The public spaces and resident’s amenity areas at Horseshoe Bay will be as pleasant by night as they are by day. Westbank is developing a custom series of sculptural lighting fixtures touched with whimsy and creativity, a ring of shining artworks that will define the waterfronthere. These early sketches from Paul Merrick’s office show a range of potential designs, all of them graced with the organic-meets-urban aesthetic at the heart of their re-conception of Horseshoe Bay.
To enhance the marina and public paths defining one edge of Horseshoe Bay’s harbour, and then make new places to live above them is one of the greatest challenges of Paul Merrick’s architectural career. He drew on a lifetime of experience to understand and solve the opportunities at this, one of the most magnificent building sites on Canada’s Pacific coast.
Paul Merrick’s early architectural mentors:
Arthur Erickson 1924 – 2009, left
Ron Thom 1923 – 1986, right
Merrick Architecture now includes partners Gregory Borowski, Mitch Sakumoto, Graham Fligg and Shaun McIntyre plus thirty-five employees in offices in Victoria and Vancouver. The range of work produced by this acclaimed practice is evident in the three works illustrated here: the dramatic stack of cliff-dwelling rooms in West Vancouver’s Sentla Residence; the airy reading room and Gothic details (in homage to Ron Thom’s Massey College) of the UBC Alumni Reading Room near Vancouver General Hospital; a penthouse interior at the top of the Shoal Point high rise towers that guard the entrance to Victoria harbour.
More About Paul Merrick
Paul Merrick
Olympic Village, BC 2009
Jericho Tennis Club, BC 1999
Smaller versions of the same design aesthetic inform these light fixtures that are to be set on the lower walls of the residential and commercial buildings, pairs of them flanking entrances and other points of interest.
Half-circle layered variation on freestanding light standard
Regular rhythm of repeated fixtures along waterfront building elevation.
A contemporary update on lights strung above busy residential streets in Europe and Asia, these hanging pendants will be suspended from lines running from building to building, their drooping petals and LED fixtures adding a festive note.
2 layers of glass petals constructed as typical
These are tall and free-standing lighting towers that will illuminate the piers and boardwalks at water’s edge. With long curving ‘stems’ topped by a flower-like lights with coloured glass ‘petals,’ the low energy LED fixture will cast light down onto the stone and render walls, and create intriguing reflections on harbour waters.
Typical triple layer of petals
16' Height maximum
Typical double layer of petals
8' Height minimum
Paul Merrick was born and grew up in West Vancouver, remembering his Ambleside neighbourhood as a “real village,” and remarks on the multi-generational shops that are still there. His grandfather was an engineer on coastal ferries, his father an industrial arts teacher at West Vancouver High and his uncle ran the local gas station. Young Paul played in the surrounding forests, caddied at the Capilano Golf Club, and picked up the wood-working skills that still serve him today in his sailboat design and construction at his East Sooke workshop.
Paul Merrick faced a choice when applying to the University of British Columbia: “There’s not much room for imagination in engineering, so I choose architecture – it looked like more fun.” His natural abilities with freehand drawing served him well as a student, but his real education in design thinking came from one of the School of Architecture’s most charismatic professors. “Arthur Erickson had a Socratic teaching process,” Merrick says, “He showed these magnificent slides of his travels – he took us on mental journeys, talked about pace and place and light.” At the time, Erickson was designing the Filberg House in Comox – his first large house commission – and he shared the evolution of its design with Merrick and his classmates. After third year, he spent a summer working at Ron Thom’s office, working on the details of Massey College in Toronto. Upon graduation, Merrick faced a choice: “I had offers from two firms that were on very different wavelengths. You could say that Arthur Erickson’s office was FM, but Ron Thom’s was AM, and that is what I chose.”
Soon, Merrick was designing small wooden houses in the Westcoast idiom that was Thom’s hallmark. “It’s hard to know where one’s influences come from, but from an early age I had a strong empathy for an organic way of thinking,” he says of these designs. These tendencies are evident in the larger Sciences Complex and Library/ Bridge commissions he was given as part of Thom’s design of the Trent University campus in Ontario, which meet the technical needs of a contemporary university, but retain a sense of handmade tradition. Merrick says: “When Ron put his hand to something, a different kind of light emerged.” After a few years in Thom’s then-Toronto-based office, and some extended travels in Europe, Merrick returned to Vancouver.
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Working with Thompson Berwick Pratt, Merrick was lead architect for the lobby extension and interior adaptive re-use that transformed the former Orpheum cinema in to Vancouver’s leading concert venue, winning Governor General’s Medal for Architecture for his design.
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A felt pen elevation for UBC student house design project
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A sketch for Paul Merrick Family Residence, Eagle Harbour
For Thompson Berwick Pratt he designed the powerful Brutalist forms of the downtown Vancouver CBC studios, then was project architect for the very different interior renovation and lobby addition for the oncethreatened Orpheum Theatre, which won a Governor General’s Medal for architecture. Merrick designed a sublime house in the forest for his family in West Vancouver in 1972, then a few years later formed his own practice. The range of buildings completed since is remarkable, ranging from the Gothic touches of the UBC Alumni Medical Library at 12th and Heather to the assertive wood structure of the Day Lodge at the Callaghan Valley installations for the 2010 Winter Olympics.
Merrick says that one of his most important techniques he used as he built his own architectural practice – which has grown to forty employees in offices in Victoria and Vancouver – is to constantly ask “What is the site asking of us?” He regards the current commission for Westbank on the Sewell Marina site to be one of the great challenges of his career. “Horseshoe Bay has the curious condition of the view being north, the sun to the south,” he says. A breakthrough came with memories of the rural English architecture he had toured with is family in the 1970s, with “buildings one room thick” being the perfect strategy he had sought for this confined site having the additional site conditions of steep forest on one side and harbour on the other. “During design development all the notions were there, but they got pumped up a bit, more texture came in,” says the architect of his Horseshoe Bay design, concluding: “Listen to the land, and it will tell you what it wants to be.”