Passage Island Retreat

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As I worked out details, the interior slowly evolved into a one-bedroom, one-bathroom design. An L-shaped living-dining-kitchen area would be brightly lit by a 32-foot-wide spread of double-glazed windows soaring 16 feet high. Due to the self-supporting characteristics of the roof, a lintel (or header) over the 32-foot span would be unnecessary. The top of the window frame would simply be a 1 X 6 lying on its flat side, with a little concrete furring to accommodate the curved roof. In the middle of the living room would be a five-foot circular fireplace with a stone base under a chimney suspended from the roof. Outdoor living would be important in this environment, so I included 1,150 square feet of patio space in the planning.

With the design frozen, next came site preparation. Lot 56 on the southeast part of the island offered views of the North Shore Mountains, downtown Vancouver to the east and the American San Juan Islands to the south, but the site was mostly uneven bedrock, calling for extensive blasting to create a flat spot for the house. (Actually, most building sites here and even on the mainland of West Vancouver are on bedrock, making our local blaster one of the wealthiest individuals in the area.) To avoid the cost of transporting an air compressor, we used a Punjar gas-powered rock drill to place the explosives. The broken rock left after the blasting had to be moved aside but eventually would be used to give the house its fireproof exterior. (I ended up moving the rock by hand twice, because I decided to extend a patio where I'd initially piled the broken-up rock.)

Finally it was time to bring over building materials. The most practical approach was to charter a towboat and barge to haul everything over in one trip. The materials, a mobile crane and a secondhand quarter-yard cement mixer were all loaded at a barge ramp in False Creek. Unloading at Passage Island on September 1, 1968, was uneventful. The crane operator used a clamshell to of load the sand and gravel, and the rest was shifted by hook and slings.

Now I was ready to start. But start where? As a building contractor, I had built several hundred houses, but I hadn't had a hammer or saw in my hand since I was a boy, working for my older brother, Bob. Not only that, I'd never built a shell structure, nor for that matter had anyone else in Canada. Oh, yes, there was a hyperbolic paraboloid in Edmonton covering a swimming pool and another in Montreal at the 1967 World's Fair, but they weren't shells. These were four to six-inch-thick macho roofs, not to be compared to Candela's elegant shells.

It would have been foolish to hire a forming crew. They would have stood around half the time waiting for me to decide what to do next. So I hired Roy Borden, a young West Vancouverite, to give me a hand. He was of medium build, well muscled, and turned out to be a good worker who enjoyed the extemporary aspect of the novel job.

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