Vancouver House

Vancouver House is a residential skyscraper in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, in a style called neo-futurist. Building began in 2016 and it was meant to be done by the end of 2019, but it was finished in summer 2020. The tower is about 150 m tall.

The Danish architect Bjarke Ingels designed it. It starts as a small triangle at street level and gradually grows into a full rectangle at the top, so the upper floors hang out over the ground below. The odd shape is the answer to a tricky site: a triangular plot of land right next to the on-ramp of the Granville Street Bridge.

Why the strange shape?

The lot east of Howe Street was a small triangle squeezed by bridge ramps, so there was little room to build a normal tower. Ingels and the engineers at Buro Happold and Glotman Simpson let the building widen as it rises.

The east and west faces have box-shaped balconies that give the walls a honeycomb look. Spinning Chandelier and other public art pieces are part of the plan, which kept the area lively.

Art and a bumpy moment

As part of the city's rezoning rules, a public art piece called Spinning Chandelier was set up near the tower.

The tower had a small mishap in April 2021, when a water pipe burst on the 29th floor and damaged 17 apartments and several elevators. It is one of the most unusual shapes in the Vancouver skyline, and it has about 59 floors.

On the globe

The model shows the tower twisting outward from a triangular base to a full rectangle at the top, beside the bridge ramps.