Book review: up | dn—88 Spins with Bill Pechet

up | dn: 88 Spins with Bill Pechet

By Leslie Van Duzer (ORO Editions, 2025)

REVIEW Elsa Lam

For the past 40 years, Vancouver-based Bill Pechet’s practice has been exceptional in its interdisciplinarity. Trained in geography, visual arts, and architecture, Pechet—initially with business partner Stephanie Robb as Pechet & Robb, and later under PECHET Studio—has traversed from art, to architecture, to landscape, to urban infrastructure. Pechet has created public art works, memorials, playgrounds, plazas, urban lighting, houses, commercial interiors, exhibitions, stage sets, and children’s book illustrations. In his work, the set for a dance production is treated with as much care, thoughtfulness, and humour as the design for a new pier and street furniture for North Vancouver’s Shipyards district. 

In the spirit of Pechet’s unconventional practice, UBC School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture professor Leslie Van Duzer presents 88 of his projects in alphabetical order—a device intended to invite non-sequential browsing, and to create unexpected juxtapositions. The title of the book, referring to the notational system found on stairs in architecture plans, is intended as an “early warning sign,” writes Van Duzer. “You have entered, perhaps unknowingly, into a realm that invites you to stand on your head to see things clearly. In Bill’s wonderland, delight comes from having your expectations upended, from finding your sense of agency compromised, from being ensnared in thick webs of references and puns.” 

The result is a treasure trove of delights. On one dip into the pages, this reader turned to two of Pechet and Robb’s early projects—St. Andrew’s Park (2002) and SweaterLodge (2004-06). Van Duzer describes St Andrew’s Park, in North Vancouver, as a “park-as-charm-bracelet,” with integrated public artworks (a stone living room, a bronze miniature castle, a fountain-and-trough for water play, and so on) attached to a path that rings the park. SweaterLodge, Pechet and Robb’s contribution to the 2006 Venice Biennale of Architecture, used recycled polar fleeces (themselves made from recycled plastic water bottles) to create a giant orange sweater that draped the Canadian Pavilion. Under the sweater, cycle-powered projectors displayed a film depicting panoramic views of Vancouver. Following the event, the giant sweater was recycled into outdoor wear.

Another spin takes us to two more projects by Pechet and Robb. Located in the Victoria neighbourhood of Oak Bay, Exeter House (2004) keeps with the West Coast modern tradition in intermingling built and natural spaces. Layered on this are spatial sequences and materials inspired by Pechet’s lifelong fascination with Japan: from a front entry that nods to the engawa extensions to Japanese-style homes, to an outdoor dining area sheltered by a pine-needle-embedded fiberglass canopy reminiscent of a shoji screen. 

False Creek Energy Utility Stacks (2009-10) celebrated North America’s first wastewater-powered heat recovery system (or as Van Duzer puts it more plainly, “the first successful conversion of poop to power on the continent”) by styling the requisite vent stacks like a raised hand. Fingernail-like reflectors turn “hottie” red and orange during periods of peak power use, and “kool-kat” blue at times of lower demand.

While wit is a mainstay of Pechet’s work, his approach turns more serious with his longstanding work on memorials and cemeteries. Spanning twenty years, the projects Woods I (1993) and Woods II (2013), for Capilano View Cemetery in West Vancouver, offer a study in contrasts. Woods I arranges ruin-like stone walls into open-air rooms for columbaria, under a canopy of pines; Woods II provides more orderly rows of contemporary columbaria, sheltered by thin concrete roofs. Little Spirits Garden (2013), in Victoria, B.C., commemorates lost infants with personalized, house-shaped forms arrayed on landscape-hugging concrete bars.

“Truthfully, my happiest place is in trying to bring a bit of a smile to the public realm—or at least to remove a frown,” says Pechet in an interview with long-time collaborator Lorïnc Vass. (Two interviews, an essay by Van Duzer, a biography by Bill Richardson, and a photo essay by Greg Girard, are interspersed among the pages of the book.) “I know it’s a bit much to ask someone entering a cemetery to do the Macarena, but at least you can offer them a pool of water to see the reflection of the sky.”

Beyond his built legacy, Pechet has taught at the University of British Columbia’s School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture—where he himself studied—for over 30 years. He brings humour to this work, too—both to create a “safe space for [students] to start making,” and to encourage students to think outside of the box. “We all know the world is crappy, unjust, complicated, unresolved,” he says in a conversation with colleague Thena Jean-hee Tak. “Having the ability to stand slightly outside of all the maudlin is so liberating.” 

For those of us who haven’t had the benefit of being taught by Pechet, or who live far from his public artworks and urban furniture installations in Central and Western Canada, Van Duzer’s wonderful book offers an opportunity to spend time in his world, where wit and whimsy become tools to navigate complexity, and a way to approach the world with compassion. Who wouldn’t want to spend time with someone whose worldview—and view of design—takes this tack? “I think that humour is the best tonic for all the crappy crap that’s out there,” says Pechet. “It is the apogee of the intellect.” 

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