Articles published in FOCUS Magazine, Victoria, Canada
On this page you can find page scans converted to PDF of all my FOCUS Magazine articles, starting with November 2006. There’s a “bonus” item from October 2006 — the letter to the editor at FOCUS, which got me the job of writing for the magazine on a monthly basis.
Note: these PDFs take a long time to load. Don’t try loading more than one at a time — you’ll likely get a blank page if you do. These documents may not be used without permission by third parties for any purpose. They remain © Yule Heibel.
There are also two other articles of mine on VibrantVictoria’s articles page, which you can read online.
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Clicking on the link will bring up a PDF of the article, as scanned from the magazine pages.
October 2006 “Bonus”: Why the Corazon is a great addition to the street (Not an article, but a letter-to-the-editor that landed me the job of writing a monthly column at FOCUS Magazine.)
November 2006: The fine line between street vibrancy and dead zones — Q: How many Victorians does it take to change a light bulb? A: None. They like the old one.
December 2006: Consuming Downtown — What brings people downtown? (with special thnx to Pet Clark…)
No Jan.07 column (the Victoria by Design section was entirely devoted to the Independence Settlement Project)
February 2007: Discovering Changes — Would the architect of Victoria’s most charming and celebrated buildings be rolling in his grave if he knew his work had helped encourage decades of city-visioning based on avoiding change?
March 2007: Private affairs in public spaces — Have parts of downtown Victoria — Centennial Square for example — been conceived as though their creators thought the best way to experience them would be from the privacy of a moving car?
April 2007: The “right height” debate — The recent approval by city council for a 24-storey building as part of the redevelopment of the Bay site was given as a reward for the developer’s commitment to preserving the circa 1921 Edwardian Classical Temple style edifice. But DRA’s Rob Randall says we still haven’t had the critical dialogue about downtown height and density.
May 2007: Spatial micro-climates: how to make a corner — In terms of street vibrancy, the higgledy-piggledy organic street layout of older cities such as Seville, Spain may have a natural advantage over the hard-edged grid of newly-built Victoria. What can we do to compensate?
June 2007: AGGV downtown: will it fly? — The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria is on a space mission: desiring to launch a 25,000-square-foot satellite into downtown’s orbit, its dream is fuelled by a developer’s rocket, which could fly — or, depending on economic forecast and/or political weather, crash in council chambers.
July 2007: A soft-core view of Victoria — wherein the author focuses on qualities of built form & cities, using theories of evolutionary psychology and categories developed by Grant Hildebrand to analyze what attracts and repels.
August 2007: Biophilic design: taking love to the street — A modest proposal for an urban intersection (View & Vancouver Streets), which argues that while we know regular exposure to nature is good for us, we perfect designs that keep nature out, sometimes even erase our awareness of it.
September 2007: Of ducks and decorated sheds (original title: “Sheds meaning like a duck”: what we need from buildings)
October 2007: The Belleville plan: it’s all wrong — Victoria ought to be building its cultural tourism infrastructure; this plan doesn’t do it.
November 2007: Victoria’s genius locus: perspectives from the water — If the Belleville Street task force got it wrong, what’s needed to make it right?
December 2007: Not just another brick in the wall — The greenwall proposed for Gateway Green would reconnect art and architecture
January 2008: The death of a good idea — A creative plan for a downtown location for the AGGV is toast. What went wrong?
February 2008: Ditch height restrictions; adopt “good design” prescriptions — A survey of downtown’s landscape shows that restrictive zoning is bad for our savannah brains.
Theme: Pool by Borja Fernandez.
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