Barry Downs with his young family in Downs House I, Vancouver. Photo by Selwyn Pullan, courtesy of the West Vancouver Art Museum
In the ruthless postwar arena to build the nation in the modern paradigm, Barry Downs presented an anomaly. Soft-spoken, modest, and devoted to both architecture and family life, he brought a rare sensibility to his work. When he died, in July, at age 92, it marked the passing of one of the last giants of West Coast Modernism.
Mr. Downs built his career in the second wave of Canadian modernism, when verdant lots on the West Coast were cheap and plentiful. The timing allowed him to benefit from the mentorship of the earlier architectural trailblazers, including Ned Pratt and Ron Thom. As he built his career through the late 1950s and 1960s, his houses and public buildings bridged the often-austere high modernism of the day with a more earthy, organic sensibility that fit the coastal context. Barry Vance Downs grew up in a C.B.K. Van Norman-designed home, whose steeply pitched roof, timber and stucco gables, baronial oak-plank front door, and huge garden made an indelible impression on him as a young boy. During high school, he befriended Art Phillips, who later became one of his first clients and later still one of the most transformational mayors of Vancouver.
After two listless years studying commerce at the University of British Columbia, Downs moved to Seattle in 1950 to study architecture. Although UBC had just established its own architecture...