 Hello everyone, and good evening. My name is Taryn Erhardt and I'm the Arts and Special Events Programmer here at the West Vancouver Memorial Library. On behalf of the library and the West Vancouver Art Museum, I would like to welcome you to tonight's architecture talk, Paul Merrick in Conversation with Hillary Letwin. While I recognize that we are all in different places this evening, I would like to acknowledge that the West Vancouver Library and Art Museum reside within the traditional ancestral and unceded territories of the Squamish Nation, Slava Tooth Nation, and Musqueam Nation. We recognize and respect them as nations in this territory, as well as their historic connection to the lands and waters around us since time immemorial. I am personally grateful to call the Pacific Northwest my home, and I'm thankful to the Coast Salish communities that continue to protect the natural beauty and animal diversity that surround me every day. It has been my great pleasure to work with Hillary Letwin and her guest tonight to bring this event to our community. So now I would like to pass things over to Hillary, who is waiting for us over at the museum. Thank you, Taryn, and thank you to the West Vancouver Memorial Library for hosting our talk this evening. Paul, it's such a pleasure to see you. You're located in Victoria, and I'm here at the West Vancouver Art Museum in your exhibition. The current exhibition, A Twist of the Rules, the architecture of Paul Merrick, which is on here at the Art Museum until June 23. Paul, I'd like to start out our talk this evening by speaking a little bit about your connection to West Vancouver. Can you tell us a little bit about your upbringing in West Vancouver? And perhaps also speak about the connection that you have to the West Vancouver Art Museum's home, Gertrude Lawson House. Well, it's a reflection. It's quite a pleasant story. I had the great good fortune to be born in West Vancouver. Technically, I suppose it was North Vancouver because West Vancouver has in the hospital. And I find a bit of minor amusement in the fact that the building I was born in in North Vancouver Hospital is still there. It's not a psychiatric ward. Some people find it amusing. We lived on Sentinel Hill in Nambleside. The family was in West Van because Grandfather was an engineer on the West Anchorage from the early 20s. So I grew up in a very, I think on hindsight I realized I'm really a wonderful, close-knit, easygoing village. It was a very strong community. And most people knew most other people. We all knew the bus drivers and we knew the shopkeepers. And a few of them were even still there in Nambleside was our shopping briefing. And we, at the time, we lived on Betches, 100 block, which at the time didn't go through. So at the end of the street was just wilderness. We lived in wilderness, so it was woodlands. And as youngsters, we built a lot of time in that woodland and building forts and things like that. A couple of amusing stories around that that I won't go into. And the went through first elementary school at Holyburn, which amazingly is still there, still the same building, still intact. The high school, of course, was what then became the wine has now been replaced with the new building, but that was Nambleside. I think part of the impact of that in terms of how I was able to see the world as it went on was that as a community, it felt quite grounded and in a good place and supported by local society that one was a part of. And so I found along with the two or three early influences I had, which we've talked about before, found that it was, it was not difficult to go up having at least a reasonable sense of oneself that you could, you could explore things and and at an early stage was kind of, I don't know, not so much talk, but given permission to ask why. So, Paul, I'd love to hear your connection to Gertrude Lawson house I think there was somebody who was an early influence in your life, who had a connection to the building can you speak to that. Absolutely. Having grown up in Ambleside and gone to Hollywood school as I said, I found myself in I think it was the second grade with a teacher named Gertrude Lawson, and I had learned over time that her father john Lawson was one of if not one of the original settlers in West Vancouver and his Lawson Park at the foot of 17th now is, of course, in his name and that's, that's where his farm was and his farm extended up the hill to and, in fact, apparently include lens that the city of all across the road from where you are in the museum, which is Gertrude Lawson's home with that land was given to me established by john Lawson. Gertrude Lawson was just my grade one teacher. She never writes, I told, generally that it was her father who built this stone house for her. And, and she took in, among other things, tenants, typically single single people and, and I've learned recently that they were, they were typically women who were on their own and and making their own way. They were women tenants of Gertrude's became my stepmother. She, she was my natural mother's friend in the early teens, they knew each other. And so she was a friend of a family all my growing years. My mother sadly died when I was about seven. And