Gregory Henriquez turns rezoning Vancouver into art

Vancouver architect Gregory Henriquez stood on the site of the Venice Biennale five years ago and considered the fact he was a short distance from a historic ghetto where Jewish refugees had been confined after their expulsion from Spain.

He’d been invited by the European Cultural Centre to create an exhibit at the Architecture Biennale in 2021, and a couple of years prior, he’d been asked by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to become a Premier Advocate. Initially, he thought the request was a prank. But his reinvention of Vancouver’s historic Woodward’s Building had caught the world’s attention – a major development that found a way to co-exist with the city’s troubled Downtown Eastside.