The West End’s modern apartment complexes overlook and owe their high real estate value to Stanley Park and its picturesque forest just across Lost Lagoon. The park is home to ancient Douglas firs and red cedars, their age marked by ferns, mosses, lichen, and other epiphytes clinging to their bark. Residents of the West End can walk through the park to take in this natural complexity, but the buildings they live in, constructed on land previously occupied by the same wildness, lack any sense of intrigue or ecological value. West End buildings constructed from the 1950s-1970s are especially rigid, with completely flat and unarticulated facades marked by repetitive rectangular windows.

Our intervention, a modular system of facade additions, aims to reintroduce fragments of lost ecological complexity to the West End. Organic forms of fabric stuffed with rough dead plant material invite birds and epiphytic plants to colonize the facades of previously blank buildings. Residents could look out their windows not only to the canopy across the road, but to pieces of tree trunks and suggestions of the forest floor right next to them. Repeatable, low-cost, and implementable on existing structures, these ecological meshes will help break down the binary of nature and urbanism that currently characterizes this neighborhood and many other parts of Vancouver.