What is Vancouver without its iconic buildings and bridges?
Lions Gate Bridge, Science World, and Canada Place; these are places that help define the look of the city, from tourist videos to postcards. The Burrard Bridge is a regular in car commercials.
The SkyTrain, while an integral and recognizable part of the cities transit, shows up everywhere from an obscure Californian experimental hiphop track to K-pop music videos to movies based in Manhattan.
Meanwhile B.C. Place, Hotel Vancouver and the downtown library are all huge construction projects that each added new flair to Vancouver's core.
They're nine of the city's icons, but each had to be built. There was the time before they existed and the time after they were finished, but what about those couple of years (and in almost all cases these projects took more than a year to build) between groundbreaking and grand opening?
Those moments are caught in these photos (and the video below, if you were looking for BC Place), showing the skeleton of Science World, the Marine Building's superstructure towering over the young city and Hotel Vancouver's awkward teenage years between being a hole in the ground and a grand hotel.
