Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
entrance hall and a spiral staircase. There would be four to six bedrooms and
bathrooms, often a separate wok kitchen and an entertainment room.
Builders quickly learned the importance of incorporating traditional
feng
shui
elements in the alignment of doors, access to light through large win-
dows unimpeded by plantings and other details of interior design. In parts
of Oakridge almost entire blocks have been rebuilt and on east-west streets
many houses now have an address ending with a lucky eight, the old number
having been changed if necessary by the builder to include this cultural
desideratum.
20
New houses overshadow existing smaller dwellings, often
reducing privacy and sunlight. On a visit to a lawyer's home, I was shown
their abandoned vegetable garden, no longer viable after the construction of
a much larger house next door had removed sunlight from their vegetable
plot for much of the day. Around such disruptions to everyday 'neighbourli-
ness', resentments may form.
While celebrating
feng shui
and the nuclear, sometimes the extended
family, a landscape of modernity not tradition is evoked by these houses.
Modernity's fascination with the new is celebrated as simultaneously pro-
gressive and good real estate practice. It became clear during the conflicts
that ensued that older housing forms held no attraction. In 1992 letters to
Council, two Chinese-Canadian homeowners in South Shaughnessy asserted
their commitment to new, not old, urban forms.
21
'We must grow out of the
toys and clothing of our youth. We must allow some things to die before we
can have a new life… We are undergoing change and change itself will pro-
vide the new forms and new concepts of beauty in the future'. Less obliquely,
a second homeowner wrote condemning 'antique' ideas, for 'Vancouver is a
modern, progressive city. The world is changing all the time, so will this city'.
New forms were progressive, modern, and a sound investment; values
learned in Hong Kong and Taiwan were transferred to Canada.
Meanwhile, secure in its achievement of establishing First Shaughnessy
as a character district in the preservation-oriented Plan approved by Council
in 1982, the Shaughnessy Heights Property Owners Association (SHPOA)
attempted to replicate their success in Second and Third, or South,
Shaughnessy, a slightly newer district of mainly upper middle-class homes,
including some mansions, that stretched 16 blocks south and up to 12
blocks east-west (Figure 6.3).
22
Following its practice in First Shaughnessy,
SHPOA first commissioned a design study from a consultant. When the
report was presented in 1985, it made the first reference to new 'oversize'
houses that were not compatible with the existing landscape. The report
spoke critically of the 'squandering' of heritage and the 'unravelling' of the
design harmony in the district occasioned by these large properties (French
1985). By 1987 a steady stream of letters was reaching Council about the
new large houses, 90 percent of them critical of their incompatibility with
an established landscape. The letters came from different parts of the city
