Tag: Eldon Beck

Whistler: A Town

Whistler Village InfluencesWhistler Village Influences

October 23, 2015 Whistler Museum 0 Comments

If the twin peaks of Whistler and Blackcomb Mountains put our town on the map, then Whistler Village is what keeps it there. It didn’t come together overnight; there were more than a few hiccups along the way, but to this day the village remains one of the defining features of our resort.

In the past we shared some stories from Eldon Beck, the lead architect responsible for the Village’s design. With this post we will delve a bit deeper into Beck’s creative process and the physical reality that it resulted in.

Despite the naturalistic approach, a lot of thought got crammed into Beck's initial designs. — Despite the naturalistic approach, a lot of thought got crammed into Beck’s initial designs.

When asked about the main influences on his design, Beck first pointed to his success in redesigning the village at Vail, Colorado.

My professional training is in landscape architecture… In 1972 my firm was hired by the town of Vail to do an overall community master plan… It finally turned into resolving horrendous issues they had about traffic and servicing in their village, so the task was to make it a pedestrian village. So I worked for them as their prime consultant for about six years, from 1972-1978. That really was the bulk of my early mountain planning experience.

It was on the heels of this successful transformation of Vail into a more pedestrian-centric place that Beck was solicited for the new Whistler Village.

Lots of attention were paid to ambiance, the flow of traffic, and sight-lines of the surrounding mountains.

Unsurprisingly he took a similar approach here, to similar success, scrapping the original, grid-style design for his more flee-flowing traffic-free village. Continuing to describe how his work at Vail carried through to Whistler:

Vail did have a fairly important influence, mostly Bridge Street. The shape of the street actually was almost exactly what the shape of the valley suggested.

Going back further, Beck referred to where most influences in the ski world draw from, the Alps…

I’d done a fair amount of European traveling in the mountains, and I was fascinated by villages for a long, long, long time. So both Wengen and Interlaken [in Switzerland were major influences]. I took a lot of pictures there and I used parts of both of them. One as a pedestrian town and the other as a symbol of what a village was with the picture of shops on the ground floor and then the people who own the shops living above it. And so that was kind of the pattern, that’s the historic look of what a village is… The European villages all were shaped by the land. They didn’t violate the land. So to me that was very important. In our continent we tend to dominate the land. We don’t respect it as we should.

And so the Village adopted Beck’s more environmentally oriented design style.

This amazing scale model was produced to help visualize and plan the village before building. Note the planned hockey arena that instead ended up being the Conference Centre.

The Village Stroll was intended to mimic the meandering curves of a flowing stream. Like an actual river, major bends in the route were conceived as eddies, incorporating open plazas where people could take a breather and watch the flow of traffic stream by.

The meanderings were intentional because, even though they weren’t direct or efficient like a grid, that wasn’t the point. Tourists weren’t here for business, Beck reasoned, but to relax, so a little happy confusion was sprinkled into the design. He wanted people to be able get a little lost in the village and wander aimlessly.

Practical considerations were not lost on Beck however; the village still needed to function. Logistical features such as the commercial loading bays, underground parking, hotel entrances and so on were tucked into back alleys in the Stroll’s many folds, hidden from view to keep the noise and distraction away from the pedestrian zones.

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In next week’s post we’ll return to Beck and his reminiscences about the village’s construction and how the reality matched his vision.

Eldon Beck: The Brains behind Whistler VillageEldon Beck: The Brains behind Whistler Village

November 12, 2011 Whistler Museum 9 Comments

When Whistler Mountain entered the ski scene during the winter of 1965-66 it was a pretty big deal, but is was still “just” a ski hill. It wasn’t until the 1980s, once Blackcomb had opened and Whistler Village had been constructed that Whistler’s trajectory to international mega-resort was set.

Eldon Beck, an American landscape architect who had made a name for himself working at Vail, Colorado, was the village’s design mastermind, and the Museum has a bunch of photographs and a 2005 oral history with Beck which give some cool insights into this seminal period.

With local developers and the provincial government recognizing that the Whistler Valley had the potential to completely revolutionize the ski world, the Resort Municipality of Whistler was established in 1975, the first “Resort Municipality” in Canada. By this point, plans were already underway for the construction of ski lifts on Blackcomb and a centrally located, purpose-built village to service the twin ski hills.

Designs were solicited, but they left much to be desired, so in the summer of 1978 Al Raine visited Beck in Vail for some outside input:

Al came to town and described what they were doing at Whistler, and I’d never heard of Whistler. So Al pulled the [existing Whistler Village] plan out and said, “You know, something’s not right with this. Could you take a look at it?” … It was basically a little grid plan. It was like a little city, and a lot of the images felt like a mini-Vancouver… there were major roadways crossing from one side of the Village to the other. There was a pedestrian [spine], but it had these really very heavy duty auto crossings over it. So you can kind of imagine both cars and people running together at critical locations… The land always tells you what to do. In this case, there was a plan imposed upon that. That was the major problem.

Beck’s initial comments were intriguing enough to earn an invite to Whistler to help amend the designs. During this initial visit Beck spent a lot of time walking around, getting to know the lay of the land and paying close attention to sight-lines. At one point Beck climbed to the top of a spruce tree and recognized the potential for a clear view of Fissile Mountain if the Village Gate was designed just right (thanks Eldon!). Later that day he reconvened with the resort development bigwigs in their corporate office:

I don’t know whose garage it was, but we went into a garage, and the Council was there and they were kind of all gathered around and we said hello and shook hands. This was a Saturday morning and they said, “We have a meeting tomorrow at two. Could you have something for us at two.” And I said, “Of course.”…

What I found in a lot of my design process, I kind of load my brain up and then I sleep on it. So at about four in the morning I woke up and I could really see it pretty clearly. So I got up and basically drew the plan and we worked on it then during the morning, but we had it ready for the two o’clock meeting, and presented it. And they all said, “Hey, that’s what we want to do.” It was supposed to have been a modification of the existing plan, [but] it really became pretty apparent that that was not the way to do it.

And so the Village design adopted a completely new course, following Beck’s lead.

From these initial sketches further details were hammered out.

This early sketch shows the attention to detail and 3-dimensional layout that went into Beck’s designs.

Beck (at centre) was hired on to oversee the project’s construction through 1979 & 1980. Village Square, behind the group pictured here, turned out to be Beck’s favourite part of the completed village.

Beck was initially frustrated by the lack of control he was given with the details of individual buildings, but over time, came to appreciate what he had initially considered to be “dozens of mistakes and imperfections.” The end result was sufficient to have him called back years later to oversee the design of Village North, Main Street and Blackcomb Village as well.

What are your thoughts? Is the Village a masterpiece or glorified mall? Does the consistency of design lead to a comforting or contrived feel?