Exquisitely detailed drawings offer a “field guide” to ubiquitous but overlooked elements of Vancouver’s urban landscape.
Three series of intricate graphite drawings depict, with arresting realism, real-world examples of assembled, grown, and built objects common to distinct milieus of Vancouver: the shopping carts piled high with belongings that clatter along sidewalks in the downtown core; the long, high hedges that insulate single-family homes from the din of arterial traffic; and the sculptural lions placed for good luck atop fenceposts in front of many homes, especially on the city’s east side.
In creating snapshots and then laborious drawings of these objects, Taizo Yamamoto, the principal of Yamamoto Architecture, was driven by a fascination with how the recurrence of these seemingly mundane objects speaks to omnipresent issues of housing unaffordability, densification, and the aspirations of diasporic communities—conc
