Comment: Victoria, stick to restraint in building height and sympathetic building forms

A commentary by an architect and urban design planner who has worked for more than 30 years in downtown Victoria

Throughout Greater Victoria, more - and more diverse - housing is becoming a collective

regional agenda, but care for urban quality and contextual scale should be integral to that

quest.

Continue gathering a healthy concentration of downtown growth, but there is no need for

emphasis on excessive vertical tall towers. Keep to moderation, and foster vital streetscapes.

Future growth in Victoria’s downtown should complement the historic city centre.

A chief assignment for me as a former senior planner for urban design in Victoria was to

identify criteria for patterns of urban intensification — and building types suited for growth for

more than 30 years — for an enlarged, distinctive, yet familiar and welcoming downtown.

The city centre would face daunting challenges: More than 10,000 new residents, and more

than one million square metres of new building floor area, in the precinct bounded by Bay,

Superior, and Cook streets. Continuing to the north, the area has potential to accommodate

more than half of the city’s anticipated growth for decades ahead.

How to proceed? How to preserve a vulnerable historic centre? How to integrate new buildings

in a downtown celebrated for fine-grained pedestrian scale? How to complement our compactcity-centre geography? How to maintain good faith with generations of Victorians decrying

abruptly tall buildings? How to safeguard qualities distinctive for Victoria?

Increases in height and density were inevitable — but how to alleviate the impacts of height,

and to seek compatibly framed streets?

Four options for urban form were considered: In-Town, Across-Town, Up-Town, Cross-Town.

After some years of public consultations Cross-Town was selected as the most coherent

strategy – to strictly retain the historic low-scale Harbour, Old Town, Chinatown, and Rock Bay

districts, while featuring a back-drop of two spines of growth: a dominant corridor between

Douglas and Blanshard, pulling development northward, and a more modest secondary

corridor centered on Yates Street, filling in the Harris Green neighbourhood.

Heights were constrained, with a maximum of the 72-metre Hudson project, a commencement

of the primary northward corridor. Heights and densities would then diminish, stepping down

block by block, toward surrounding neighbourhoods. Height allowances were identified as

discretionary maximums, to be fine-tuned within their contexts, with various public advantages

to be gained in rezoning negotiations; they were not offered as entitlements.

A modest skyline was envisioned: a backdrop to our historic downtown, gradually rising from

the south and the north, and descending to the east in an undulating contour, reflective of

Victoria’s hilly setting, rather than a steep vertical thrust, as now characterizes cities like

Calgary and Toronto.

A smaller secondary skyline area was identified for the Songhees hilltop, and a third small-

profile skyline south of the harbour — all surrounding a low-scale harbour and historic core,

creating the “view basin” of an “urban amphitheatre.”

The long-dormant old-industrial Rock Bay area can take on a low-scale redevelopment pattern

to recall the modest-height, but concentrated warehouse and lofts type building forms characteristic of older working inner-city areas – and complementary to adjacent Chinatown

and Old Town. The recent Ironworks building is an excellent example of this potential.

Rock Bay District –a modest scale adjacent to, and complementing, Chinatown and Old Town.

General criteria for buildings were established. Respected urban commentators Jane Jacobs

and Jan Gehl have long noted that pedestrian-friendly, retail-successful street-frontages are in

the low-rise range of three to five storeys.

Many urban designers see that combined low-rise and mid-rise (six to ten storeys) areas of

cities are the liveliest and most sustainable. They are typically known for walkability — for good

“propinquity,” the condition of amiable interpersonal activity. This is certainly a condition not

found in dense high-rise tenement areas like suburban Hong Kong, or the Bronx Projects —

and not praised as a virtue of Burnaby’s super-high-rise Metrotown.

Allowances for floor areas for lower building levels were maximized, limiting higher levels,

emphasizing lower and mid-rise building forms, to avoid large bulky high-rises such as View

Towers. This leads to terraced forms, which reduce the visual impact of set-back taller

buildings; counter wind downdraft; and provide more sunlight and sky views — all important

factors for attractive, well-used streets, particularly in Victoria’s winter climate.

In addition, Victoria's long-standing and very useful requirement of a 1/5 setback envelope

from street faces above 10 meters was maintained, but updated for more urbanizing

conditions, for general downtown street faces to 15 meters, and for wider streets to 20 meters -

another measure that encourages stepping, set-back building forms, as well as set-back

penthouses for taller buildings. Otherwise, clearances between buildings were intentionally

encouraged to be snug, for an evolving, intimate, fine-scale cityscape.

Street frontage standards also promote the predominance of continuous retail frontages,

typically tight to the sidewalk to help sustain continuous retail energy and pedestrian vitality.

Diverse - and visually lively, high-quality architectural design is highly encouraged, within the

general context of these guiding urban design criteria.

A 3D study model confirmed that such buildings, within height limits, would readily house the

intended count of new residents, with capacity for additional growth. 3D mock-ups of 30-storey

towers were glaringly out-of-scale for Victoria.

So how would great increases in building height allowances, such as currently proposed for

several new tower developments (about twice the proscribed height limit for two Yates Street

proposals!) improve on planning objectives developed with conscientious public consultation

and confirmation through more than 10 years?

What answer is offered for long-known isolation problems for high-rise family and assisted

housing?

Examples of proposals needing to be brought into conformance with protective urban design

planning for Victoria: the two Starline projects along Yates Street seek a concentration of new

inner-city housing on those sites, but their extreme narrow tall heights severely conflict with the

evolving surrounding, moderate profile Harris Green context. Similarly, a currently proposed

narrow point tower addition above the old BC Power Commission Building does not provide for

the stepped-form, and side-wings massing that is a characteristic of the Art Moderne idiom.

Proposals for high-rise towers next to Capital Iron would confound the essential concept of a

low-scale urban 'basin' set over the harbour and its adjacent historic precincts, and do not

promise to reinforce the qualities of a long-time urban industrial area, as so successfully

evoked in the recent, carefully scaled Ironworks project.

A pre-eminent issue here is that of over-all civic identity. High-rise clusters in unwary provincial

cities have become naïve urban clichés of the early twenty-first century. There is little doubt

that the towns which will retain their distinctive identities and qualities, and their timeless best

allure for visitors, through generations to come, will be mid-rise central cities which have

fended off high-rises - like Florence, Oxford, Salzburg, Valencia, Antwerp, Prague, Budapest,

Vienna, Santa Barbara, Savanna, Santa Fe, Quebec, - as well as older low and mid-rise areas of well-regarded, much visited, larger places such as Rome, Paris, Berlin, Athens, Boston, etc.

Why should Victoria not choose to keep to this better company?

- Urban Capital, a prominent journal of city business, identifies that the most successful

economies are in lower scale towns, and asserts: “It’s generally accepted that mid-rise

development creates friendlier cities”.

It is intemperate high-profit drivers that propel the form of extremely vertical towers.

Legitimately, these various projects are proposed for areas due increased occupancy — but

could each be adjusted readily, by removing the top third of proposed high-rise and point-tower

heights, instead arraying expanded adjacent lower floor areas – creating lower podiums, and

stepped building forms, with a mid-rise emphasis — still achieving intended unit counts.

All could be reasonable revisions to achieve sympathetic buildings, to complement Victoria as

a unique place, rather than a counterfeit understudy to high-rise cities like Calgary and

Vancouver.

Chris Gower

April 23 2022