The new Vancouver Art Gallery shapes up as an architectural gem

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Herzog & de Meuron want you to put your hands on their architecture. “People often like to touch the walls of our buildings, and that is a good sign,” the firm’s co-founder Jacques Herzog said this week from his studio in Basel. “I like that, in old sites in Rome, sculptures will often have a glassy surface from people’s hands; it shows there are moments of tenderness.”

Visitors to the new Vancouver Art Gallery at Chan Centre for the Visual Arts will mostly not be invited to touch the art. But the building – a 20-storey tower of wood, concrete and copper – promises to be a playground for the mind, the eye and the fingertips, as well as a hospitable public landmark in downtown Vancouver.

The project appears headed for construction after this week’s $100-million gift from developer and architecture patron Michael Audain. It is being designed by HdM, together with Perkins & Will Vancouver. That is excellent news for the city and for the country: a transformative piece of architecture by one of the world’s most thoughtful (and most art-savvy) design practices.

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This week, the VAG was slightly vague on the details, but the design scheme is similar to that unveiled in 2015 – with new twists and weaves.

The gallery is still a vertical building, rising up 10 double-height floors and descending into a basement level for a theatre. Its form is still a series of horizontal slabs of varying thickness, suspended from a central vertical axis. And this structure is still surrounded by a low pavilion-like building that encircles the sloping, two-acre site at the former Larwill Park.

What is different? For one thing, the exterior cladding material. In 2015, this was planned to be wood. In the next version, glass. Now it will be wrapped by a weave of copper-coloured metal a foot thick, alluding to the Coast Salish weaving tradition.

At 80,000 square feet, the gallery spaces will be larger, the VAG’s director Anthony Kiendl said, and remain varied in their sizes and arrangements. Details are still being worked out.

The ground-floor area is now an enclosed space, and the main entrance is now at ground level. In the previous iterations, the entire ground floor was an open-air courtyard and the entrance was one level below ground. Mr. Kiendl said these changes were made at Michael Audain’s suggestion.

It is clear that community spaces are deeply important to the project. The VAG’s low outer building now includes a child care centre; accommodations and workspace for artists in residence; and a “community project space” that will especially welcome local Indigenous people. And the structure of the low pavilion building is intended to be mass timber, or engineered wood, a material that is both grown and processed in B.C. It provides wonderful surfaces to run your fingertips across.

On a larger scale, a building such as this inevitably also plays a symbolic and civic role. Done right, cultural architecture can capture the character of a place, enhance it, and transform it. HdM are especially good at this. Their expansion to the Tate Modern turns London’s familiar yellow brick into something weird and yet enticing.

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Art plays a part in this alchemy of place. HdM have engaged with visual art and artists throughout their career, and more than once have incorporated artworks into the facades of their buildings. In this case it was a series of local indigenous artists who helped shaped the design through early 2021: Debra Sparrow, Angela George, Skwetsimeltxw Willard (Buddy) Joseph and Chepximiya Siyam’ Janice George. “As weavers, we were asked to bring our art to the table,” said Janice George, an expert weaver and educator. “And now the whole building is wrapped in copper strands.” She added: “It will change the feel of the city, no doubt about it.”

HdM are also celebrating three museums being completed this fall. “If you see photographs of these buildings,” Mr. Herzog said, “it shows the degree [to which] we like to give people completely different platforms.” But HdM’s approach to museums remains the same, he said: “These must be places that people want to go – and future generations want to go – to see, but also to talk and to be together.”

One such museum is M+, opening next week in Hong Kong, billed as “Asia’s first global museum of contemporary visual culture.” Hong Kong is a tower city, and M+ is a tower museum. The building (wrapped in dark terracotta tubes) forms an upside-down T, with galleries below and curatorial, research and residence space up top. (“You don’t find any other city in the world where artists’ studios are somewhere on the 20th or 30th floor,” Mr. Herzog points out.)

Vancouver, too, is a tower city. Or that is what the city tells itself. In fact, most of Vancouver is low-rise, made up of wood-framed houses interspersed with commercial strips. The new VAG will speak to both, says architect Simon Demeuse, the Herzog & de Meuron partner who’s managing the project. “It has a scale that is familiar to the house neighbourhoods, and it is as tall as the condos. It is familiar. And yet also distinct, which is good,” he added, “because this is an art gallery.”

Indeed, a gallery building should both capture the spirit of a place and invite new ways of seeing that place. The new VAG promises to put such a gift in Vancouver’s hands.

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