hooked.
“I was bothering everybody around me to take their portrait,” she said.
She built up her portraiture business, becoming involved with the Professional Photographers of Canada and competing in photography contests. Still, West didn’t want to just capture moments — she wanted to make them.
That’s when artificial intelligence came on the scene.
West was using Midjourney, a generative AI program, when it was still in beta testing. Around the same time she became involved with Web3, she experimented with blending AI-produced textures into her photography. In her business, AI quickened her workflow and allowed her to change backdrops and furniture.
While creating a piece in 2023 called When I Die, West wanted to design a man underground with roots blossoming into a tree. Well, there aren’t any blossoming trees in Canada in February, West joked — so she made the tree using AI.
“I feel like someone took handcuffs off me, and I’m free,” she said.
Lauren Cruikshank, an associate professor in culture and media studies at the University of New Brunswick, has spoken about the use of AI in universities, but she also thinks about it through an artistic lens.
From the camera to spell check, Cruikshank said the same discussion happens with each new medium: how much of the artistry belongs to the artist, how much to the tools they’re using?
“For some people where it gets uncomfortable is where the role of the human is minimal compared to how much the AI tool is creating or having creative influence,” she said.
With AI, Cruikshank agreed there are degrees — there’s a difference between prompting an AI to generate an image of a beautiful sunset and claiming it as your artwork and what West is doing, combining AI with her own artistry.
“That sounds really compelling to me,” Cruikshank said.
When West first saw Lume Studios on Broadway in lower Manhattan, the place she’d eventually display Eden’s Dye, her immersive art exhibit, she knew she wanted it immediately.
She collaborated on the exhibit with some of her Web3 friends. Los Angeles actors and poets Laurence Fuller and Vincent D’Onofrio wrote poetry to accompany each piece of art, which West created using both photography and AI. A coder friend joined the crew, and the result was a floor-to-ceiling immersive exhibit. West’s collaborators also choreographed performances to complement the art, using music produced by AI.
“Why wouldn’t I do that if I can?” West asked. “It’s freeing, I think, and lets you push the boundaries of photography and what you can do with it.”
While the exhibit leaned heavily on romantic, classical themes and Baroque aesthetics, Eden’s Dye is almost a premonition: minted, digital artwork taking up entire walls in people’s homes, flowers growing from code, experiencing art in virtual realms.
Demand will only grow, West said. Technology will progress and the internet will change. But what she really wanted was for people to walk into Eden’s Dye and be amazed by the art they were experiencing.
“They came because of the art, and they were there enjoying the art. You don’t really need to understand anything beyond that.”
/* OOVVUU Targeting */
const path = ‘/things-to-do’;
const siteName = ‘wellandtribune.ca’;
let domain = ‘thestar.com’;
if (siteName === ‘thestar.com’)
domain = ‘thestar.com’;
else if (siteName === ‘niagarafallsreview.ca’)
domain = ‘niagara_falls_review’;
else if (siteName === ‘stcatharinesstandard.ca’)
domain = ‘st_catharines_standard’;
else if (siteName === ‘thepeterboroughexaminer.com’)
domain = ‘the_peterborough_examiner’;
else if (siteName === ‘therecord.com’)
domain = ‘the_record’;
else if (siteName === ‘thespec.com’)
domain = ‘the_spec’;
else if (siteName === ‘wellandtribune.ca’)
domain = ‘welland_tribune’;
else if (siteName === ‘bramptonguardian.com’)
domain = ‘brampton_guardian’;
else if (siteName === ‘caledonenterprise.com’)
domain = ‘caledon_enterprise’;
else if (siteName === ‘cambridgetimes.ca’)
domain = ‘cambridge_times’;
else if (siteName === ‘durhamregion.com’)
domain = ‘durham_region’;
else if (siteName === ‘guelphmercury.com’)
domain = ‘guelph_mercury’;
else if (siteName === ‘insidehalton.com’)
domain = ‘inside_halton’;
else if (siteName === ‘insideottawavalley.com’)
domain = ‘inside_ottawa_valley’;
else if (siteName === ‘mississauga.com’)
domain = ‘mississauga’;
else if (siteName === ‘muskokaregion.com’)
domain = ‘muskoka_region’;
else if (siteName === ‘newhamburgindependent.ca’)
domain = ‘new_hamburg_independent’;
else if (siteName === ‘niagarathisweek.com’)
domain = ‘niagara_this_week’;
else if (siteName === ‘northbaynipissing.com’)
domain = ‘north_bay_nipissing’;
else if (siteName === ‘northumberlandnews.com’)
domain = ‘northumberland_news’;
else if (siteName === ‘orangeville.com’)
domain = ‘orangeville’;
else if (siteName === ‘ourwindsor.ca’)
domain = ‘our_windsor’;
else if (siteName === ‘parrysound.com’)
domain = ‘parrysound’;
else if (siteName === ‘simcoe.com’)
domain = ‘simcoe’;
else if (siteName === ‘theifp.ca’)
domain = ‘the_ifp’;
else if (siteName === ‘waterloochronicle.ca’)
domain = ‘waterloo_chronicle’;
else if (siteName === ‘yorkregion.com’)
domain = ‘york_region’;
let sectionTag = ”;
try
if (domain === ‘thestar.com’ && path.indexOf(‘wires/’) = 0)
sectionTag = ‘/business’;
else if (path.indexOf(‘/autos’) >= 0)
sectionTag = ‘/autos’;
else if (path.indexOf(‘/entertainment’) >= 0)
sectionTag = ‘/entertainment’;
else if (path.indexOf(‘/life’) >= 0)
sectionTag = ‘/life’;
else if (path.indexOf(‘/news’) >= 0)
sectionTag = ‘/news’;
else if (path.indexOf(‘/politics’) >= 0)
sectionTag = ‘/politics’;
else if (path.indexOf(‘/sports’) >= 0)
sectionTag = ‘/sports’;
else if (path.indexOf(‘/opinion’) >= 0)
sectionTag = ‘/opinion’;
} catch (ex)
const descriptionUrl = ‘window.location.href’;
const vid = ‘mediainfo.reference_id’;
const cmsId = ‘2665777’;
let url = `https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/ads?iu=/58580620/$domain/video/oovvuu$sectionTag&description_url=$descriptionUrl&vid=$vid&cmsid=$cmsId&tfcd=0&npa=0&sz=640×480&ad_rule=0&gdfp_req=1&output=vast&unviewed_position_start=1&env=vp&impl=s&correlator=`;
url = url.split(‘ ‘).join(”);
window.oovvuuReplacementAdServerURL = url;
These aren’t your grandma’s quilts.
Being a grandmother herself, Lorna Costantini said she’s not a huge fan of the above phrase, but she can’t help but use it to describe modern quilting.
DJT Stock Rises. Trump Media CEO Alleges Potential Market Manipulation. – Barron's
Trump Media alerts Nasdaq to potential market manipulation from 'naked' short selling of DJT stock – CNBC
Private equity gears up for potential National Football League investments – Financial Times
Botched home sale costs Winnipeg man his right to sell real estate in Manitoba – CBC.ca
Canada Child Benefit payment on Friday | CTV News – CTV News Toronto
Gas prices see 'largest single-day jump since early 2022': En-Pro International – Yahoo Canada Finance
Dow Jones Rises But S&P, Nasdaq Fall; Nvidia, SMCI Flash Sell Signals As Bitcoin's Fourth Halving Arrives – Investor's Business Daily
Iran news: Canada, G7 urge de-escalation after Israel strike – CTV News
