Commercial eyesores

I don’t know quite enough about these matters but to my understanding residential properties appear to be held to a much higher standard than commercial properties. The bylaw applying to penalizing owners of residences in disrepair explicitly states that the bylaw does not apply to commercial properties. If there is a commercial version of this law, it is not being enforced.

It seems to me that if anyone should get a break it should be homeowners. After all, while businesses can write off any improvements or maintenance, home owners have to spend after tax dollars.

I have two cases: one an abandonment, the other just plum ugly.

I used to eat at this restaurant. Years ago, this was one of the very few alternatives to the Bulgogi House for Korean food, and I thought it was better. It had a great beebimbob, and oddly enough the best apple pie in town. I was driving a delivery truck at the time and it provided very good food at a good price from good and friendly people.

That was some time ago, and the place has been boarded up for over fifteen years. Soon after closure it looked like it looks above and though it has never gotten much worse it has never gotten better. On either side and on the other side of the street are thriving well kept establishments, and this in what you would think is a viable location for something being on 109 street and in Parkallen.

I take this one a little personally because I ended up living a block from there for about ten years and everytime I walked by, not only was I visually depressed but also I was upset that had things been a little different, I would have been able to wander in on a regular basis, and again have my beebimbob and apple pie.

This second case is a thriving business (or so I’ve been told) but one that looks as though the building was transplanted from some place of destitution. If I was more of a postmodern turn of mind, I would theorize that the owners were being ironic, for is this not a business devoted to helping others attract business through display while they themselves reject the most primary form of display, the structure they operate out of? Are they not denying their own reason for being?

A few more of this hideous creature I drive by every single working day.

Maybe someone out there can enlighten me as to why so many of these abandonments remain unchallenged, and why these businesses have so little respect for the city that supports them. Commercial properties should be held to a much higher standard than homes; they make money because they exist in a certain place, and a small way of saying thanks is to be attractive, to be pleasing to the eye of those who walk or drive by. The first building may have been abandoned unavoidably but the second is an insult to its community.

Your house is a garage

I’ve already commented on the lack of colour and imagination in my neighborhood but among the things that are right in the area where I live are easy access to green spaces, some innovative front yard gardens, more dogs that you can throw a stick at, and very few home designs like that in the picture above.

This can no longer be considered a trend but an imposition, a cancer, a pox on the eyes. But for the sake of fairness let us first consider why this type of design might serve a purpose. After all, home design seems to be a continuing negotiation between the demands of aesthetics and utility.

First of all, there may be no back alley and the garage needs to be in front. Second, putting the garage in the back uses up valuable recreational area.

I think Jane Jacobs, were she still about, would agree with me that this design is not a positive element. When I think of community togetherness I often think of old Frank Capra films, and scenes of New York tenements with people hanging out on the front stoops and spending time with their neighbors. Those stoops are right up on the street. The house fronts are inviting.

Not only have we pushed the houses back from the street but when the garage and driveway dominate, the result is a further retreat from the street, a shunning, a turning the back on the community. I would take that further and say that I feel that the house is mooning the street.

I’ve always felt that if the parts of the house were the parts of the body, the garage would be the colon. Its the ass of the house. Trash seems to move toward the garage, and to carry the analogy where it naturally goes, the cars are, well…you can fill that part in. And if you buy that, then what this design expresses to me is the celebration of the accumulation of waste. Not so much different from bragging about the size and frequency of your bowel movements.

If there were only a few of these houses around it would not be that annoying but they tend to populate entire subdivisions and tend to co-occur with colour restrictions as well, so we have the unvarying onslaught of not only these domestic posteriers but also the slightly off white to beige boredom. The one above is a little more risque with the pale blue but you can see that it exists within a sea of similar houses.

Take another look at the picture, the garage is actually wider than the rest of the house. The whole aspect pushes you away. It really is a garage with a house attached. (I have seen small garages which face the front and are attached to the sides of the house, and they can seem an afterthough, hardly drawing the eye at all, and those can even be pleasing in overall effect).

I will return to this tirade in the future but if there is any justice in this world, the rising eco awareness as well as the rising cost of fuel will undermine the future of this template. We might actually move away from this counterintuitive trend toward larger and larger homes, larger and larger garages, and larger and larger vehicles.

Clock

I like this. Its an unusual adornment and seems to evoke a sense of the official -like a townhall in an old European town. The one drawback I see is that once you put a timepiece on prominent display, you are responsible for making sure it is accurate.

On not seeing red

As I’ve already mentioned I live in the grayest of neighbourhoods. For example..

It seems as though a competition began years ago, to create the least exciting exterior, and if you missed it, no worries, a front runner has yet to emerge. Its much too close too call at this point or perhaps we should say in this race to the bottom, everyone might be a winner. Except for the owners of that house in the centre, the pale yellow one, the one so wild and crazy considering the environs.

