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Stunning contemporary houses illuminate the enduring and evolving influence of the West Coast Modern architectural style in B.C.Decades after gaining international recognition through the work of practitioners such as Arthur Erickson, Ron Thom, and Barry Downs, the West Coast Modern style remains widely celebrated and highly influential for residential architects in British Columbia and beyond, even as its expressions evolve and adapt to contemporary contexts. What are the contours of its legacy today—and has a new Cascadia regional style emerged?
To explore these questions, Clinton Cuddington, co-principal of Measured Architecture, invited dozens of B.C.-based architects to share residential projects that best exemplified their design process. Their responses range from palatial mountain chalets to cabins sitting lightly in the forest to oceanfront retreats to sensitive urban renovations. Each house is presented through full-colour photos by professional photographers including Andrew Latreille and Ema Peter, and accompanied by short essays by curator and critic Michael Prokopow that draw on visits to each house and interviews with the architects to elucidate the many aesthetic and programmatic accomplishments on display. The houses are grouped by typology within Mountain, Forest, Shore, and City sections, and followed by profiles of each firm with photos of additional work.
As Prokopow details in an incisive essay, each house is necessarily also a response to the conditions of its creation, notably its site—locations include the Sea-to-Sky Region, Vancouver and the Lower Mainland, Southern Vancouver Island, the Gulf Islands, and the West Kootenays—as well as its social and cultural context, and so is revealing of modern ideas about home and family, leisure and vocation, ecological concerns and communion with nature on Canada’s West Coast.
With thoughtful, deeply informed prose and over 300 considered photos,
Reside is an absorbing and inspiring tour of some of the most exceptional houses in the country, and a portrait of how the unique character of the region is expressed in built form.
List of contents
West Coast Modern House: The Next Generation, by Clinton Cuddington
Preface
The Houses, by Michael Prokopow
Mountain- Treetop House | Evoke International Design
- Wedge Residence | Hemsworth Architecture
- Cedar Grove | HunterOFFICE
- Camera House | Leckie Studio + Design
- Trail’s Edge | Openspace
- The Rollover House | Studio 9
Forest- Howard Residence | Architecture Building Culture
- Bonetti II | BattersbyHowatt
- Quayle House | Coast and Beam
- Forest Cabin | Helen Pang
- Forest Modern | Lamoureux
- Berkley House | Rafael Santa Ana
- Saanich Farmhouse | SCOTT AND SCOTT
- Hummingbird House | Studio 531
Shore- Ocean Park Residence | Burgers Architecture
- Sooke 01 House | Campos Studio
- Funnel Cove House | D’Ambrosio
- Collingwood Residence | Frits de Vries Architects + Associates
- Southern Gulf Islands House | Gates-Suter
- Shor House | Measured
- Bowen Island House | Office of Mcfarlane Biggar
- Blue Cabin Floating Artist’s Residency | Simcic Architecture
City- The Cube House | AA Robins Architecture
- East Georgia Flats | AIR
- Devereaux/Freeman House | Broster Design
- East 3rd House | Carscadden Stokes McDonald
- Curio House | Haeccity
- Union | MA+HG
- Exeter House | Pechet Studio
- Subtract house | Ply Architecture
- W27th House | RUF Project
- John Street 2 | Scott Posno Design
- [house name] | SHAPE
- St. Francis Wood | Seng Tsoi
The “BC Idiom” Revisited: The Contemporary House in the Millennial Age, by Michael Prokopow
The Firms
Acknowledgements
Notes
About the Authors
About the author
Michael J. Prokopow, PhD, is a cultural historian and curator whose areas of expertise include material and visual culture, design history, and critical and cultural theory. His many publications include, most recently,
Reside: Contemporary West Coast Houses (Figure 1, 2024);
Hurvin Anderson (Lund Humphries, 2021); and
Smith House II (UBC-SALA Press, 2018). From 2004 to 2008 he was curator of the Design Exchange, Canada’s only museum of twentieth-century industrial design. In 2016 he co-curated the touring Gardiner Museum exhibition (and accompanying catalogue)
True Nordic: How Scandinavia Influenced Design in Canada. He sits on the boards of the Arthur Erickson Foundation and the Nathaniel Dett Chorale, and he is a regular contributor to Studio: Craft and Design in Canada. He holds a PhD from Harvard University and is a member of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at OCAD University in Toronto.
