It’s a horribly designed building that’s hard to work in and wastes quite a bit of space.

I work here and agree, but would add, the sight lines from the pedestrian levels are ridiculous, from the street (south side) you have large vista style windows that look into the storage rooms and the vendors have filled with shelving, which looks awful. The retail space is undersold, so only a handful of crappy businesses are in there (dollar store variety), so the whole entrance, which was supposed to be like a medieval market (why would Vancouver need this anyway) appears like a two bit strip mall. The grand entrance is quite nice, if you ignore the broken windows and bird shit all over the glass. Safdie did not pull this one off, it looks like the budget get cut in half before they even got into the build. This photo does not reflect how poor this building actually is, from this shot it looks very neat. In real life it is a lousy building.

Love some of Safdie’s work but this one falls short for me. But is that really the rooftop? Your camera’s point of view makes magic outta something otherwise ‘blah’.