RICHARD HENRIQUEZ(s), ACCLAIMED LUSO JAMAICAN CANADIAN ARCHITECT


"Henriquez has an interesting history himself. He's of Portuguese-Jewish descent, from a family that left their home in the 17th century to escape the Portuguese Inquisition."

Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/Architect+adds+gallery+career/6780249/story.html#ixzz2AF5nLEJe

John Mackie, Vancouver Sun, Canada
 jmackie@vancouversun.com




 

Photograph by: Arlen Redekop, PNG , Vancouver Sun

Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/Architect+adds+gallery+career/6780249/story.html#ixzz2AF5YC7Xi

Richard Henriquez is one of Vancouver's most acclaimed architects. He designed the condo tower with the tree on the roof near the Sylvia Hotel in the West End, as well as the BC Cancer Agency building with the groovy round petri dish windows near Vancouver General Hospital. He even revitalized several historic structures by melding them into the Sinclair Centre at Granville and Hastings.
But architecture isn't his only creative outlet: he's also an artist. And at 71, he's having his first show in a commercial gallery.
Narrative Fragments brings together Henriquez's sculptures, drawings and computer-animated "digital collages." The opening at the Winsor Gallery last Thurs-day drew a crowd of about 400 of Henriquez's friends and admirers, including one who spent $8,000 for the mixed media collage Violin in Richmond.
"I'm an old guy, I've got lots of friends," Henriquez chuck-led when asked about the big turnout.
The first thing you notice about Henriquez's art is the tripods. He's been collecting them for years, then adding found objects to turn them into sculptures.
"I have maybe 60 of them now." he notes. "They come in two varieties: they're either for cameras or they're for surveying instruments. They're a very primitive, stable form of structure that was used to lift stone blocks, probably in the Roman times. I just love the look of them, the materiality of them and so on.
"I started collecting them, and started to think about what they really represented. They sup-ported instruments, very technical instruments that measured things or recorded things. So I thought I would replace these technical things with intuitively created objects that came from the other side of the brain."
Hence you get tripods affixed with toy bulls, surveyor's boxes, old animal skulls, fans, driftwood, and paper mâche creatures. The funkiest one might be Toy Trumpet, which actually features a toy saxophone.
"It's a little [instrument] that comes with a scroll," he explains. "I took the scroll off. I guess you wound it up and it made a sound, like a toy player piano. I found it on Main Street in a junk shop."
Violin in Richmond is a collage with a toy violin at the centre, reminiscent of something by the great Spanish artist Juan Gris.
"It's got a little toy violin, it's got a soup bone, and it's got part of an architectural model," Henriquez relates.
"I saved it because I liked the look of it, and started applying things, putting [bits of] newspaper on it. Each piece in a collage has its own story, you see. These fragments represent history.
"Think about this violin, where it comes from. Wood was grown somewhere in Southeast Asia, someone cut it down. Someone sold it from a wholesaler to some-one who made toy violins, some guy carved the thing, and it found its way to Vancouver into a junk shop."
Henriquez has an interesting history himself. He's of Portuguese-Jewish descent, from a family that left their home in the 17th century to escape the Portuguese Inquisition.
"I grew up in Jamaica," he explains. "My family [first] moved there in 1690. They lived in one little corner of Jamaica from 1690 till when I was born, on the north coast, near Ocho Rios. They had plantations, or they were merchants, things like that."
He fell in love with architecture as a kid.
"I had a grand-uncle who was an architect and an engineer and a sculptor/painter, a really neat guy," he says. "When I was 10 I decided [to become an architect]."
His uncle's son was studying architecture at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, so that's where Henriquez went, too.
"It was kind of exciting when the snow came for the first time," he laughs.
"I made angels in the snow and all that. But then the cold set in. I remember standing at a bus stop in front of the Great West Life Building on Osborne one night thinking I was going to die. I was sure I was going to die."
After he graduated in 1964, he moved back to Jamaica with his wife Carol and son Gregory. Gregory is now a prominent architect, while Carol founded and ran Arts Umbrella for 25 years. But he left to get a master's degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), then came to Vancouver in 1967.
"My wife's from Saskatoon," he says. "She wasn't that keen on Jamaica, so we decided to come back, and settled in the warmest place we could find in the country."
A classmate from Winnipeg, Bob Todd, helped him land a job at Rhone & Iredale. Two years later he and Todd set up their own firm.
"We were together for eight years," he says. "We did little houses, cabins on the Gulf Islands. What starting architects do, houses, renovations. Optical shops.
"The Gaslight Square project [on Water Street in Gastown], the courtyard, was the first sort of significant project that we got. Then I did a building for Bob Lee in Chinatown, the Lee Building."
Henriquez thrived in the 1980s, when he worked on the tower beside the Sylvia Hotel (1984), the Sinclair Centre (1986) and Eugenia Place (1987), the condo with the tree on the roof.
"I got interested in trying to combine narrative with architecture," says Henriquez, who won the gold medal from the Royal Architecture Institute of Canada in 2005.
"I thought if we could somehow think of [Eugenia Place] as an archeological site, with layers of history, trying to represent every-thing that has ever been on the site, [you could] give people the idea that they live in a historical continuum.
"The first thing on the site was the first-growth forest. Then they built four little cabins at the turn of the century, and in 1947 they built a three-storey wood frame building that we tore down to build the tower. So if you look at the site, you'll see the footprints of all of them."
How? He had a sculptor create concrete stumps to represent the trees that had been cut, then he put a tree on the roof, to represent the height of the old-growth forest before Europeans arrived to chop it all down.
"But just to stick it up there didn't seem kind of right," he says. "So there's this screw-like thing [in the front] that looks like it could have lifted it up to the height of the first-growth forest."
It's a cool little feature, like a futuristic 19-storey high bay window. Like a screw, it tapers at the bottom and has a big head at the top. Unlike a screw, it looks like it has a tree growing out of it. Which is one of the most distinctive architectural touches on any recent building in Vancouver - and is historically appropriate, to boot.
"The forest was about a couple hundred feet tall," he says with a smile. "They were big trees."
AT A GLANCE
RICHARD HENRIQUEZ: NARRATIVE FRAGMENTS