so sometime after that, this, this lady, Betty Copeland, Elizabeth Copeland became my stepmother. She was a public health nurse in the school nurse in West London so a lot of people know her as a young person in the 40s. She had a car which very few people did which was kind of a privilege that we realized later. But she proved among other things to be a wonderful person in terms of both provoking me and and stewarding me and, and, and, and I guess providing a reason to have confidence in exploring what's caught. And I think you, you have noted previously that she handed you a copy of Frank Lloyd Wright's autobiography when you were 17. It sounded like that was something that sort of set you on the course to architecture. And other things that I'm sure it was very influential. Because that autobiography which even I find a lot of my colleagues aren't familiar with because so much has been published about right and his work. And most of it is full of extraordinary photographs because his work is so photograph photographic I guess photogenic. There's not a, there's not a shot of anything in that it's just a verbiage, and it's his story of his life. And I guess and he was in his late 60s or 70s at the time he wrote this, and of course he doesn't another decade or two. And the thing about about his story was he, he kind of illustrated from an early age, how he acquired his view of things and his value structure, and what he found to be important because he grew up in Wisconsin and they were foreign people and it was much more rural than we're used to. And, but, but he, and he, and he had the, these wooden blocks as a child that his mother given them to, to explore form of composition and but three dimensionally with. And he went variously into the influences of his aunts and relatives and, and they're out of, I don't know that they were Quakers but they, they were, they had quite a simplistic, you know, shaker like view of, of life and out of care for each other. So, so he, I think, you know, in a word, one of the, one of the best summaries of what that man was about came from a Mrs Cheney, who was, was an early client of his in the little park in Chicago and, and went on to become his, I guess, second wife. When, when Mrs Cheney with their first husband we're looking for an architect, they, they sought many out and, and decided that Mr right was the only one who evidence the competence of principle. And I thought that pretty, pretty well some summed it up. I mean, because we're presenting this talk tonight with the library it's very appropriate that a book should be credited with setting you on your course towards architecture. And I do, I love that connection to Gertrude Lawson house and your stepmother being a border here. Well, I'd like to switch gears a little bit and talk about some of your projects here in West Vancouver and also outside of West Vancouver. I'm, of course, sitting in front of the wall devoted to the Orpheum theater project in Vancouver and this was a renovation project that you undertook in the early 80s. I want to hear a little bit about your work on the Orpheum theater and how this project came about. Can you tell us about that. Excuse me. I probably have to begin with a story consistent with with where we are my first experience in that Orpheum theater was as fairly, fairly early in my youth I might have been 10 or 11 or 12. And this new mother of ours, Miss Copeland, took my brother and I to a concert in the afternoon would have been a Sunday afternoon concert I think and I don't remember what was playing or much about the music, except it was a physical experience. But I remember at intermission, we were in the balcony of course in the door seats and went out on the balcony on Seymour Street that's still there. We looked down on the street and there were all the Cadillacs and the salsons and the light from the folks who we lived in Shaundersie, waiting for their lordship to come out and be driven home. And they were all having a cigarette and chatting with each other and that was my perception of the good life when it came to to find music. Years later, of course, the Orpheum was, at that point, a movie house owned by famous players, been built as a vaudeville house. It was designed by Marcus Priddick had practiced I think at that point out of Seattle. And it was the 749th theater he had built across North America. He was a good age by then. And so he had learned more or less empirically what made a good house what made good sound. And at that time, of course, at the last century amplifications and systems and the like were certainly not developed the way we know them today. So you had to manage the projection and the quality of sound, even as a vaudeville house. And as most people know that there's there's still an organ in there which what the words are which was part of the original format presentation. The famous players was wanting to sell the building as they already had sold the Capitol Theater next door. And there was a group in Vancouver, called the Community Arts Council, I think something like that. And my partner and my early years at Thompson for John Deaton had been a member of the Community Arts Council and learned about this. And so a