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[Saanich] Tuscany Village mixed-use | Built - completed in 2007


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#21 gumgum

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Posted 05 February 2007 - 12:23 PM

You mean there's no Subway in Tuscany?

#22 G-Man

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Posted 05 February 2007 - 12:28 PM

I am sure there is but it is not as predominant as here.

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#23 Holden West

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Posted 05 February 2007 - 12:31 PM

Closest one is on an airbase in Naples. :P

Thankfully, the Italian custom of going into the local corner deli and getting them to make you a sandwich with whatever is on hand is still popular.
"Beaver, ahoy!""The bridge is like a magnet, attracting both pedestrians and over 30,000 vehicles daily who enjoy the views of Victoria's harbour. The skyline may change, but "Big Blue" as some call it, will always be there."
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#24 aastra

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Posted 05 February 2007 - 02:09 PM

British culture is the largest ethnic segment of our heritage in this city.


It's the largest ethnic segment in every Canadian city outside Quebec. So how come Victoria is the only city obliged to enforce tweed and Tudor stereotypes?

Even if Victoria were somehow exceptionally British, what's the point of introducing hackneyed representations of British architectural history? Are they still building knock-offs of ancient buildings in Europe? Wouldn't it make more sense to reflect the real Britain? The one that exists now? The British people who live in Victoria today didn't come to town in a time machine from the year 1500.

Anyone ever been to Ontario? Whenever I'm in Ottawa I find myself puzzling over why the cities in that part of the country don't market themselves as a bit of old England. They have much more of an old world vibe than Victoria does.

#25 aastra

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Posted 05 February 2007 - 02:21 PM

I mean, if a bunch of Canadians decided to retire to Fiji tomorrow, would it make sense for them to build log cabins and grain elevators there?

#26 Ms. B. Havin

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Posted 05 February 2007 - 09:41 PM

It's not just any "British" house style that set the tone, it's a mish-mash of medieval-baronial manor house. Add some William Morris, throw-back to "hand-made" and rustic, "authentic," all at a time of rapid social and industrial change (a lot of this stuff was built around WWI, the first mechanized war). It's nostalgia. And showing off: here's a group of essentially petits-bourgeois bureaucrats living it up like medieval barons, in the 20th century, for god's sake -- this stuff wasn't built in 1875. So, nostalgia on the one hand: for tradition, for family lineage, for solidity, even as the Empire is changing under your feet. Second (this is my opinion, and will get me lynched by Canadian nationalists): inferiority complex and ressentiment toward the Americans. Aside from sporadic outbursts of craftsman-style bungalows, which were a fashion like Queen Anne houses, Americans at the start of the 20th century were not going back to some medieval and feudal architectural style, but were reviving 18th century Colonial styles (hence neo-colonial, which had a revival around 1900-10). ("Colonial" does not refer to colonies, but to the house style of the colonists who fought for American Independence against the British.) Remember that Colonial, like Federal, is all about American democracy, the Declaration of Independence, and "give me liberty or give me death" sort of stuff, along the lines of Thomas Jefferson, Paul Revere, Ben Franklin -- that sort of thing. So, if Colonial gets a revival around this time (as neo-colonial), it's a reaching back to the American revolution and to the roots of independence. Meanwhile here, in Victoria, which (as a actual colony, a political eunuch) had no tradition of independence to reach back to, folks retreated to a never-never land of medievalisms -- hence the fake Tudor. That's my 2-cents, anyway. Everytime I see these houses (and I see them all the time), I compare them mentally to the great colonial and federal architecture of America's founding years. It's not nice of me, but there you have it.
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#27 m0nkyman

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Posted 05 February 2007 - 09:55 PM

Yeah. Um. The tudorbethan building I call home was built in 1900. A bit before WWI....

Carry on.

#28 Ms. B. Havin

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Posted 05 February 2007 - 10:09 PM

I don't count your place, which seems to be a mix of tudorbethan appliques and some other stuff. I also wonder what your place looked like when it was brand new / just built, i.e., whether it had those features then or whether they were added at a later time. My primary interest at any rate is in the grand, "representative" houses, not just little places.
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#29 Icebergalley

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Posted 05 February 2007 - 10:10 PM

How long have the British foreign service and colonial types from all over the Empire been retiring here?

#30 Holden West

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Posted 05 February 2007 - 10:37 PM

Much of Antique Row on Fort St. was a mishmash of Italianate, Art Deco etc. that was "Tudorfied" decades ago.
"Beaver, ahoy!""The bridge is like a magnet, attracting both pedestrians and over 30,000 vehicles daily who enjoy the views of Victoria's harbour. The skyline may change, but "Big Blue" as some call it, will always be there."
-City of Victoria website, 2009

#31 G-Man

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Posted 06 February 2007 - 07:35 AM

Wow Ms B. Not sure if it was your intention but that post of yours sounds great in a spoken word format. I am not kidding. Try just saying all of it!

