The Vancouver Art Gallery has unveiled a conceptual design for its new building by Herzog & de Meuron, featuring a series of stacked volumes clad in wood. If the scheme is ever realized – and even if it isn’t – that unusual promenade will change the way the city thinks about its architecture. “The low-rise wooden building along the street is inspired by how the streets in Vancouver were built in earlier times”.
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He believes Vancouver is under performing when it comes to public space.
In the design, the 310,000-square-foot gallery is a tall, distinctive monolith. An inukshuk? An Inca temple in the air?
The proposed wood design is a marked departure from Vancouver’s iconic glass-and-metal aesthetic, which one of the project’s lead architects says pays homage to the area’s natural history.
Binswanger and Bartels talked extensively about the conceptual design.
“That’s why the transparency is very important”, she said in an interview. And $350 million, as in missing nearly all of it.
Logical enough. But what happens at the bottom is most unexpected.
Beneath this plaza would be a lobby and substantial gallery spaces, plus a sunken garden open to the sky. This is the theme that Arthur Erickson and Cornelia Hahn Oberlander played at Robson Square, taken to a new level of complexity.
The Gallery also plans to dedicate exhibition space on the ground floor to its Institute of Asian Art, which was launched in autumn 2014, to further develop exhibitions, public programs, the collection, and scholarship devoted to the visual arts of Asia, with a particular emphasis on contemporary art from China, India, Japan and Korea. This sequence makes flawless sense; the galleries would be sober boxes, lit through carefully placed skylights and high windows.
Herzog & de Meuron has a vast experience with designing world renown museums, including London’s Tate Modern and Basel’s Schaulager.
Winners of the Pritzker Prize, HdM are one of the world’s leading architectural offices, and unlike many of their peers, they have no signature style. Herzog & de Meuron’s buildings not only effectively and elegantly meet the needs of their users; they also become places that are part of the cultural DNA of a city.
The City of Vancouver gave a significant portion with the contribution of the large lot for the building site.
The new gallery would cover two-thirds of the city-owned block. This design would accomplish just that.
The design calls for the building to be built in wood, including its structural frame.
The lower levels of the building will be more transparent, with floor to ceiling glazing, in order to engage the street.
“The Vancouver Art Gallery really deserves a place that can deal with these numbers of people and different kinds of people”, Binswanger said. British Columbia is at the forefront of constructing large wood buildings, making it an ideal place for a building of this material.
The new purpose-built building will replace the existing gallery which has been located in a neo-classical renovated Courthouse building for the last three decades. To that end, the architects suggest blowing up part of Queen Elizabeth Square next door and bringing a new square down to the level of the gallery.
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To create a strong presence westward along West Georgia, the design proposes to modify the Queen Elizabeth plaza by lowering it to the same level as the street. The design has been described as transparent, open and inviting.
