Developer Ian Gillespie: “This is going to sound arrogant but no one else is willing to do what I’m doing”
By Frances Bula
Developer Ian Gillespie is much in the news these days, as he launched his Gesamtkunstwerk exhibit a week ago as part of the build-up to Vancouver House, the Bjarke Ingels-designed tower that with be blooming flower-like (thin stalk, showy bee-attracting thing on top) next to the Granville Bridge.
Here’s a recent feature I did on him in Vancouver magazine. In advance of your column, I notice Gillespie seems to draw a lot more negative comments than any other developer I write about. I’ve done profiles of Peter Wall and the Malek brothers at Millennium, mentioned people like Terry Hui at Concord and Andrew Grant at PCI and Michael Audain at Polygon in stories any number of times, and never seen as much vitriol directed at them as at Gillespie. (Interestingly, others in the development community seem to be at least as annoyed by him as many resident groups.)
I’m guessing it’s because he tends to wade in to contentious parts of town, attracting more attention. (Some development companies I report on simply never ask for rezonings — they just don’t want to deal with the hassle. They stick strictly to land that’s already zoned for what they want to
Source: Frances Bula
