Building of the week

One building, and why it matters.

Vancouver · Beach Avenue

Vancouver House: a tower that twists out of a traffic island

At the foot of the Granville Bridge, where the off-ramps leave a triangle of land most cities would pave over, stands the 49-storey Vancouver House. Designed by Bjarke Ingels Group and completed in 2020, it starts as a triangle at its base and twists into a rectangle at the top — a shape dictated entirely by the site: the tower had to clear the bridge ramps, the view corridors and the neighbours’ light, all at once.

It matters for this paper’s beat because it is a lesson in awkward sites. Metro Vancouver’s easy parcels are mostly gone. What remains are triangles under bridges, lots beside SkyTrain guideways and parking lots behind colleges — the VCC campus included. Vancouver House shows what happens when a constraint is treated as the design brief rather than an obstacle.