Where: Winsor Gallery, 3025 Granville
Info: http: //winsorgallery.com http: //henriquezpartners.com/
jmackie@vancouversun.com

Richard Henriquez | Henriquez Partners Architects

henriquezpartners.com/people/richard-henriquez/

GENOME PROJECT-From Jamaica to Vancouver to Portugal-part 1

This article first appeared in Portuguese on February 1, 2011 in Terra Quente, a bi-monthly newspaper in Tras-os-Montes, Portugal, and in English at www.ladina.blogspot.com

Richard George Henriques, A Canadian architect in search of his roots.http://www.imprensaregional.com.pt/jornal_terra_quente/index.php?info=YTozOntzOjU6Im9wY2FvIjtzOjE1OiJub3RpY2lhc19saXN0YXIiO3M6OToiaWRfc2VjY2FvIjtzOjI6IjE2IjtzOjk6ImlkX2VkaWNhbyI7czoyOiI3MiI7fQ==

Antonio J. Andrade and M. Fernanda Guimaraes

Translated and revised by mlopesazevedo and M. Fernanda Guimaraes

(the authors assert copyright)

Henriquez Partners is a prestigious architectural firm in Canada. Their most emblematic work is found in Vancouver where they are located. Some of their highrise projects form part of the panoramic of the city. Other noteworthy projects are part of urban renewal, sometimes constituting a set of buildings or even an entire block. There are also significant buildings in the arts, medicine, and scientific research. There are innovative projects, from the boldest modernism to very contextural designs inspired by adjoining Neo-Classical re-creations. The firm enjoys an international reputation and has won more than a dozen awards, in particular, the Governor General's gold medal, which the firm has received twice and the Royal Architectural Institute Gold Medal, which Richard received in 2003.

The firm has about 30 members, headed by architect Alfred Gregory Henriquez whose mentor and thesis advisor was the celebrated architect and historian Alberto Perez-Gomes, professor of architecture and engineering at the University of Montreal. But the founder and builder of the firm is his father, the architect Richard George Henriquez. It is the latter that is at the heart of our story, which will lead us to multiple references of a Sephardic family that left its mark in many parts of the world during several centuries. We are restricting our research to Portugal, especially the Inquisition trial records (“processos”) that can be found at the Torre do Tombo archives in Lisbon.

First, we wish to point out that the surname Henriquez was Hispanicized at the turn of the last century during the construction of the Panama canal. Therefore, for the purposes of our work, we will adopt the Portuguese spelling, Henriques, the name which connects this Jewish family to Portugal since the 15th century. Other branches of the family kept the Portuguese spelling in the diaspora.

