For a month each summer, Londoners – combined with hordes of tourists – live and breathe architecture through a bevy of exhibitions, talks, tours and parties. This annual event has come to be known as the London Festival of Architecture; in 2008, it celebrates its third year.

For this year's festival, Trafalgar Square’s Canada House will celebrate the west coast’s architectural style – and its impact on international designs – with Vancouverism: Westcoast Architecture + City-Building. With a spotlight on west coast architects Arthur Erickson, James Cheng and Bing Thom, as well as Fast + Epp Engineers, the show will trace the term “Vancouverism” – a word now synonymous with the new high-density city – back to the 1950s, when Erickson’s Plan 55 sketch envisioned the city’s high-rise, high-density re-design.

In addition, drawings, photographs, videos and scale models of Vancouver’s architecture will illustrate the city’s innovative and dynamic response to its high-density needs. Erickson’s Law Courts/Robson Square/Vancouver Art Gallery project, for example, is among the projects on display. This project, in the heart of downtown Vancouver includes the seven-story Law Courts and the three-block Robson Square complex, and connects to the Vancouver Art Gallery via pubic space.

Show-goers can also check out work by James Cheng, whose buildings include the Spectrum Costco-Condo Complex (the roof of a big box Costco, topped with four high-rise condo towers) and the Shangri-la Hotel-Condo Tower – Vancouver’s tallest building, and a perfect example of Vancouver’s affinity for hybrid condo-hotel structures.

A temporary construction on the exterior of the Canada House, called Trafalgar Square Demonstration Construction, was designed by Bing Thom with Fast + Epp Engineers/StructureCraft. (The latter are currently responsible for a number of innovative wood-based architectural projects in Vancouver such as Richmond’s Speed Skating Oval for the upcoming 2010 Winter Olympics.) The experimental project consists of a series of stacked serpentine wood structures made from sustainably-harvested British Columbia cedar timber, held in place by tension cables and metal brackets. The organic, undulating structure is 60 metres long and eight metres tall, and wraps around the corner of the historic site without ever actually touching it.

So for those who'd like to find out how Vancouver spun dense urban gold out of sprawl, make sure you check out Vancouverism: Westcoast Architecture + City-Building, which runs from June 23 to September 4 at Canada House in London. The show is then slated to tour through Canada in 2010.