Ocean Towers is one of the West End’s most enduring architectural and urban monuments, a much-loved beachfront icon for Vancouverites.  It has a never-to-be equalled site, taking up most of the block east of the Sylvia Hotel, blessed with permanently un-impeded view across English Bay towards Point Grey and Vancouver Island.  High rise residential blocks in the slab format are quite rare in Vancouver, as opposed to the smaller floorplate and squarish point towers predicated by our block forms and city planning preferences.  The slab format here maximizes the number of suites having un-impeded ocean views, as occupied rooms run its entire length.  The resulting horizontality of the English Bay façade is broken with some clever detailing-floor plates are extended in shallow ‘V’-forms, creating shadows that visually break block this horizontal pattern into smaller sections. Some have likened this pattern of shadows to the lapping of waves across the street along the sands of English Bay below.

This is also one of the rare Vancouver buildings to show influences from Le Corbusier’s residential towers, notably the “Unité d’Habitation” constructed first in Marseille, then across Europe.  Like these slab towers, there are exposed concrete columns (fattened in width for visual reasons) at their base, a detail Le Corbusier called “pilotis,” with empty landscaped space left between each, making the mass of the building appear to hover dramatically over its site.  The penthouse here is one of the most spectacular in the city, with 3,000 square feet of apartment and the same size of decks overlooking the ocean.  It was offered for sale in late 2018 for $17 million, one of the highest asking prices ever for a West End apartment, but this much un-impeded south-facing view space will never appear again.

At eighteen storeys, this was the first high rise tower on English Bay when it opened in 1960, and was a breakthrough both for its height and its nature of residential tenure.  Ocean Tower’s design is by Rix Reinecke of Chow Nelson and Reinecke. It was originally rejected by the City’s Town Planning committee, because it blocked views from inland.  City Council over-ruled the planners and authorized this design, a scale-changer for the entire area west of Denman Street.

Ocean Towers is also historic for its model of ownership.  The building pre-dates British Columbia’s Strata Titles Act of 1966, so was conceived under the rare BC application of New York-style “Co-operative Apartment” arrangements.  These are not the full collective ownership modalities which blossomed across Canada in the 1960s, but rather join ownership of the entire building, divided by the proportions of total inhabited space each controls.  The legal complications this mode of ownership produces helped convince provincial officials to adapt a form of the condominium strata apartment laws, which had been pioneered in Australia. Ocean Towers is thus a legal, as well as an architectural marvel.