[WCML/The League] The West Coast Modern League is a leading voice for modern architecture and design on Canada’s west coast. Established in 2013, the League is an independent, Vancouver-based, nonprofit society dedicated to celebrating, and advancing the understanding and appreciation of, architecture, urbanism, and design of the North American west coast, with a special focus on the southern coastal regions of British Columbia. We are a volunteer-based organization, lead by a Board of Directors composed of architects, curators, critics, and professionals, with a passion for west coast architecture and the allied arts.

Founded in 2013, the West Coast Modern League bears the name of West Coast Modernism (also known as West Coast Vernacular or West Coast Style), the distinctive regional adaptation of modernism that emerged in the Greater Vancouver area in the 1940s. For the better part of the past century, West Coast Modernism has played a formative role primarily in west coast domiciliary architecture, proliferating across not only the south coast, but into the interior regions of the province and further afield.

The south coast of British Columbia has been home to some of Canada’s most influential designers, pioneers in their respective disciplines and in the conception of this regional language of modernism. Among the most prominent of this vanguard is renowned artist Bertram Charles Binning, with architects Arthur Erickson, Fred Hollingsworth, Ned Pratt, and Ron Thom, loosely known as “The Vancouver School,” as well as Geoffrey Massey and Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, among others. They believed in the principles of the international modern movement but yearned for an architectural expression of it that was more appropriately responsive to the domestic lifestyles, culture, rugged natural terrain, resources, and rainforest climate of Canada’s west coast. First marked by the completion of the B.C. Binning House in 1941, the principles of West Coast Modernism continue to play a prominent role in contemporary practice, with city building efforts carrying forward the traditions of the movement while adapting to modern lifestyles and the increasing pressures of development and climate change.

Established in 2013, the West Coast Modern League is a registered non-profit society in the Province of British Columbia, based in Vancouver, British Columbia. We are a volunteer-based society lead by a Board of Directors.

The West Coast Modern League is based on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Coast Salish peoples – Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.