Project 200, via John Atkin’s blog, who describes it as the Really Nasty Version. He writes:

Digging through the files I found this image of the proposed Project 200 for the waterfront of Vancouver looking east from Stanley Park.

Someone was channeling Hugh Ferriss.

Yikes.

I’ve featured Project 200 before, but it’s true this rendering is particularly dystopian.

Note the hovercraft in the foreground, a futuristic indicator of the shape of the future! A bit like featuring Zeppelins on the Marine Building. Actually, Vancouver did have some early hovercrafts in operation, as I explored briefly here. The first two Coast Guard crafts CCGH 039 and CCGH 045 have been replaced by CCGH Siyay and CCGH Penac.

I recently posted the Project 200 brochure on flickr, the often discussed freeway and urban development that almost wiped out Chinatown. Gordon Price has mentioned it on many occasions; here in 2008 he agrees with John Atkin who states it was not only outspoken public opposition that ended the project; they also ran out of financing options, and the feds walked away with the money.

What I find most amusing about this photo is ironic juxtaposition between the iconic landmarks of the Woodward’s building, the Dominion Building, and the Marine Building, and the giant blocks of Lego architecture that look like badly designed hotels of the 70s. Never mind the fact that no one would have dared to imagine Woodward’s would no longer be in business some 30 years later…or that it would one day become the vibrant redevelopment that it is today. I’ll add another footnote to the story tomorrow.

Towering City of the Future by Jasper Veerman, architectural illustrator in West Vancouver. Painted for the Journal of Commerce, Western Canada’s Construction Newspaper since 1911. Original painting now in the permanent exhibition “You Say You Want A Revolution” at the Museum of Vancouver. Note Project 200 in Gastown upper right, and proposed residential towers for the north shore of False Creek lower right, where Expo86 took place and where Concord Pacific is now.

Colour renderings of Project 200 (uncovered by Bob Rippon at the Vancouver Planning Department), Vancouver’s infamous development and freeway mega-project that was not to be, via PriceTags20.

1960 renderings of Project 200, featuring “a big ditch at Comox and Thurlow with a dizzying complex of roads and cloverleafs”, via the PriceTags blog.