Ghost Building In the frenzy of building activity a number of scaffolds wrap previously completed structures. Scaffolds come in various guises but typically are cloaked with an emerald green perforated fabric — a unique and detailed veiling. However, there are variations: several skids of brick in the lane behind one building signal cladding replacement. To maintain a consistent mortar tempera- ture, the scaffolding has been wrapped in an opaque, silky white sheathing to hold tempered air between drape and façade. A phantasmic presence, this wrapped building marks a strik- ing difference to the stock of condo towers dotting the down- town core. It may look like just another leaky condo but it is also a spectacular and captivating phenomenon, a changeling in this ephemeral condition. Mute Rendering Formally, the Ghost Building presents itself like all the others, twenty to thirty-something storeys extruded vertically and placed the bylaw eighty feet from its neighbours. In its simple slip, it has masked itself from the city and bowed out of the point-tower posturing race. However, this new typology has inadvertantly transformed the everyday into event. Ghost Building grabs attention with an undeliberate ingenuity that other condos would like, but can’t. The draw of its pillowy skin is immediate. It undulates. It shakes and shivers. It billows and shimmers. At night it is a glowing collage with subtle punc- tuations of colour from the still-occupied units inside. Posi- tioned in a field of static sameness, this wrapped building makes no overt claims for attention, but its silence commands attention anyway. Muffled and mute, the building is inconclusive. Ghost Building’s detached, new intensity contests the city’s zealous ef- forts to provide the perfect mould for city living. The decorative nips, tucks, swirls and swooshes of the neighbours look insuf- ficient and superfluous against its tremulous mass. Androgenous, silkily clad and not its muscular brick self, the Ghost Building also obscures all those involved in the its origi- nal presence: the planners, the advisory design panels, the city’s council, local community groups, the architects, the engineers, the endless assortment of building consultants, the marketing team and ultimately even the building’s own inhabitants, who register only when their lights are on at night. Something of Difference I don’t wish to present Ghost Building as ‘good architecture’ or as an urban success story. Its premise is based in failures that are a menace to its inhabitants; it is ethereal but an aberration. But by effectively shutting itself off, it questions both the exter-
nal and internal uniformity of high-rise residential living throughout the peninsula. While condo marketing and architecture collude to sell the ideal interior condi- tion, Ghost Building has propelled this condition to its absurd apotheosis. Ghost Building’s fabric has imprisoned the inhabitants in an interiority that has everything they paid for, except that all important view. In a further irony, the fabric delights only those looking at it from the outside, turning the whole notion of privileged life- style on its head, and pointing out how transitory a thing lifestyle is. Beyond Lifestyle Processes of construction, decay and repair flag the shortcomings of unrelenting urbanistic production: Ghost Building’s interruptive architecture dislays all the urban and formal contradictions of Vancouver’s insistent residential tower type. D
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