Gene Miller
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Posted January 10, 2021 Image: High Point Community Church in Victoria West Why don’t we still make communities and cities that give us a feeling of identity and heart’s ease? Go to story -
Why don’t we still make communities and cities that give us a feeling of identity and heart’s ease? “BALANCE IN ALL THINGS” we say, wisely. The embrace of such wisdom makes us hopeful, and even near-certain, like well-behaved children, that God, always conning for signs of decency and right thought, is taking note, keeping score. And while we’re here, compare the expressive calm of the Latin equilibrium with buh-heavy balance—buh, as in but, bother, bellow, the double-b bomb and, in spite of beauty and bliss, sounding less like balance itself and more like forces grimly tethe -
Zorth hovers, sees opportunity, colonizes
Gene Miller posted a gallery image in Spotlight on new stories
Posted December 20, 2020 Image: An artist's rendering of the Starlight proposal for Harris Green. Starlight Developments' mega-plan for a block in Harris Green suggests we’re not all in this together. Go to story -
Zorth hovers, sees opportunity, colonizes
Gene Miller posted an article in Development and architecture
Starlight Developments' mega-plan for a block in Harris Green suggests we’re not all in this together. An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance JOIN ME: we’re going on a tunnelled journey deep into a corporate psyche; probably, actually, the psyche—the structure and joinery of ideas and values—of an individual corporate executive, since it seems so often to come down to that. But I promise, when we emerge, you will recognize that the whole time it has been a rollercoaster ride around your own sensibilities and values— -
Posted November 12, 2020 Can the social messaging inherent in Victoria’s buildings help us render current reality legible in these destabilized times? Go to story -
Can the social messaging inherent in Victoria’s buildings help us render current reality legible in these destabilized times? A note to readers of this column: Founding Editor of Focus, Leslie Campbell (you old-timers will remember that Focus began its life as a “women’s magazine” titled Ironing And Brats), has invited me to centre my future contributions generally on urban design and architecture themes, noting that the recorded readership levels of my recent “meaning of life” columns suggest that nobody reads that shit. This, of course, is not true. I know for a fact th
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Posted October 15, 2020 Image: Tourists boat by scrap metal pile on Victoria's Selkirk Waters. The project of civic renewal needs us to bring our many gifts to the table—and set an example for the world. Go to story -
Welcome to Victoria—The World’s Unsolved Problem Capital!
Gene Miller posted a comment in Commentary
The project of civic renewal needs us to bring our many gifts to the table—and set an example for the world. SWOONING. Do people still swoon? Informative and very entertaining liner notes with a CD of Charles-Valentin Alkan’s piano music comment that “by the mid-1830’s, Alkan had taken up residence in Paris’s fashionable Square d’Orleans, with the younger Dumas, the ballerina Taglioni, and later, Chopin and George Sand as neighbours,” and friend of the admiring Liszt “whose pianistic style in concerts was capped with such histrionic gestures as swooning at the pia -
Posted August 19, 2020 Photo: Park visitors discuss the tents in Beacon Hill Park The vast resources invested in Victoria’s homeless—without apparent success—provide incentive and the means to fashion a new narrative about this city. Go to story -
The vast resources invested in Victoria’s homeless—without apparent success—provide incentive and the means to fashion a new narrative about this city. All these beauties will already be familiar to the visitor, who has seen them also in other cities. But the special quality of this city for the man who arrives there on a September evening, when the days are growing shorter, is that he feels envy toward those who now believe they have once before lived an evening identical to this and who think they were happy, that time. —Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities I BEGIN WITH THI
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Posted August 11, 2020 Image: Bay Centre Food Court in September 2019, before the pandemic arrived. It’s only when normal takes a holiday that we get an intuitive glimpse of the vast, unseen social and environmental forces that sustain normal. Go to story -
It’s only when normal takes a holiday that we get an intuitive glimpse of the vast, unseen social and environmental forces that sustain normal. THANK GOD, things are getting back to normal! You remember normal, don’t you? You can see signs of its return all around: more people on the streets, more shops with “open” signs, more job-resumed rush hour traffic. Why, the way things are going, it shouldn’t be too long before you’re back complaining about how nothing exciting or out of the ordinary ever happens here. But below that, closer to the bone, how to explain the feeling
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Building design reflects cultural health
Gene Miller posted an article in Development and architecture
June 30, 2020 The ideas embedded in our civic architecture say a lot about the state of our civic citizenship. WITH INCREASING FREQUENCY THESE DAYS, I start watching a movie online or crack open a book only to be prodded, ten minutes or ten pages in, by the realization that it’s the second time around: I’ve seen it or read it before. “Huh, will you think of that!” I say to myself and then walk into the bathroom to make myself a sandwich. But enough about you. The occasional mutter from readers reaches me about how this column is so negative and pessimistic, and how I -
Ch-Ch-Change: Lessons from View Towers
Gene Miller posted an article in Development and architecture
May 28, 2020 View Towers illustrates how civic inattention can lead to unintended consequences. VIEW TOWERS. It sat there, like a spaceship in a cow pasture, between Quadra and Vancouver, Fort and View Streets, a 19-storey heartbreaker silently announcing to everyone who walked or drove by: “Beauty is tricksome and fleeting, and Death awaits thee.” A description in the Islandist states: “The building, completed in 1968, has been locally notorious for much of its 50 year existence, having been the site of several murders, suicides, fatal overdoses, destructive fires, count -
May 13, 2020 The Jawls provide us with examples of how buildings can reflect and build a rational, respectful social vision. I HAVE THIS WAKING FANTASY…Mayor Lisa Helps, just after the start of her first term, back in 2014, is invited by UDI, the property developers’ organization, to be the luncheon speaker. Understandably, the membership wants to get a sense of the priorities, policy directions and “body English” of this new mayor. There are about a 140 attendees, seated at round tables, munching rubber chicken. Finally, lunch eaten and announcements announced, it’s show
