Taizo Yamamoto: Carts, Hedges, Lions

Review By James Huemoeller

December 20, 2024

Given the current urban situation, Taizo Yamamoto: Carts Hedges Lions is a timely graphic essay on Vancouver. Architect and artist Yamamoto offers an anthropological survey of three artifact types spanning the city’s last seventy years, raising questions about its future. Each type is carefully recorded through detailed pencil drawings and accompanied by textual responses by guest authors.

In the first section, Carts, Yamamoto illustrates the core research problem through exquisite drawings of shopping carts filled with objects. Though we cannot know the story of the cart’s proprietors, the importance of shopping carts for people experiencing homelessness is well documented. By enabling people to secure their possessions as they move through a city, they provide a basis for transient living. The detailed portraits of these critical vessels expose the region’s housing crisis and growing economic disparity on a personal, intimate scale. The world sees glass towers against an extraordinary landscape, but we all know the truth.

The next two sections identify the task. So much of our current engagement with the housing crisis focuses on numbers. Housing starts, affordability indexes, rentable areas, and community amenity contributions have become the language of dwelling. These two visual studies and the supplemental texts offer alternative rhetoric. Creating homes, not just housing, must be the conversation’s centre.

The cultural material that Yamamoto isolates is crucial to this argument. Both sections document everyday objects that residents of the city know well. Though people can never be defined by material possessions, objects are crucial to our existence—not only as tools but also as symbols. For some, including the characters in the texts, the manicured Hedges and stone Lion gates signify the culmination of the struggle to obtain a good home to live out their lives.

The devastating essay by Kevin Chong emphasizes this point by describing the life of a neighbouring hedge from the author’s youth. The hedge is familiar to anyone who has walked the city, shifting from manicured to twiggy in parallel to its caretaker’s tragic story. The neighbour’s sense of home is intertwined with the hedge surrounding his property as loneliness replaces pride.

Hedges and Lions are more than just markers of domestic life. They are objects from a bygone era, a twentieth-century car-centric town transitioning into a cosmopolitan global city. As thresholds from the public domain to the private, they characterize the priority of single-family housing during that period, mirroring the rise of the individual in a consumptive economy.

Both were protectors of an ideology from an era we are gradually moving past. Despite the calls for gentle density, the responses to climate change and social injustices necessitate a new urban formula. As these new typologies take shape, we must not lose sight of the goal. The housing we build must still supply space for its residents to make a home. It is not simply about quantity but about creating enduring domains embedded in new values for our lives to inhabit.

As an architect, Yamamoto is well-placed to actively engage the built environment that these images speak to. He can observe but also influence the urban landscape. I am eager to see how Yamamoto draws on these reflections in his design work and hope it matches the linework he presents in this book that so deeply interrogates its subjects, challenging us through the familiar objects of our city.