Local Architect Omel Arbel designs 2010 Olympic Medals

October 30, 2009 — Eric

Local architect and in industrial designer, probably best know for his Bocci lights, is collaborating with the 2010 Olympics to help design the medals. This is a great local story for a talented designer/architect that has really made a name for himself.

You can read the full story here.

Every medal won at the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games will be unique — a first in Games history. Recently unveiled to great critical acclaim, the medals designed by Omer Arbel are characterized by an undulating form meant to abstractly represent ocean waves, drifting snow and the mountainous landscape surrounding Vancouver.

On the medal’s surface, Arbel applied two large master artworks of an orca whale (Olympic) and raven (Paralympic) by Vancouver-based Corrine Hunt, a Canadian artist of Komoyue and Tlingit heritage. Hunt’s artwork was produced at a large scale, and then a specific, cropped section of the larger art was applied to each of the individual medals, making each unique. A silk scarf printed with the master artwork will be presented to each medallist along with their medal, enabling them to see how their medal connects with those awarded to other athletes at the Games and to make the artwork complete. Like a puzzle, it takes all of the individual medals to complete the artwork.

The medals were produced by the Royal Canadian Mint using metals supplied by Canadian mining company Teck Resources.

Omer Arbel is an industrial designer and architect based in Vancouver who leads OAO – a design office focused on eliminating the boundaries between the traditionally defined fields of architecture, industrial design, material research, manufacturing and invention. This basic conceptual approach has resulted in unexpected and inventive works which have positioned the practice as one of Canada’s most experimental and innovative young design offices. The practice has been extensively published, has won some of the highest profile international design awards,

and exhibited work in some of the most celebrated venues worldwide.

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Real Estate recovery seems to be Canadian wide

October 30, 2009 — Eric

This is an interesting article from the Montreal Gazette talking about Montreal house prices climbing in the last few months. So it’s not just Vancouver that is in a unique position of recovery. But also note, that Vancouver is still one of the most unaffordable places to live in Canada.

You can also see the original story here.

If you’re a homeowner, the past six months or so have been reassuring. Last winter’s nationwide collapse in home prices has not only eased, but by some measures completely disappeared.

That’s great news if you might want to sell any time soon. Of course, it’s not such great news if you’d like to buy.

Indeed, some have even begun to wonder if a new bubble in home prices might be starting to inflate. That’s not likely in the opinion of most analysts, but it’s not impossible, either.

The Canadian Real Estate Association’s average of all Canadian transactions in September might seem to justify such fears, showing prices at an all-time high of $331,602, up a blazing 13.6 per cent from a year earlier.

Another yardstick, the Teranet-National Bank House Price Index, is a better measure, though, because it carefully removes the distortions caused by strong rebounds in the high priced markets like Vancouver and Toronto.

The August version of this index appeared yesterday and confirmed there’s a strong uptrend. It showed prices still down from their peak last year, but only by 3.4 per cent.

Details of the index also showed values rising in every one of the six major cities tracked, with three of them – Montreal, Ottawa and Halifax – already above previous peaks. A fourth, Toronto, was within two percentage points of reaching a new record.

As a result, the affordability of homes has dropped sharply across the country. After improving to better than average this year, it has deteriorated substantially in the past few months, says a report from the Desjardins credit union group.

While Vancouver, as usual, shows the worst affordability of any major city, even relatively low-priced Montreal is less affordable than its long-term average. This estimates the gap between average household take-home pay and the income needed to buy an average home.

Montreal’s average income is just 31 per cent higher than needed to buy a home, down from the long-term average cushion of 39 per cent. Toronto’s positive income gap is only 26 per cent, but a little better than the long-term average of 19 per cent.

And Vancouver is now a first-time buyer’s nightmare. Households today earn only 80 per cent of what it’s estimated they need to afford an average home, for a negative gap of 20 per cent. That’s even worse than the long-term average of negative 13 per cent.

So if prices are already rising much faster than people’s ability to pay, could this lead to a new real-estate bubble?

Certainly it’s true that one key factor, interest rates, now make the payments on a home mortgage a screaming bargain. That’s good for buyers in the short run, but tends to make prices balloon over time.

Since the Bank of Canada has virtually guaranteed that rates will remain ultra-low through the middle of 2010, you could wonder if this will boost demand too much, inflating prices to an unhealthy extent.

“Yeah, there’s definitely some risk of that,” says senior economist Michael Gregory at BMO Capital Markets, but he’s not worried yet. Similarly, economist Marc Pinsonneault at the National Bank says this is not his most likely scenario.

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