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#32 Ms. B. Havin

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Posted 06 February 2007 - 10:20 AM

Obviously my remarks were generalizations, but at the same time there's a real social meaning in the fact that, in Victoria, relatively ordinary people built themselves houses in the 1890s all the way into the mid-1910s that looked like the lodges of some baronial fief or laird. And you have to ask yourself, what does that mean? When, in the Gilded Age (1880s through 90s) William K. Vanderbilt, a man considered socially unacceptable by NYC's Old Guard, built himself an overwrought palace designed by Richard Morris Hunt on the corner of Fifth Ave. at 52nd St., he was obviously trying to "say" something. The question is, to whom?, and what? The building looked like a French chateau straight out of Fontainebleau. When Louis Sullivan, the Chicago architect who's called the "father of the skyscraper," saw the Vanderbilt house, he wrote:

Must I show you this French chateau, this little Chateau de Blois, on this street corner, here in New York, and still you do not laugh! ...Have you no sense of humor, no sense of pathos? Must I tell you that while the man may live in the house physically (for a man may live in any kind of house physically), that he cannot possibly live in it morally, mentally or spiritually, a characteristically New York absurdity; that he is no part of the house, and his house is no part of him?



What happened there was on a totally different scale, but you have to ask yourself why people build themselves medieval-style "castles" in the middle of the wilderness, and why there isn't more honesty about what and who you are and where you live. The other thing that bugs me, I guess, is just how unfriendly and dark and downright obstructionist some of these houses are. It's as though they deliberately ignore the mod-cons (and modern thinking) coming online by the late 19th/ early 20th c. Home Economics as well as Time-and-Motion Studies became thriving branches of study & industry then, and a number of women had a huge influence on making the modern home more efficient and less labour-intensive, which often resulted in houses that looked brighter, lighter, and had better flow. (Eg., Lillian Gilbreth, married to Frank -- both of them efficiency experts, made famous in the book, Cheaper by the Dozen. Lillian had a PhD in engineering and worked in that profession.) That sort of thing is totally absent in the c.1900 piles in Victoria.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that, for me, Victoria's tudorbethan style has less to do with "heritage" than with social history. It's like the difference between believing that Scotsmen really had clan tartans back in the middle ages, or knowing that they were [url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/events/reith_99/week3/week3.htm:188ae]invented[/url:188ae] early during Industrialization by (horrors!) an ...[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Rawlinson:188ae]Englishman[/url:188ae].
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#33 djp

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Posted 06 February 2007 - 04:49 PM

Much of Antique Row on Fort St. was a mishmash of Italianate, Art Deco etc. that was "Tudorfied" decades ago.


Really? That makes me weep, actually..I bet it was so much cooler decades ago. Anyone got pics so I can cry over them?

#34 mat

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Posted 06 February 2007 - 11:17 PM

I see everyone has talked about the design, neighbourhood and even the name of the development - no one has talked about the traffic situation. UNi Heights has 3 sides to let traffic in and out, Shelbourne Plaza has 4 sides. Tuscanny Village has only Mckenzie - one exit and entrance, onto one main street, with only a gas station providing spacing to the main intersection of Shelbourne. It is going to be a nightmare.

Make your next photo grid project the Tuscanny Village - let's get pics of the buses trying to get to stops, and the shoppers/residents, trying to do 'lefts' to get towards Uvic.

#35 G-Man

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Posted 07 February 2007 - 07:42 AM

A good point, except is there a cement median there that will only allow right hand turns? Also perhap a new traffic light will have to go in like at Home Depot around the corner.

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#36 Holden West

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Posted 17 July 2007 - 11:24 PM





To those that would say this looks like Disneyland, here's an [url=http://davelandweb.com/construction/images/5_55_Const_2.jpg:f3da7]actual 1955 construction pic of Disneyland[/url:f3da7].
"Beaver, ahoy!""The bridge is like a magnet, attracting both pedestrians and over 30,000 vehicles daily who enjoy the views of Victoria's harbour. The skyline may change, but "Big Blue" as some call it, will always be there."
-City of Victoria website, 2009

#37 amor de cosmos

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Posted 17 July 2007 - 11:43 PM

fake, "set-up", ugly :( glass would have been nicer

#38 gumgum

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Posted 18 July 2007 - 05:41 AM

Got any more pics, West?

#39 G-Man

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Posted 18 July 2007 - 06:25 AM

Disneyland looks more authentic.

Visit my blog at: https://www.sidewalkingvictoria.com 

 

It has a whole new look!

 


#40 Holden West

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Posted 18 July 2007 - 07:26 AM

A couple of Tuscany Village pics at the [url=http://www.flickr.com/groups/vic_buildingboom/pool/:3a623]Vic Building Boom Flickr page[/url:3a623].

Great vintage [url=http://davelandblog.blogspot.com/search/label/Main%20Street:3a623]Disneyland Main Street pics here[/url:3a623].
"Beaver, ahoy!""The bridge is like a magnet, attracting both pedestrians and over 30,000 vehicles daily who enjoy the views of Victoria's harbour. The skyline may change, but "Big Blue" as some call it, will always be there."
-City of Victoria website, 2009

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