Tower Cranes and Taylor. Hello Vancouver

Tacos and Tower Cranes is back after a hiatus and we’re going international, with the first stop in Vancouver. I’ve run into a few people recently who have asked me what’s up with my tower crane posts. The honest answer is that I have been lagging. However, I’m here to give the people what they want. As for the Taylor Easter egg...keep reading to the end.
 
Vancouver is a beautiful city that checks a lot of boxes: great architecture, great culture, great scenery. I was able to see with my own eyes two projects I have admired from afar: The Vancouver House by Bjarke Ingles/BIG and The Butterfly, by Revery Architects:

​Given this trifecta of architecture, culture and scenery, the city has been growing like crazy over the past several years. According to a report from rennie  landscape, Vancouver in 2023 has experienced a 49% increase in project starts over its 10-year average, population is expected to grow by 2 million over the next 20 years, and rental rates are rising, with an underserved purpose-built rental market. (Click here for the full rennie landscape report. It's a treasure trove of data for those interested in Vancouver) This is a recipe for more housing, and in a well-planned urban center like Vancouver, that means high-rise construction, which is the gateway to tower cranes. While the rennie landscape publication was from 2023, a reddit user with the handle u/LivinAWestLife posted a graphic showing that Vancouver has 128 buildings with 10 or more stories actively in construction as of July 2024, placing the metro area in the top ten in the United States and Canada in terms of total projects (#3) and construction per capita (also #3).

​So all of this made a lot of sense as I walked/ran/strutted my way through Vancouver's urban core and saw plenty of tower cranes. The odd part is that I didn't see most of them. An unknown, but obviously cool, stranger, has created a Google Spreadsheet showing 197 active tower cranes in the metro area. Here are a few that I saw on high-rise projects that seemed to be multi-family or mixed-use projects:

On a particularly early morning, I came across a PCL Construction project that is a 548-bed ground-up hospital that will serve as the new St. Paul's Hospital: 

Outside of the urban core, I was able to observe a couple of projects, with the first being in Kitsland, due west of the Granville Island Public Market:

And a whole bunch of tower cranes in North Vancouver. This picture doesn't do the whole area justice...there were tower craned dotting the entire landscape:

But where Vancouver gets an A+, because the city obviously understood the assignment, was its preparation for the Taylor Swift Eras tour. There were signs throughout the town, but when the tower cranes get in on the act, that's pure art:
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Well played Vancouver. I hope to be back soon.
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