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magazine / oct09
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October 2009 issue |
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FEATURE
Under one roof
Green builders want to cut energy use. Heritage advocates want to save old buildings. And both camps are concerned about the future.
Story by James Glave with photography by Marina Dodis
I am battling vertigo four storeys above the weathered fir-plank floor of the Vancouver Salt Company Building
as I follow architect Russell Acton up a somewhat terrifying construction scaffold in my borrowed rubber workboots.
We’re ascending a set of aluminum stairs — they feel more like ladders — through a spiderweb of Douglas fir timbers
that have supported this former industrial plant for almost eight decades. “Look to your right,” Acton calls down. I turn
and spy a short section of dilapidated track and a miniature rust-pocked hopper car tucked into the rafters.
In the 1930s, when this building was a salt refinery, workers augered raw salt out of scows anchored in nearby False
Creek and used this track to send the mineral along the ceiling to a variety of brine-processing vats on the shop
floor below. “We’ll be leaving that there,” Acton says of the hopper car, “after seismically stabilizing it, of course.”
For the rest of this story, visit your local newsstand or go to our store to buy this issue.
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