The Vancouver Art Gallery's current home is a former courthouse that overlooks Robson Square.Isabella Falsetti/The Globe and Mail
For years the Vancouver Art Gallery pursued an impossible dream: a new building by celebrity architects that would tower above the city and blow the gallery’s budget.
This week, B.C.’s largest art museum pivoted back toward reality, hiring two architecture firms, locals Formline and Toronto-based KPMB, to deliver a facility that will be closer to the ground and rooted in Indigenous tradition.
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The VAG still plans to move six blocks to a site on West Georgia Street; but rather than a 70-metre tall, dramatic building by Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron, the gallery’s new home will be smaller, shorter, and more Canadian.
The question is what exactly that means for architecture, for the gallery, and for Vancouver.
Alfred Waugh, founder of Formline Architecture + Urbanism.Formline Architecture + Urbanism/Supplied
Bruce Kuwabara, a founding partner at KPMB Architects.KPMB Architects/Supplied
In an interview this week, the VAG’s interim co-CEOs Eva Respini and Sirish Rao said the gallery’s new facility will be approximately 200,000 square feet, with 80,000 square feet of gallery space. It will rise to a maximum of three storeys. The budget is undetermined, but the executives said a $100-million contribution from the Audain family and $40-million from the Chan family remain intact.
For one thing, it represents a milestone. An Indigenous architect, Formline’s Alfred Waugh has won a major cultural commission, albeit on equal terms with KPMB partner Bruce Kuwabara. The announcement reinforces the presence of Indigenous design in Canadian architecture.
This week in a video meeting, Waugh and Kuwabara expressed a mutual respect for each other’s work and called the job an equal venture. “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have trust in our relationship,” Waugh said, “and that we would have an equal contribution.”
That combination could result in a fusion of KPMB’s orthodox modernism with Formline’s “Indigenuity,” as Waugh puts it: architecture that favours natural materials and uses them efficiently and resourcefully.
Respini and Rao said they and their design team will now begin in earnest to design the new gallery. It will be “welcoming, porous and a place for gathering,” Respini said. “We as a museum will participate as citizens in our city.”
The architects echoed this theme. “Maybe there will be galleries addressing the street,” Kuwabara said. “Maybe there will be sculpture on the roof.” At the same time, the building “will try to capture the essence of Vancouver,” Waugh said, especially its natural setting. “You need to get a sense of the sky, a sense of what a rain forest is,” Waugh said. “How do you bring that into the gallery?”
That kind of symbolism is part of the job of a major cultural institution. It inevitably defines a city spatially and culturally. And when the project began a decade ago, the VAG launched a design competition and chose some of the most respected architects in the world, Herzog de Meuron.
A rendering of Saskatoon's new central library designed by Formline.Formline Architecture + Urbanism/Supplied
HdM’s proposal was tall, striking and ornery, rising as high as 200 feet, wrapped initially in wood, and flanked by enclosed courtyards. This would have been expensive: The budget rose to $600-million, and the actual cost could have been much higher, far beyond the resources of the gallery and its philanthropic commitments. This is why the VAG, last December, fired HdM and started again.
“Sometimes you just need to start fresh,” explained VAG board chair and developer Jon Stovell. “This project was conceived a long time ago, when the context of the city was much different,” he added. “It was much more of an emerging global city. Now there’s more focus on Canadian and Indigenous identity. This just feels better suited to the times.”
The danger here is that patriotism and reconciliation become code for a lack of ambition.
The Larwill Park site is on the edge of downtown Vancouver. For the VAG to move here would slightly reorient the city’s cultural geography. The HdM vision, however impractical, was big both literally and conceptually. It would have marked the new “cultural district,” as Rao puts it, that the VAG hopes to catalyze here.
The Gardiner Museum in Toronto by KPMB Architects.Shai Gil/Supplied
The new VAG will of necessity be less flashy. All the same, it will need to be conceptually bold, an anchor for public life all through the week, and thoughtfully knitted into its somewhat vague surroundings, with programming and public space. (Landscape architecture will be critical.) Happily, the VAG’s leaders seem committed to these goals.
What about its existing site? The VAG’s home in a former courthouse, owned by the city, was part of the great architect Arthur Erickson’s reshaping of Robson Square. The public space in front of the gallery is Vancouver’s only real piazza. It is perverse to hollow this place out and take the energy of its visitors and activity somewhere else.
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Why not, as some locals have suggested for years, remain there, and expand the gallery underground and nearby? The VAG has studied this idea extensively, including with work by the excellent California architect Michael Maltzan, but has never released detailed results.
Today the VAG’s leaders dismiss this idea as expensive and impractical, in part because one of its key donors, Audain, is committed to moving. “The move and the funding are intertwined,” Rao said.
That is a shame. KPMB has expertise with using existing buildings, and there’s an argument that the existing site remains the right place for the gallery. Instead, the VAG is lighting out for a new home, and KPMB and Waugh now must imagine a gallery that works and also expresses the spirit of the place.