Joyce aspires to add vibrancy and beauty to this growing transit-oriented area, contributing to safer and more attractive streets and providing a suitable mix of affordable homes, while honouring the site’s historical context. The architecture of this 30-storey residential tower takes inspiration from the community’s multicultural character and natural environment. At its core, the design celebrates the diversity of the neighbourhood comprising a myriad of nationalities and an authentic vibrant history of arts and culture.

Such a diverse community, with varied parts making up a colourful whole, can be interpreted as a symbolic quilt. Quilts contain stories; they are colourful and visually rich, holding many symbolic connotations across the world. In Joyce, the symbolism of a patterned quilt and metaphoric quilting of ideas and cultures is applied to the tower’s façade, as overlapping patterns of coloured glass. Layered over the metaphorical quilt, and reflecting inspiration drawn from the environment, is the outline of Still Creek.

This local body of water is the only remaining exposed creek in Vancouver and, for the first time in decades, salmon have returned to spawn here. Inspired by this renewal, the balconies of the tower are coloured to evoke salmon swimming upstream. Echoing its sinuous form, the large-scale expression of the river’s outline in the building’s façade also pays homage to Still Creek, while breaking the scale of the massing.