Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Orwell meets Mies van der Rohe

By G.D. Maxwell Less is more. Small is beautiful. Money for nothing. Chicks for free. Nice thoughts. All nice thoughts. Orwellian, but nice. And let’s be honest, totally out of step with who we are and what we’ve become.

By G.D. Maxwell

Less is more. Small is beautiful. Money for nothing. Chicks for free.

Nice thoughts. All nice thoughts. Orwellian, but nice.

And let’s be honest, totally out of step with who we are and what we’ve become. Well, except for the money for nothing, chicks for free part. But then, Orwell didn’t play rock ’n’ roll.

Any illusions that less is more or small is beautiful owe their existence more to old books, fading memories, bad drugs or total psychosis than they do to the realities of the 21 st century. If you even recognize the thoughts and wonder if they have any currency, a walk down Lake Placid Road should put them to rest.

It’d been a long time since I’d wandered down that Creekside street, almost a decade since I’d lived there for a season and nearly that long since I’d ventured further than Hoz’s or Alpha Park. Having done so earlier this week, I’m not sure if I owe the movers and shakers behind Nita Lake Lodge an apology exactly, but I may have been wrong about how out of place and out of scale their proposal is.

While I still harbour serious reservations about commercial development and redevelopment on the shores of Whistler’s lakes, I’m not certain a four-storey, 80 room hotel is as out of character as I’d imagined, given what I saw. Hell, given what I saw, I’m not sure an 80 storey hotel would be entirely out of character. Now that would be a Gateway to Whistler, wouldn’t it?

Ten years ago, the lower end of Lake Placid was mostly dirt. The couple of Lincoln Log homes slowly taking shape looked laughably out of keeping with the rest of what was down there but their numbers were few and at least one of them gave the appearance of financial distress and held out the possibility of never being finished.

Ironically, they still look a bit out of place. The main difference is they look out of place because they may have been the last structures built there with even a passing nod to less is more, small is beautiful. The subdivision of log McMansions grown up around them with their urban landscaping look like an arms race run amok. More is more, large is beautiful, anything over a mouthful is… bonus, dude.

Yet, even they look diminutive and must be causing their once-proud owners measurable social shrinkage in the large shadow cast by the bizarre development at Kasa Kerfoot. One can only hope the landscape contractors are force-feeding the wall-o’-trees hedge a steroidal brew of growfast juice. Out of sight will never be out of mind but out of sight will be a vast improvement.

The hockey arena was bizarre enough. Just visible from Highway 99, one can only take solace the game of preference wasn’t football. But what’s with all the pods? I couldn’t shake the uncomfortable feeling this was a site for mass alien visitation or a staging area for some cult of white-robed seekers impatiently awaiting the mothership’s return and a promised new life amid the cosmos, all the while brewing up a batch of emergency kool-aid just in case. My condolences to the neighbours and kudos to the former council for that master stroke of deal-making.

Be it homes, cars, boats, vacations, kitchen appliances or furniture, this Generation of Swine’s mantra is most definitely More is More. Now that Porsche has joined the lemming-like parade and is building an SUV to pander to the Boomers’ insatiable appetite for size and power, I don’t know whether to take heart or give up. The idea of the ultimate sports car company building the ultimate SUV is a bit like the shoeshine kid giving you stock tips. Maybe it means this bubble will finally break and collapse. But then, that’s what I thought when Lincoln and Cadillac announced they were going to market SUVs. "What kind of limpdick wanker would buy a Caddy SUV?" was the prevailing thought. Wrong again.

No, the only arenas where less is more and small is beautiful have any currency is electronics and government. And I’m not completely sure about government.

Come to think of it, I’m not sure about electronics. While speakers have gotten small as kittens – while still roaring like lions – you now need five or six of ’em and a subwoofer to fill up all the speaker slots in the back of your new, smaller, surroundsound, amp. And for every micro shrinkage of cellphones and PDAs, there’s a Newtonian increase in the size of televisions.

But governments are rushing to embrace small is beautiful, less is more. Well, not when they’re voting themselves pay raises or stumping for donations, but certainly when they’re doling out what we used to think of as government services.

We’re being told to get used to smaller school budgets – and commensurately higher school taxes. Semesters instead of quarters. Longer days but fewer of them. It’s a mixed message. Less school is more school taxes. Is that what they call synergy? How much longer before we’re asked to choose between the smart kids and the ‘challenged’ kids. Can’t afford to educate both, where will we throw the money? Bring the dumb ones up to the level of functional literacy or help the bright ones really shine?

But that kind of choice is really a cakewalk compared to the upcoming less is more choices in health care. Those choices will be socially gut-wrenching. Who gets to live; who gets to die? What maladies will we muster resources against and which ones will we hospice? When we can’t save everyone, who will we save? Politicians? Elite athletes? Those who tend to their own health or those who treat their bodies like desecrated temples? Will there be a Timbit Test for treatment of the manifold ailments our over-indulgent lifestyle visits upon us? Or will it be a matter of how much health the individual can afford?

The B.C. government, and to a lesser extent Whistler’s municipal government, have embraced two concepts that will plague us all for the foreseeable future. Both have the simplistic cachet of reasonableness. One is user pay and the other is public-private partnerships.

The first explains why, for example, something as prosaic as fishing licenses and fees have risen this year anywhere from 20 per cent to 67 per cent and why the government will ding you a couple of bucks just to leave your car at the Brandywine or Narin Falls trailheads.

The other will be used to justify trading a future stream of cashflows from something like the Coquihalla Highway for cash in-hand right now.

Both are insidious. Both will continue to fuel the widening chasm in the Canadian social landscape between those who believe more is more and those who simply have to get used to the idea that less is… well, less is just what’s left over for them.