The other Vancouver Special
Housing: Architect Joe Wai created a new style of Strathcona living during a time of turmoil
If you have lived in Metro Vancouver for any time at all, and if you have even a passing interest in the housing market or a rudimentary affection for urban architecture, you will have heard of the Vancouver Special.
This is a housing style that some say is utterly unique to our metropolis, an architectural form known for its wide, boxy countenance, its shallow wrought- iron upper balconies, its two- storey, no- basement flexibility and its intent — in its heyday of the 1960s and 1970s — to provide ample, affordable, easy- to- build square footage for young families and new waves of immigrants.
If you know the Vancouver Special, and there are hundreds still providing roofs over heads around the region, you will know, too, that for many years it was the black sheep of our housing stock, a mass market abode that was mocked and maligned for its simplicity, lowpitched roofs, unchanging floor plans, brick and stucco exteriors and utter lack of character, not to mention a footprint that favoured indoor living space over outdoor green space on the average building lot.
The Vancouver Special, though, has undergone something of a renaissance of late, as another generation of young families and working couples looks for affordable housing, and as clever architects and mid- century modernists reimagine new ways to repurpose and tart up the Special’s clean lines and airy openness.
Today, possession of a vintage Vancouver Special is becoming a source of pride, especially if it’s one that has been renovated to modern standards, with sleek cedar siding, extra powder rooms and expanded outdoor decks. Stories abound about its growing popularity, and the awards that rehabbed Specials have won.
The Vancouver Special today, you could say, is the house of which hipsters dream.
But what you might not have known is that there is another kind of Vancouver Special, a narrow, more architecturally interesting version that is found only in Strathcona.
In fact, there are only 51 existing Strathcona Specials, which its acolytes fondly refer to as Joe Wai Specials.
They were all built in Vancouver’s east side neighbourhood in the mid- 1970s during a time of some social and political turmoil, when government officials were expropriating property with the intent to slap a freeway right through the middle of Strathcona.
Back then, Vancouver architect Joe Wai had been working locally ( for the late Arthur Erickson, among others) and abroad, having graduated from the UBC architecture program in 1964. He worked in the U. S., Mexico and in London, and it was in the latter city that he came to understand the value of social housing, and the logic of the compact townhouse as a means to improve density while maintaining a sense of singlefamily autonomy.
He returned to Vancouver in 1969 and got involved in a West End senior’s organization, as well as becoming a volunteer with the Strathcona rehabilitation program, underway after the cancellation of the freeway initiative.
“The plan,” says Wai, “was to not raze the community but to start helping to repair it.” That meant everything from road and street lamps to neighbourhood upkeep and government grants for home repairs.
The Vancouver Special, though, has undergone something of a renaissance of late, as another generation of young families and working couples looks for affordable housing.
It also meant “infill” housing needed to be built on the expropriated property, much of it sitting as empty lots or lots with derelict structures.
So, in the mid- 1970s, Wai took on the task of designing something new for Vancouver’s oldest residential neighbourhood, something bespoke for the small and eclectic but increasingly tight- knit and proud community.
The Joe Wai Special, he says, “was partly influenced by my time with the London city council, and by how many ways you can put houses together, how you can have more density and still have a livable environment.”
The first build was a co- op, with seven connected Strathcona Specials on five lots on Union Street. It was followed by three units on two lots, four units on three lots, numerous duplexes and 15 single- family houses, all in the same Joe Wai style with living and dining on the main floor, three bedrooms ( the spacious masters feature a bay window) and one bath up, along with an unfinished basement. They had stucco on the front, but cedar planks on the sides and they were narrow and long, some only 16 feet across and 35 feet in length.
Wai credits the neighbourhood for his inspiration, for the Asian- style pagoda pitched roofs, for the ground- level flexibility catering to a sometimes knolly terrain.
“It had to be flexible, for modest income and low- income families,” says Wai. “And it had to be economic to build.”
Which made it similar in theory to the other Vancouver Special of the time, which Wai isn’t particularly fond of because “I thought it looked like a shoebox.”
Christine Dalton and Patrick Byrne moved to Strathcona from Commercial Drive 10 years ago, when Christine was pregnant with son Tristan. For years, the couple has been waiting for a house to come up for sale on the street facing north on to MacLean Park and a row of magnificent oak trees.
“We had been looking for a house on this block since we moved to Strathcona,” says Byrne, who is a speech pathologist.
So when they saw a For Sale sign in just the right spot, in 2008, they snapped up the house. It was a Joe Wai Special, which they knew about. Dalton, in particular, wasn’t especially thrilled with it, given that it had a wall dividing the living and dining rooms and given that it was only about 500 square feet on each of the two livable floors.
But the couple began renovating, and when they moved into the 25- foot- wide house in 2010, there was a new modern kitchen, a roomy back deck with French doors, shiny oak flooring, and an open main floor with light streaming in from all the new big windows. The couple also finished the basement, putting in a recreation area with an onyx- faced fireplace, as well as a laundry room and bathroom. The yard is enclosed with a modern cedar and corrugated metal fence.
Dalton, a teacher, says they aren’t finished yet: “We want to change out the windows and floor upstairs, but we’re not going to change anything structurally.”
The couple came from Portland in the 1990s and never left. As for the city’s peculiar housing:
“Vancouver Specials?” says Dalton, “we had never seen anything like it.”
Today, the man who invented the Strathcona Special is 73 and is still practising architecture in Vancouver. He counts the design of the Dr. Sun Yat- sen Gardens among his many accomplishments and, while he lives on the city’s west side, he maintains strong ties to Strathcona . Is he proud of his Specials? “They’re not what you’d call earth- shattering architecture, to say the least, but they fill the need. And I’m happy about that.”