number of them created a case that they put the City Council to to take on the, the building. Because, by that time, of course, the Queen Elizabeth had been operating for some time. And they found that it was of course multi purpose was still is a multi purpose hall had a very big stage and huge striking areas that was good for for ballet and opera and large scale stage presentations. They didn't have that brilliant or some quality for for concert orchestra work. So that so they thought that the working would would be a wonderful alternative and in fact, highly inexpensive way of getting a concert hall in the city so the city was convinced to take it on with the help of the federal government was willing to come aboard equal share. I think on the grounds that the foyer's would be extended because along the as we know it sits behind the lane on scene on scene between Lane and Seymour and there's just wonderful gallery access from from Warfian Street which is traditionally its main entrance. Yeah, but the lobbies were, although they're wonderful spaces they're tight and congested for the size of house that is which is over 2000, 2800 seats I think. So it became a case of expanding the foyer's which is done as a second stage and more importantly, expanding the performance area the stage. There were very limited ways of doing that because the back wall of the stage was hard against the Jason property you couldn't expand away from the, from the house proper. So it was a case of either going expanding it sideways or forwards into the house. And we did that as much as was practical but the problem with that is that as you come forward towards the patron already established in the seating, you start to lose sight line from the balcony of, you know, the most important person on the stage being the conductor probably with a soloist and and so so even to this day you'll see the stage still goes further forward than they typically will arrange the orchestra and that's because of the sight lines, unless unless it's a very large orchestra it doesn't require combination. Going sideways was was accomplished by literally taking the entire finished development that the, the, the, the kind of tablatures I decided the stage and the stage arch, the prescenium, which is all done in suspended plaster work. The whole of the house services are just plaster suspended from a structural shell and took it apart and kind of recreated it, literally as, as critic had designed it but half again as big. And most people don't, don't realize that because it's sense of the same vocabulary that was there originally, but the prescenium was pushed up into the, into the cornice and the, and the transects were were widened to accommodate a bigger performing area. Tony Heisberg and as I said was the decorator and he, he was a wonderful he was in. Well, cute story about his age. At a reception he was a Dutch fellow been a decorator all his life and he had been the original decorator of the Orpheum which is why we were able to dig him up through Marcus critic as successor in Seattle. And he's been living in Los Angeles and he had a home in Karnac in France, where you go every summer with a rule of canvassers and become home with a rule of paintings. And he was the most amazing Bosardian copyist, he could, he could paint and he took me to a, to, to a health club like a wife facility in downtown Los Angeles that had this beautiful pool that they were developed like Roman tepidarium. The Roman baths of classical time, and, and he done it all in pink, he had to look at the tile closely there were one inch square tiles and that was all painted by Tony. And, and he developed when we came to have him recreate the theater he developed a two or three different options, which I learned was how you did it in the Bosardian school of thought. It was the elephant scheme and the gold and silver scheme and the, you know, the grain gold scheme. And you would pick one and that then became the drawing from which the painters doing the restoration worked. And then the last story about Tony was he wanted to do a mural in the dome, which, which was there but it never never been finished. And it was full of when we took it on for for for the musical, the, sorry, the film use, the cinema use. It had been filled with the material because there were some bad reflections, because don't do that. And, and so Tony wanted to do a mural. It was agreed and there was some ways developed a funding it. So he worked himself in his wife, he called little tiger if you look at the ceiling, you'll find a tiger there that's Tony and Bergman's wife. And he wanted to put all my children in so he has to take photographs of them. They're all 4567. And they, they, they were all on cold little nymphs except the youngest who was Maya, who was actually out here from monkey all today. And he said, well, she was too young and too innocent to be without clothes. So he put her in 90, but that's all the little kids up there. And the conductor I think is was my partner Ron Nelson at the time. Now to see who was the kind of manager of the project. So the faces of your children are immortalized on the on the roof of the on the ceiling of the Orpheum theater. So the Orpheum theater is a