1/ Walked past a tower in Vancouver I worked on years ago (pre web3 days) and it reminded me: architecture isn’t just about building up, it’s about layering meaning into space.

This is a luxury tower with ocean and mountain views, mixed with a podium for social housing 🌊🧵⬇️:

2/ The corten entrance takes you to the luxury homes. Every home is a corner unit w only 4 units per floor.

A lowkey podium marks the social housing entrance.

3/ The material language, especially the corten steel was quite interesting to me. 

Corten isn’t just a material. It’s a philosophy:
→ Let things age
→ Let them rust
→ Protect by exposing, not hiding

A kind of architectural wabi-sabi 🍂

4/ Wabi-sabi (侘寂) is a Japanese aesthetic and worldview that finds beauty in imperfection, impermanence, and the natural aging of things.

A cracked ceramic bowl that’s been lovingly mended, or a weathered piece of wood with a beautiful patina, that’s wabi-sabi

5/ To speed up the aging, we literally hosed the corten steel entrance down during construction forcing the rust to bloom before residents moved in.

6/ Why corten? It’s self-healing. The rust forms a protective layer that slows further corrosion. It’s honest, and in a coastal climate, practical.

I see it as not trying to outlast the elements but coexist with them.

7/ For me, the most interesting layer wasn’t materials, it was social. 

The building includes social housing tucked into the same structure, with its own entrance.

It’s a common setup in mixed-use developments. But it brings up hard questions 🤔

8/ Should social housing have its own door? Does separation reinforce stigma? Or protect dignity?

Architectural decisions like this are rarely neutral. They reflect policy, power, and perception. The façade might be beautiful, but what stories does it conceal?

10/ Seeing the tower again today, aged and lived-in, I felt a mix of pride and realism. Some design choices held up beautifully. Others… revealed their flaws.

But maybe that’s the point: architecture evolves. With weather. With people. With time.

Buildings, like cities, are never finished.

They age. They rust. They crack.
And in doing so, they become more real 💗

Grateful to have worked on this project and love seeing vancouvers skyline evolve over the years.

9/ Later, I returned for deficiency work fixing what didn’t go to plan. 

This phase taught me that architecture is less about perfection and more about repair.