We would also like to relate how this adventure began, yes this project, not the architectural one! Richard had been trying for two years to obtain processos from the Torre do Tombo but lack of knowledge of the Lusitanian language of Camoes hindered him, so he decided to attend in person at the archives. Richard has been making many such trips over the last 20 years to places such as the USA, , England, France, Spain, Holland, wherever his ancestors led him. By chance, a Luso-Canadian lawyer referred him to Fernanda Guimaraes who practically lives at the Torre.

It was in the summer of 2008 when Richard and his wife arrived in Lisbon. There is an old saying in Portuguese, when hunger calls, the appetite strikes. In other words, at precisely the same time that Richard was looking for the processos, Fernanda was researching them. Unkowingly, Fernanda had been studying Richard`s ancestors in such dispersed places as Torre De Moncorvo, Vila Flor, Trancoso, Celorico da Beira, Miranda do Douro, and Viseu, all places with a significant Jewish population before the forced baptism of 1497. ( All Portuguese Jews were forcibly baptized in 1497, thereafter called New Christians). Fernanda was also aware that some members of the family had fled Portugal to such places as Madrid, Bordeaux, Amsterdam and then London to escape the clutches of the Inquisition. Fernanda offered her services and Richard was pleased.

Richard George Henriques was born on February 5, 1941 in Annotto Bay on the north coast of Jamaica, within the limits of the town of Port Maria, baptized Puerto de Santa Maria by the first Spanish colonizers. His mother's name was Essie Adeline Silvera, also Anglocised (Silveira in Portuguese), and his father Alfred George Henriques was born in 1916. They were a typical merchant and agricultural family working on plantations , however Richard's father was soon working in Jamaica to help boost agricultural production during wartime. On becoming aware of the peril facing Jews in Europe and with an appetite for adventure Richard’s father, volunteered and joined the British Air Force . During his tender years, Richard remembers a particularly violent storm, almost a hurricane, which destroyed the family home in which his sister, Kathleen Maye Henriques, his mother and Grandmother also lived. At about the same time Richard’s mother learned that her 28 year old husband, now a bomber pilot in the British air force had been shot down by an enemy plane on a night operation aimed at Warsaw. The death of his father coincided with the uprising of the Warsaw ghetto and must have contributed to Richard's destiny to become the family genealogist.

Without a father and the family home in ruins, Richard and his sister went to live with his paternal grandparents, Alfred St. Elmo Henriques, and Linda Maye Cohen Henriques, at Greenwood, a citrus plantation. Richard has fond memories from his time at Greenwood, frequent trips to the beach supervised by his aunt Rita, moonlight filled nights on the house porch with his grandfather unravelling the mysteries of life and the world, and his grandfather’s adventures as a young man. Perhaps it was these nostalgic evenings and the absence of a father killed in a distant land that ignited Richard's interest in discovering his roots.

Later, Richard's mother married Francis Roy Henriques, his grandfather's nephew. The family settled in Buff Bay, a small seaside town, 40 kilometres from their previous home, where his mother and stepfather had three other children. Of the five siblings, four now live in Vancouver.

Richard started primary school when he was seven and has some unpleasant memories of being bullied. When he was about ten years old he decided to become an architect like his uncle Rudolph Daniel Cohen Henriques whom he got to know during summer vacations. Uncle Dossie, as Richard called him was a talented self-educated man, architect, sculptor and painter. He served an architectural apprenticeship at a New York engineering firm and with Richard’s grandfather went to Panama when the Panama canal was being built. He returned to Jamaica to start an architectural, engineering and construction business with several of his brothers. Richard has fond memories of uncle Dossie's trip home to see his wife, sister and her family on the north coast of Jamaica, amusing the children with sculpting animals in clay. Uncle Dossie had married Gwendolyn Cohen Henriques, Linda's sister and Richard's paternal grandmother. Their son, Maurice Karl Cohen Henriques graduated from architecture in 1957 from the University of Manitoba in Canada. Richard soon followed in his footsteps, and the rest is history as it is said.

Source

Howard Shubert, Geoffrey Smedley, Robert Enright, Richard Henriques, Selected Works, 1964-2005, Douglas & McIntyre, Vancouver, Toronto, 2006