The architect who designed the building was interned as a child. The land was purchased with redress money. The opening date was chosen to mark the anniversary of an apology. Inside are 670 recorded voices and 52,500 photographs from a community that lost everything and built this anyway.
Artom Butenko · 9 min read
In 1985, the Aga Khan and the Prime Minister opened a building shaped like a prayer. Bruno Freschi designed it around a single geometric form — the octagon, "where the centre is everywhere, and everyone is in the centre." Thirteen years earlier, President Idi Amin had expelled the community that would fill it.
Artom Butenko · 6 min read
He voiced Goku, left over a pay dispute, and went home to Burnaby to create a cartoon about growing up on Royal Oak Avenue. The piano store became a keyboard shop. The house became a drawing. The city became sixty-five episodes of a show that YTV aired for three years and then forgot.
Artom Butenko · 5 min read
On July 8, 1948, Andy Digney opened a quarter-mile oval with grandstands for 4,500. Men bought 1930s cars, welded the doors shut, and raced. By 1958 the track was gone. Towers stand on the site now.
Artom Butenko · 6 min read
Edmonds: a Dublin speculator who built a tramway to inflate his own land prices. Gilmore: a bureaucratic typo that replaced a politician's real name forever. Metrotown: a term borrowed from a Baltimore urban planning report. Sperling: it was Pole Line Road until someone renamed it after the electricity company's manager. Every name is an act of power somebody forgot to explain.
Artom Butenko · 7 min read
In 1946, five hundred houses went up in North Burnaby in eighteen months. Ninety per cent of the first residents were veterans who had come home from the war and needed somewhere to live. The brochure called it "the largest single veteran housing project in Canada." Now the province says the lots are too big for one family.
Artom Butenko · 6 min read
In the 1890s, Chinese farmers leased land nobody else wanted and turned cranberry marshes into the most productive vegetable farms in the region. By 1921, they supplied ninety per cent of British Columbia's vegetables. They were barred from voting, owning property, and holding municipal jobs. Twenty-seven of their farms may still be operating.
Artom Butenko · 7 min read
