"The Burns Block is named for its original owner and builder, Patrick Burns of P. Burns & Company, who had it built in 1909 as the headquarters for his meatpacking business. An Irish-Canadian, Burns was a rancher, meat packer and operator of a chain of butcher shops in western Canada. Burns Meats went on to become one of the largest meat packing businesses in the world. He founded the Calgary Stampede and later in life, was appointed to the Canadian Senate." - from the back of the postcard on the building's history available at Bitter. Several years ago, having just accepted the commission to design the CCTV Headquarters in Beijing, the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas announced in one of his publications that he was ’going East’.  It was one of the largest commissions ever undertaken by his office OMA, and the realization of an XL building from his popular tome S,M,L,XL. More than the building though, it was also an announcement that China was about to embark on a massive city building age, that architects of the West should heed the call or be left behind, and that we were all about to become globalized whether we were ready or not. But perhaps what Rem also meant was that we should 'go East' not just on an international scale, but on a local one as well. The ‘east side’ has always had negative connotations in urban environments throughout North America, not just Vancouver. To ‘go east’ then could mean to look at one's own inner city issues à la Jane Jacobs and attend to the urban decay that has been allowed to happen through ignorance and neglect. By extension, this also has intimate connections to the process of  gentrification and, in Vancouver, these issues find their physical manifestation in the Downtown Eastside (DTES).