Vancouver's architecture, by design, was never meant to handle extreme heat

Two summers ago, as Dennis Laplante baked beneath the skylights in his home during a lethal heat wave, he decided the day had come to use the emergency space blankets he'd been saving for 20 years.

He dug two of the crinkly silver blankets out of his basement and hauled them up a three-metre ladder to reach the windows. Using some curtain rods, he rigged the material against the skylights to block the sun from getting in his 1980s townhouse.

"It was quite cheap and it worked really well," said Laplante, now 70, who has lived in Vancouver's Champlain Heights neighbourhood nearly half his life.

"The space blankets actually degraded in the sun," he noted. "The following year and this year again ... we put some cardboard with aluminum foil up."

Experts say much of Vancouver's architecture is uniquely vulnerable to intensifying heat in Canada, because it was designed for milder weather, leaving the city with tens of thousands of buildings needing urgent upgrades. They say designers need to shift back to basic, sustainable building techniques to keep residents cool naturally, because relying on air conditioning won't be a long-term solution.

"There's lessons in history," said Donald Luxton, who has worked as a heritage consultant in the city for 40 years. "We have to just think really hard about the environment and not try to conquer it, but work with it. And that's more, historically, how buildings were designed."

Said Luxton, "I think we've forgotten a lot of things that our parents and grandparents probably knew about."

Indigenous people who lived in the area — the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səlil̓wətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples — had an innate understanding of the need to design buildings to work with the climate, rather than against it, based on their in-depth knowledge of the land.

Homes had removable curtain walls — or outer coverings — to control sun exposure and air flow. Split cedar planks were used on rooftops, which could be angled or rotated to manage rain.

"There are these innovations of Indigenous cultures right here in the Vancouver area that are meaningful as we look forward now to the changing climate and how can we keep our buildings comfortable," said Nancy Mackin, an architect who studies Indigenous design.

"There's so much to be learned from just having this intense awareness of what's around us."

After colonization, much of Vancouver's architecture used Victorian-era porches, verandas and small glass windows that reduced sun exposure and allowed for a cross-breeze, Luxton said.

By the 1960s, mid-level high-rises were replacing single-family homes in the city's West End. Glass-walled condos started dominating the skyline in the 1980s, proving extremely profitable in a city known for its views. 

"In a place like Vancouver, where so much of what you're selling is location and view and access to nature ... more glass was a really big, big selling point," said Sara Stevens, an associate professor of architecture at the University of British Columbia.