Plans for one of Vancouver's tallest skyscrapers recently passed a design-review hurdle, the latest sign of a tall-building boom sweeping Cascadia's biggest cities.
The new 59-story hotel-office-residential combination would rival a new Shangri-La Hotel slated for completion by 2008. The projects will dramatically alter the modest Vancouver skyline that has preserved views of the mountains. They could even begin to shift the feel of the city -- if you buy the idea, quoted in the latest issue of Dwell magazine, that the focus on the outdoors has kept Vancouver's urban culture restrained.
Meanwhile Seattle recently approved taller towers, a step that had been verboten since the building boom of the 1980s. Even Portland, with its small blocks and human-scale buildings, may grow taller as it fills underused land near downtown.
The difference from earlier building booms is that channeling growth appears to be a larger part of the calculations, in addition to the vanity of building taller towers. Vancouver, where the first building above 37 stories opened in 2001, needs more office space in the center city to counter sprawl. Seattle's traffic is bad enough to stoke demand for more close-in housing. Concentrating building along Portland's existing transit corridors would maximize return on the investment.