Building design suits harbour location

Re: “City favours new condos on difficult downtown lot,” June 15. Any project that replaces a surface parking lot with high-quality architecture, especially on a prominent waterfront site, enhances Victoria’s public realm for all of us.

My delight, however, is tempered by my concern that the permit is subject to reconsideration of the lightcoloured metal panelling on the building’s west side, facing the water, at the suggestion of Coun. Pam Madoff.

“I still am of the view,” she says, “that the most successful approach to a building on the waterfront adjacent to Old Town has been the Mermaid Wharf approach in terms of its architectural detailing.”

As an architect, architectural author, critic and journalist, and as a former member of the City of Victoria’s Advisory Design Panel, I beg to differ. Mermaid Wharf is, at best, an undistinguished exercise in generic “contextualism.” To establish it as a standard for new designs is to set the bar rather low.

Certainly, the waterfront edge of the addition to the Janion next door did not take this approach. Instead, its crisp modernist form, rendered in glass and light-coloured metal, clearly distinguishes the discreet scale and character of Store Street from the more robust scale and character of the harbour.

Madoff is to be commended for her stalwart efforts to protect the historic character of Old Town, but the western facade of the Pearl is well beyond Old Town’s borders. Its true context is the harbour, for which D’Ambrosio Architecture + Urbanism’s current design is eminently suitable. Jim Gauer Victoria