Meeting #1
The Stanley King Experience.
February 3, 2010
The Long Version: This video runs approx. 25 minutes.
In the words of the immortal Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein ll, and sung by Julie Andrews:
"Let's start at the very beginning, it's a very good place to start..."
In recent meetings of the Advisory Committee I've heard a tone that mixes exhaustion and authority in the voice of architect James Cheng, when he proclaims that: "We've been meeting for a year and half..."
But how far have we gotten, or perhaps more importantly how OFF TRACK?
The first 8 months it seemed that though we started off well, it ended with 6 months of traffic issues, after which we'd forgotten where we'd started. Then there was a 6 month winter lag, and a recent spurt of activity. And now, as it gets to a point where there's some sort of physical manifestation of an architectural design, it's high time we looked back to the beginning, to check in on our thoughts.
In February of 2010, the community of Little Mountain came out on masse, put aside preconceptions or prejudices, and 3 hours of their time to engage in a workshop led by Stanley King. The ideas generated were fresh and inspiring. 20% of those ideas were incorporated into the architects current (July 2011) plans. The other 80% vanished.
You can still see them. There's link from my website to all of the images and thoughts from the Little Mountain Site Design Workshop hosted by Stanley King stored on the City of Vancouver's web site. You just won't see most of them mentioned anywhere else. That's why I've subtitled the short clip "the feel-good exercise".
In the interest of an open discussion about the future of Little Mountain I think that it's time that we went back to the very beginning, and did what Stanley King urged us to do in that seminar. To look at our drawings, compare them to the ones James Cheng is now showing us, and ask, how did he encorporate our ideas into his plan?
To take one example: Where are the community gardens?
Visit the website and enter a conversation about when, how, and why they disappeared, and how we can return to a dialogue about it at:
littlemountainproject.com
Best,
David Vaisbord