The last of Vancouver

I've already posted most of the faces that I found on the Hotel Vancouver (sorry, The Fairmont Hotel Vancouver) - here and here.

But after posting the sculpture of George Vancouver's ship Discovery yesterday, I had to finish off with this sculpture from the Georgia Street entrance of the hotel. (Actually, this is the third Hotel Vancouver on this site, at Georgia and Burrard. The Architects were John S. Archibald and John Schofield who began construction in 1928, and finished 11 years later, in time for the first Canadian visit of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth.)


Above it is Hermes, the Greek messenger god who was also the god of commerce. (His Roman counterpart is Mercury.)



And here ends the faces I bagged while in Vancouver. There are more, but there is only so much hunting I can do when I'm travelling for the Day Job.

Marine Building, Vancouver (part 2)

The Marine Building, at Hastings and Burrard, is one of Canada's great art deco masterpieces. Construction began in 1929 and almost immediately upon completion in 1930, became a victim of the Great Depression. Its owners had trouble attracting tenants and by 1933, sold the building which had cost $2.3 million (more than $1 million over budget) for a paltry $900,000.

The Marine Building has an interesting history, but I'm keen to get back to the decoration. The Burrard Street entrance (above), features a ship's prow sailing out of the sunset, with Canada geese flying across the rays.



Along the inside of the archway at the entrance are terra cotta reliefs of ships that are significant in Vancouver history — including, of course, Captain George Vancouver's ship, HMS Discovery, with which he explored the coasts of British Columbia in 1792.



As for faces on the Marine building (apart from the faces of the sealife that appear everywhere), there are two images of Neptune. You can glimpse one of them in the picture of the top six or seven storeys in the previous post. Here's a close-up, in which you can clearly see the Roman god of the sea clutching his trident.



Neptune also appears as the figurehead on a ship on a two-storey-long sculptural work on another corner of the building. The detail here also gives a nice close-up (if I do say so myself) of a seahorse:

More Victoria

I have posted so little this month that I decided to make up for it in the last days of June. My camera decided to function today (of course - not when I needed it for the pediatrics conference), so I took some pictures in my hotel room. Here, for instance, is my travelling buddy* studying a map of Victoria.

*This does not mean I am taking up hunting garden gnomes and giving up gargoyles.

Victoria, B.C.

My camera decided to quit when I arrived in Victoria to cover the annual meeting of the Canadian Pediatric Society. So I have no Victoria gargoyles to show you. But I do have this great commerical for Lotto 6/49 from the B.C. Lottery Corporation. The music is great and I'm not sure who/what I'm more entranced by - the leaping cats or the woman's bowl of Froot Loops: