In the City of Glass, tall towers have tended to look alike. The homogenized skyline of Vancouver, British Columbia emerged during a construction boom in the 1990s. As Canada’s most expensive city rezones to increase density in the face of a worsening housing crisis, the skyline’s once implacable uniformity has begun to change, largely at the hands of Westbank, a local developer responsible for a series of striking new additions.
Revery Architecture worked with Westbank on The Butterfly, a 586-foot tower adjacent to First Baptist Church. On the exterior, the tower is cloaked in one of Canada’s all-too-ubiquitous window wall systems, though you’re hardly able to tell, as hollow GFRC panels are hung from the slab edge, swelling outward in bulbous, cloudlike forms. The white cladding alternates with ribbons of curved glazing, rotating in orientation on each floor to create a sense of variety.