It does seem that when I walk around the only deep and strong colours I do see are some of those deep rich browns resembling wood. But primary colours? When you do see yellows, reds, blues and greens, they are most often rather pale or if brighter, a pastel of sorts (and I will collect these and post some later). But nothing like below, which are among the photos my brother took on a recent trip to Playa del Carmen in Mexico.

or this one:

Yes, it is a tropical country, a Latin country but should that matter? Anybody walking by these buildings feels a lifting of the spirit, a spring in the step which takes you right into happy hour where you celebrate these walls with every toast whereas here you are more likely to keep drinking just to blunt the senses for the visually stunting walk home.

Of course, these are generalizations; there is some colour here and there are certainly some boring streetscapes down there but the point is that in general they are miles ahead of us when it comes to understanding that simply by using a bit of paint, life gets a little better.

Even Warsaw makes us look pretty sad in this respect, not that they don’t have those dismal Soviet concrete block flats of ennui as well:

And it is much too depressing to bring Barcelona into the discussion:

Think I’m wrong on this? Send me pictures and I’ll put some up. Let’s advertise the bright spots in this town. As I gather them I will post, as well as those examples of half hearted colour. I still think this general drabness is because people think less about their own living experience, the years they will spend in their house out of tune with their own surroundings, than they do of the hypothetical fickleness of potential owners.

Designing this site

If I had more time, and someday I will, I would just set up a website instead. I am finding the limitations of the wordpress templates not quite suitable for my purposes, but when something is free you cannot complain too loudly. So be forewarned that there will be a certain amount of flailing about until a look is settled on. The one in play right now is a little too sedate but worst of all it restricts the size of photographs on the page. The designs that allow that sort of flexibility are fixed in other respects and for the most part have rather anemic colour schemes.

Breaking ground

Welcome.

The goal of this blog is to visually document structures and related design around Edmonton. And to comment on what we see around this city, this E-town, this Rivercity.

I live in this city, in the Hazeldean community, a particularly gray area of this metropolis. In terms of its structures, Edmonton as a whole is rather colourless. What this blog hopes to do is to celebrate what diversity and originality does exist within this very conservative place, and castigate the rest.

Domestic structures are of the greatest interest to me but I will be writing about public and commercial buildings as well, and possibly general associated design elements like doorways or roads. I will be posting pictures of buildings; if the buildings are private residences I will not post the location. This is a discussion of the structures and does not mean to make any assumptions about the people who live in the houses.

Though one can relatively easily change one’s clothes, most of us are quite limited when it comes to our houses. We have to choose something in a certain budget range, and then we usually have to budget any changes. If you are like me, you express yourself more in your interior than the outside. I like walking down back alleys because I find that backyards and garages vary so much more than the fronts; this is where you see people expressing themselves. My own house is a gray and nondescript abbreviated a-frame and I have decided to spend the little money I have on the inside. And those areas I have designed, in particular the kitchen, are among the few that I would say say anything at all about the kind of person I am. The outside is no more me, than any of the other facades around here are.

So, I will critique a sad exterior but I will not presume that it was planned at all. The exemptions to these are the houses of the rich where there is enough money to make any changes, but here again, the property was purchased and does not necessarily reflect the owners. The greater exemption will be commercial and public structures which are free of the same financial restrictions and should be actively criticized or praised, and do represent their owners more directly.

Its when you travel that your realize how much this city lacks in imagination and daring. Part of the dialogue here will be to compare our structures with those in Mexico or Spain or wherever else I have pictures from. I will explore how we came to this wan place, this utterly impoverished visual landscape. Was it due to the regulations that try to make structures conform to each other in color or size, or the fact that houses have to waste close to a third of their space in a front yard lawn just like the one next door, and just as unused. Or perhaps the most influential factor of all is that too many people approach their house in terms of saleability. Making a house unique and dramatic might inhibit sales (or so we are told). Houses in Edmonton tend to be houses rather than homes. And then, when you are buying a house, you have a choice of a number of equally inexpressive structures.

I have an interest in all these things and though I have read and researched architecture I have no formal training, so there will be lapses of knowledge and a somewhat shallow sense of local history. But like most everyone, I have lived and worked in many different buildings, I walk and drive down streets lined with buildings that are as much of the landscape as the ground and sky, and the architecture I am exposed to everyday affects me. What will also be evident is that I am no professional photographer. Just a cheap digital camera and Picasa to clean things up a little. But with your help, and submissions of buildings you find of interest, and discussions, we might be able to make a go of this. This city has a lot going for it but the streetscapes in general contribute little.

So let’s start with an example of something I like rather than the opposite. Maybe that will be up next. This is a house that I used to walk by every day to work, and though the calm design is evident, the pictures don’t quite express how pleasing this house is when you walk by. It has a bit of colour but I think it is the dimensions and their relationships that work for me. Notice how the rooflines repeat and climb in concert with the windows. And I do have a fondness for modest structures.

Seems to hint at the Orient with those roofs, and the Glasgow school with the windows; an Asian cottage.