One of the world’s most important landscape architects, Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, stands inside the empty courtyard of one of her earliest works.
If you were driving by Marine Gardens, you would be forgiven for not giving it a second glance. From the outside, you’d see the non-descript entrance to some worn, 1970s multi-housing project. Inside the courtyard, it is a cool, lush oasis thanks to Ms. Oberlander, who has among her landscaping credits Library Square at the Vancouver Public Library, Robson Square and Law Courts, the Museum of Anthropology, the National Gallery of Canada, the Canadian Chancery in Washington, D.C., and the New York Times Building. She has too many awards and honorary degrees to list, including the Order of Canada.
Ms. Oberlander left Germany in 1939 with her mother and sister and settled in the U.S., where she became one of the first women to obtain a degree in landscape architecture at Harvard University. Because of her work with Arthur Erickson, architect Bing Thom came calling, and she landed her first major assignment designing Robson Square. It launched her career.
But Marine Gardens, built in 1971, precedes all the fame and success. It is from that period of her career when she devoted herself to designing low-income housing and spaces for children. Years after she designed the Marine Gardens landscape, she would drop by just to watch the children play there.
Now, the family-housing complex at 445 Southwest Marine Dr. is half empty. The day care is unused. There’s a child’s pink tricycle with ribbons abandoned outside a doorway. The MC2 condo tower at Marine and Cambie looms high over the village, casting permanent shadows. Construction noise is jarring and constant.
One by one, tenants of the 70 units are vacating, and the townhouse complex – including the forest of trees and shrubs that Ms. Oberlander planted – are coming down to make way for more condo towers. The area is at the heart of a plan for increased density by way of towers, creating a transit-oriented hub with the adjacent Marine Drive Canada Line station. Marine Gardens is slated for a two-tower development.
“I am passionate about this place, and my heart hurts,” says Ms. Oberlander, who, at 94, has no plans to retire. “Just imagine, those pine trees are going to be knocked down,” she says, pointing to two huge trees. “They make the space. What do trees do? They give you shade, they give you belonging to nature and the feeling that everything is alive. Otherwise, it’s sterile. To not be with nature makes people very sick.
“The great scientist E.O. Wilson said the longing for nature is built into our genes.”
She knows that Marine Gardens is in a sad state of disrepair. The place is long overdue for a major renovation after years of neglect.
It may be faded and weary, but it is testament to design principles aimed at making people feel good about where they live, and how they live. It was even featured at Habitat ‘76, the United Nations conference on housing, according to Heritage Vancouver. That event brought Mother Teresa and Margaret Mead, among others, to Vancouver to talk about social justice and living conditions. This year, Marine Gardens, an innovative type of family housing that is currently under serious threat of extinction, placed No. 4 on Heritage Vancouver’s Top 10 Watch List.
On a shoestring budget, Ms. Oberlander collaborated with architect Michael Katz to create a village unto itself, for affordable rental housing in a low-rent part of the city. Mr. Katz had been asked to design a typical three-storey walk-up, but instead he proposed a townhouse development that would offer the very same density. The result is that the two-level townhouses face inward, with small front porches. Each unit has a garden at front and back. At Marine Gardens’ core they designed an open-air daycare, with a laundry room and courtyard so that residents could congregate in shared spaces. The two-bedrooms are 720 square feet and the three-bedrooms 900 square feet. Parents could sit on their porches and talk while watching their kids play, with the busy traffic that surrounded them buffered by the inward-facing design.
“The whole idea is, for everybody a garden,” says Mr. Katz. “If only architects would understand that that is the mantra for great architecture: ‘For everybody a garden.’ ”
On a recent sunny morning, Mr. Katz and Ms. Oberlander gave a small tour of their early-days project. Ms. Oberlander identifies each and every plant she planted in 1971. She planted shade trees in such a way that their roots would never interfere with the structure of the underground parking – even though everybody at the time argued against it. She points to American dogwood, vine maple, alder and hemlock trees. There is forsythia and laburnum. There are a rare rhododendron. And roses, “perfected by an agriculture experiment station in Ottawa – originally from Germany,” says Ms. Oberlander. “They come back every year. Nobody has ruined them.”
And at the heart of the complex is the giant chestnut tree, which grew from a chestnut she planted herself. It’s the sort of thing you do when working without much of a budget. The big tree is a lush focal point for the shared space.
Their plan to create a convivial village atmosphere worked. Ms. Oberlander would visit the complex years after it was constructed in 1971, and watch the children play as she imagined they would.
“It’s like a village,” she says. “People would communicate with each other. Children could play. The mothers would come out and see what they were doing.”
Residents spent decades at Marine Gardens. A lot of kids were raised there. A current resident named Dodie King was delighted to meet the designers of the place she’d called home the last three years. But it was a bittersweet occasion, because Ms. King is in the process of relocating from her two-level Marine Gardens home to a 500-square-foot space in a rundown building at W. 71st Avenue, for $850 a month. She pays $1,100 at Marine Gardens. And despite the fact that nearby towers have darkened her home, she says she’d stay if she could.
She teared up when she thought about having to move, and the loss of community.
“It’s been heart-breaking,” she said. “You know, studies have shown that villages of about 100 and some people are the perfect community because people help each other. There’s less need for social services, for policing. Globally, that seems to be the perfect size for a community. We have our own village. Well, we did.”
In the few years that Concord Pacific has owned the property, Ms. King says they’ve been making repairs as required. They’ve also made relocation offers for each tenant, including the equivalent of up to four months’ rent to help with the transition. Tenants also have the option of renting one of the new units at a 20-per-cent discount. The developer has offered to cover moving expenses and helped them find new locations as well, says Ms. King.
“It was owned by a lot of companies before Concord. And these companies bought it hoping to develop it and make a killing off it. So in the meanwhile, before they got planning permission, they just let the place go. So it was from those years that these places came into such disrepair.
“Concord Pacific did make a generous offer, but it can’t replace our home.”
Earlier this year, city council approved a rezoning application to replace the 70-unit complex with a 21- and 27-storey development totalling 514 market-rate condos and a mid-rise with market-rental apartments and a daycare. In economic terms, the little Marine Gardens, which has 45 units per acre, can’t compete with that kind of density.
But those towers, they say, won’t compare with their highly livable, lush and affordable environment.
“Just think what it will do to the psyche of these people,” says Ms. Oberlander. “And there won’t be any birds,” she adds.
Mr. Katz has been designing dense, affordable housing his entire career. He says he got the idea for the Marine Gardens design in 1963, when he was still living in his hometown of Johannesburg, South Africa. After he completed Marine Gardens, he went on to design two more village-like complexes at Cambie and 16th, one that was government-assisted rental housing and the other for a government-assisted home-ownership program.
Neither Mr. Katz nor Ms. Oberlander are anti-tower. In fact, they’re collaborating on a 17-storey tower in North Vancouver that will include a large public space.
“I don’t mind towers,” says Ms. Oberlander. “But I don’t like soulless towers.”
Instead of tearing the site down, they argue that it should be restored.
“The whole thing is irreplaceable,” says Mr. Katz. “Cornelia is the world’s greatest landscape architect. This should be kept as heritage. The whole thing should be rebuilt exactly as it was. Leave the landscaping alone.”
Adds Ms. Oberlander: “And update it so that it’s sustainable.”
A deal between the city and the developer could have been struck, says Mr. Katz.
“They could transfer the density next door or the city could make certain dispensations. They could do it.
“We flew a man to the moon. This is not rocket science.”
But it is Vancouver.