great example of heritage building that you took on and sort of oversaw the renovation for it. And we see this happening throughout your career. I'm thinking of the Marine building, for example, I'm thinking of the new customs house project that you've more or less just completed in Victoria. There are these heritage buildings that you have come in and sort of given new life to. But I'd like to contrast that with some of your totally new projects and I'm thinking about the the Cathedral Place project in Vancouver. Of course across from the from the hotel Vancouver and the Vancouver Gallery. Can you speak a little bit about that project and and maybe talk a bit about how these new products are separate from your heritage projects. That's a good question that has also multiple levels of depth. This thing we call heritage is kind of ubiquitous term even because it tends to imply the acknowledgement of some kind of lineage or age or it's old and some things have to be old in order to be heritage and the reality is, of course, everything we do and build and inhabit is our heritage whether it was built last week or last century. And but we've evolved ways of trying to come to grips with how to distinguish or articulate what what that might mean. And it's not enough for something simply to be old but it needs to be in whatever its age it needs to be worth respect and and and looking after along with that. And from another point of view I've always I've always had the view that that the world we have our environment made up of buildings is is a kind of organism. It's, if you zoom back which I'm always in danger of doing. It's as if each project is a cell in the organism of the city or the village or the community or the nation for that matter. And collectively, the environment we have it is as good as each and every individual cell that we add to it that makes it up. And, and whether a project is a new project on a clean site, or an added to an altered project as the custom solution mentioned, for instance, was part of it, vintage and part of its current. Or, or, or whether it's just an old building that needs new life break read into as the orphaness. I come to find those. I guess I've had the good fortune of being offered a number of those kinds of projects and realize over time that they really are quite meaningful because they're not just about bigger and better or or replacing old within is we've been through a part, even, even in our lifetime swear that that was sought to be the way to do things and it didn't take us long to realize that that wasn't really the best it was often better to try and, and, and repair and add new life to vintage start a long thought a building properly made, even, even in very simple materials will endure far longer, far longer than any one of us as human we have a lifespan, maybe if we're fortunate and thank goodness it wasn't necessary to go on longer than that. But, but buildings will last many centuries, even native simple material. If they're looked after and they need to be. I remember a moment in years years back in visiting Salisbury near where where my wife's family were from, and went of course to see Wolfgang's house. And which is, you know, an embellished facade on a main street where all the buildings are cheap by Joe party wall buildings that were in that time, and with a small courtyard and you know an H shape or I shape or any shape they, the way pre 20th century buildings were built, and in that case you came in, kind of from the back into this courtyard and went upstairs to visit Wolfie referred to Mr Mozart, and there was a little sign there saying that when Wolfgang of Smoltzart lived in this building, it was already 200 years old. And so that man says again he said well that makes it about 400 and somewhat now. That was already a few decades ago, and it was perfectly sound and intact and it was built literally of the brick and rubble the side walls were all just whatever they could scrounge. The facade was always better material that maybe stone or or fired, fired material, and the wood was hard to come by so they use it sparingly that the rafters and beans and let the like we're just poles cut from trees that they would have been able to manage and yet it was four or 500 years old, and completely usable and as we're all its neighbors still there. And it has less me feeling over time that breathing new life into existing building fabric is pretty almost a quiet kind of honor to to to nurture or maintain or sustain the life of something that's that that's already done from a good deal of duty, it's already had a life and is capable of more. And at least to the something we call adaptive reuse where an old building fabric may be put to a very different use from from what I mean a simple example. Again, they were the original build of the water, which is quite a different, different, although it's a place of assembly, the needs of water bill quite different than say concert hall, which which is mutated into in St. Andrea, it was a school built by the sisters and St. Anne's and and there's now government office building. It may not always be a government office building but the happy, happy notice that it's, it's, it's now where where here