Unbuilt Victoria

The city of Victoria, British Columbia, is a time capsule of Victorian and Edwardian buildings. This book examines some of the architectural plans that were proposed but rejected and lets the reader decide which projects should have been built.

Unbuilt Victoria celebrates the city that is, and laments the city that could have been. For most people, resident and visitor alike, Victoria, British Columbia, is a time capsule of Victorian and Edwardian buildings. From a modest fur-trading post of the Hudson’s Bay Company it grew to be the province’s major trading centre. Then the selection of Vancouver as the terminus of the transcontinental railway in the 1880s, followed by a smallpox epidemic that closed the port in the 1890s, resulted in decline. Victoria succeeded in reinventing itself as a tourist destination, based on the concept of nostalgia for all things English, stunning scenery, and investment opportunities. In the modernizing boom after the Second World War attempts were made to move the city’s built environment into the mainstream, but the prospect of Victoria’s becoming like any other North American city did not win public approval. Unbuilt Victoria examines some of the architectural plans that were proposed but rejected. That some of them were ever dreamed of will probably amaze, that others never made it might well be a matter of regret.

Unbuilt Calgary is a survey of projects proposed but not built that were situated at critical times in Calgary's development; projects that indicate the city's ambitions through its first 100 years. It looks back to ideas and schemes that could have changed the shape of this vibrant city.

In early December 2006, a powerful windstorm ripped through Vancouver's Stanley Park. The storm transformed the city's most treasured landmark into a tangle of splintered trees and shattered a decades-old vision of the park as timeless virgin wilderness. In Inventing Stanley Park, Sean Kheraj traces how the tension between popular expectations of idealized nature and the volatility of complex ecosystems helped transform the landscape of one of the world's most famous urban parks. This beautifully illustrated book not only depicts the natural and cultural forces that shaped the park's landscape, it also examines the roots of our complex relationship with nature.

This chronicle of ten controversial mid-Victorian trials features brother versus brother, aristocrats fighting commoners, an imposter to a family's fortune, and an ex-priest suing his ex-wife, a nun. Most of these trials--never before analyzed in depth--assailed a culture that frowned upon public displays of bad taste, revealing fault lines in what is traditionally seen as a moral and regimented society. The author examines religious scandals, embarrassments about shaky family trees, and even arguments about which architecture is most likely to convert people from one faith to another.

With Decoration, the long-running architecture journal 306090 enters a new era as it evolves into full-color book format. In this milestone volumemixing contemporary building projects with commentary and criticism from across the ideological spectrum, as well as interviews, studio profiles, and student work306090 takes on one of the very last taboos of contemporary architecture: decoration. Daring to discuss a phenomenon that surrounds us, but has been quietly ignored or dismissed by theorists and critics in the better part of the twentieth century, Decoration addresses emerging trends in design, planning, landscape, and education. Contributors to this landmark installment include Jesse Reiser, Kent Bloomer, Kengo Kuma, Nina Rappaport, and Meredith Warner.

The work of the pioneering figure in British high-tech architecture.