Vancouver Specials and the Website That Loves Them

Has everyone else seen VancouverSpecial.com but me? My brother recently mentioned it to me.

The site is a (fairly obsessive) photo gallery of 1208 ‘Vancouver Specials’ around the city. For the uninitiated, a Vancouver Special is a particularly questionable (this article calls them ‘abhorrent’) kind of house built in the 1970s. Here’s a decent enough description:

In the early 1970s, Vancouver Specials began sprouting like dandelions in the city’s residential quarters. Designed for maximum floor space on a long and narrow footprint, its affordability and build-by-numbers construction made the Special the house of choice for legions of newcomers to Vancouver. But with its low-sloped roof, boring facade and cheap materials, it was soon considered an architectural eyesore.

Of course, you can just visit the aforementioned website and see all the Vancouver Specials you’d ever want.