Opinion: It's hard to match those clashing styles

By: Marty Hykin

Looking at the artist's rendition of the commercial buildings which the WAM Group proposes to build at the Songhees Marina I must say that the city has an almost impossible task in deciding whether to approve them.

Mayor Dean Fortin is quoted as saying: "We are limited to analyzing what's known as form and character - does the design fit within the general form and character of the neighbourhood."

That is the dilemma in a nutshell. The "character" of the collection of cardboard cutout buildings lining the Songhees waterfront is essentially incoherent.

Individual specimens remind me variously of penitentiaries, mental hospitals, or Miami Beach hotels of the 1950s. All together they present a visually indigestible mess of clashing styles, their rooflines strewn with ersatz domes, peaks, and pyramids which bear relation neither to the buildings upon which they have been pasted, nor to any classic form or historical traditions.A

nything built to fit that neighbourhood's "character" can only add insult to esthetic injury ... in my humble opinion.

Marty Hykin Victoria