Know-It-All: What’s with Those Weird Clocks on Robson Street?

I’ve written a lot of articles by this stage in my career. It’s only natural to forget about some of them. The brain only has so much storage space (250GB for standard models, 500GB if you splashed out on Human Brain Pro Max). Sometimes when I’m trying to access a deep memory about, say, whether or not I ever interviewed that topless woman who always runs for mayor, I can actually hear my brain making the same sort of violent vibrating grunts that our wheezing family computer would emit whenever I tried to crack open a cool Capri-Sun and kick back for big Saturday night with my Encarta 95 CD-ROM.

Which is to say, I have complete empathy for retired architect Richard Hulbert, who initially told me he was “not familiar” with Robson CentrePlace, despite some pretty compelling evidence (his architecture firm’s own website) to suggest that the Hulbert Group did, in fact, design the “56,000 square foot urban retail development” that opened its doors in 1996.

With a little prompting, he came around and took credit for designing a complex that both commands some of the city’s highest commercial rent and proudly employs Vancouver’s most dead-eyed Banana Republic employees. He refused, however, to give me a satisfying answer to my real question: what’s with the clocks?

Next time you’re on Robson Street, searching for the perfect suede boot that will only be appropriate for Vancouver weather exactly three days a year, look up. You’ll see twin clockfaces, wrapped around the corner tower at Robson and Thurlow, quietly sharing the current time with passersby in a way that’s dignified and understated, unlike some other aggressively performative clocks in town I could name.

But in case “time” isn’t enough information about the current status of our shared physical reality, you can let your eyes keep wandering: also mounted on Robson CentrePlace—a building designed to have the appearance of five smaller buildings from different time periods—are four more Art Deco-inspired clocks reporting on the temperature, the month of the year, the direction of the wind and (obviously!) the phases of the moon.

Maybe true power shoppers can see a benefit to this intel. Could a westerly wind at one’s back make the walk to Sephora easier? Should I be avoiding Zara during a full moon? Hulbert certainly doesn’t know. He reports that the addition of the clocks came after his firm completed the project: a flourish of the development company that commissioned the complex.

That development company was Hartleywood Holdings, a Singapore-based real estate firm that sold Robson CentrePlace in 2024 to an undisclosed buyer for an undisclosed amount (though it has been assessed at $105.3 million—a cool $17.5 mil per clock). I’ve tried calling the listed number for Hartleywood dozens of times to hear from the clock instigators themselves about the meaning of these unusual devices, but it rings and rings and rings. It’s the soundtrack to the one mystery I couldn’t solve, at least in time for filing this column: the clock is telling me it’s quarter to February already.