for decades ago when we restored it, it probably had a life span of another several. Again, if it's looked after it looked much the same from the outside and new building was built inside and tied up tied back and, and the, the, the issue that comes out of these kinds of journeys always have to do with the degree to which you halter or intervene in the degree to which you maintain and retain and respect. Absolutely. What one of my early heritage advisors consultants was Harold Coleman, who has, he was really the kind of father of heritage thinking as you'll see operated then out of Ottawa, and it comes from from the US, he had a lovely turn for, for being too precious about retaining heritage he called it, it was, you could either refer to it as mummification, or petrification, both of which imply not much presence of life. And, and I had at that point, again, the good fortune of having spent a couple of years living in Britain doing a project in the Middle East, and, and found a world that was roughly 10 times old as well as the world we were familiar with the West colony at, you know, at an age of about a century and were written at an age of roughly 10 centuries from, from you know, more primitive times. And they had some time, you know, with the advent of the industrial revolution and all that went with it and and escalation of population and the rest they had had to start to learn about these things that we were just beginning to be confronted with half a century ago, which the orphan was an example of. Yeah, no, it's, it's, I'm sorry. It's an excellent example. I, Paul, before we wrap up, I would really like to speak to some more local projects here in West Vancouver. And the first project I'd like to just touch on is the renovation to the West Vancouver Memorial Library or host this evening. You were brought in to do that renovation and I think that there were some changes to the plan. Can you speak very briefly about that project. Absolutely. And it's perfect example of what we're just talking about, of this metamorphosis and the life that a building that the original building was built as a second World War Memorial Library, done by Bob Burwick, and in the post and beam or timber frame structure with a scissor truss across the main space. And that, that that was a good but had become too small for for its purpose. It sat roughly in the middle of its site, which went from 19th to the east to the creek. And so we were able to add on to it around its edges, going west to expand the the stacked areas and put some parking on top of that because of the grade, made that possible and then on the east and put the Children's Center and went down to the creek and into the trees and the like. But it's a good example of how something relatively small and simple if there's room can be can be added and modified and still have a coherence. A couple of cute stories, but your librarian friend will will probably be amused by the, at the time of doing the first renovations, because the like the library is situated where if you're not driving there you're walking east or west on green drive on the sidewalk. And so you're coming at it from either end so we put an entrance at the end of the original Memorial Library and on the east end build a walkway out to the street and on the east end it was at the bottom of the stairs coming from the parking. And there was much debate about that. But at the veryest name of the time was Elizabeth muster as I recall or something, something close to that. She was a wonderful person but she was very concerned about control and of course, in those days, we didn't have the kind of electronic devices for control and the like that we have today so it was a case of being able to stay on top of what books you had in house and which would be taken out and whether they'd been returned or not and all the like. So, so we agree much about this but or defeated I suppose, and and and and built both both both those points of access, but it wasn't a matter of months I don't think and it built west at the time and would drive by it every day and one day I can was coming in. And there was a man up on the roof of the of the of the second blue entrance with a chainsaw, cutting it up into sections that became bus stops down marine drag all the way over. So much as you make your system and having your way over something which I don't remember being being that early in the boat. The world has a way of getting it the way it needs it to be for for its own purpose. That's fantastic. Well, Paul, I'd like to thank you for the opportunity to speak with you this evening it's such a pleasure to connect and to hear about these different projects. I'd also like to encourage our participants this evening to join us at our exhibition here at West Bank of Art Museum. The Orphan Theater is one of the projects that we covered, and you can see Paul's beautiful sketch behind me. Paul you are a fantastic architect but you're also an incredible draftsman and we have some really lovely examples of your sketches in our exhibition. Thank you so much for coming out and thank you Paul for joining us this evening and encourage our participants to come and see us at the Art Museum soon. Thank you very much.