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KLMNO the new arena stage} the architect Raising the curtain on Bing Thom
Arena Stage will lift U.S. profile of low-key Canadian architect
by Philip Kennicott
vancouver — Giant tankers anchored in Vancouver’s English Bay loom over Bing Thom’s wood- en sailboat like floating islands. Some, filled with containers from China, ride low in the water. Oth- ers, waiting to take on coal and potash for the return trip East, ride high, towering over the 35- foot sloop. “It costs $10,000 a day when
they wait,” Thom says. The Cana- dian architect is fascinated by the mechanics of things like trade, which often veil a complex puzzle of interlocking problems. He is a renowned designer, but he is also acutely aware of the financial, en- vironmental and social costs of making buildings. His reputation is based, in part, on his sensitivity to the client’s bottom line. But he isn’t obsessed with money, or fame or fortune. His office staff says the pristine Mini Cooper he’s driving is the first new car they can re- member him owning. Thom, whose design for Arena
Stage’s new theater will make him as famous in the United States as he is in Canada, is determined to steer a path independent of the crass salesmanship, egoism and narcissistic display that defines some of the more glamour-hungry architects of the past decade. As he opens one of his most ambi- tious buildings yet, a $135 million glass-fronted pavilion that enclos- es two historic theaters and adds an innovative third, he is also working on a civic library in an unprepossessing edge-city near Vancouver. He is redesigning the center of Fort Worth, and recently finished a parking structure in Calgary. His legacy around this stunningly verdant Pacific Rim city is an eclectic mix: a blue-chip concert hall for the biggest univer- sity in town, and a small commu- nity center in a sometimes trou- bled urban neighborhood. “Maybe there are doors I
haven’t walked through,” he says, contemplating his career. Thom, 69, whose practice has grown to include a staff of 35, is a complicat- ed idealist. He wants clients open to discovery, change and experi- mentation. He believes that every building should justify its exis- tence, that developers should un- derstand their work is a privilege, not a right. He refuses to take on projects in which he can’t be per- sonally engaged. He stresses the importance of the architect as a “master builder,” involved not just with designs and ideas, but with seeing the project through to its last degree of finish. He is intense- ly interested in sustainability without using the cliched lan- guage of green architecture, wor- ried about materialism and con- sumerism, yet compulsively fo- cused on the polish, refinement and materials of his buildings. He has also carved out a reputa- tion as a fearless critic of architec- ture and urbanism. “People are quite amazed that someone of his stature is willing to
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2010
LINDA DAVIDSON/THE WASHINGTON POST TALL ORDER: Bing Thom leans against one of his signature features, a parallam column, at Arena Stage, which boasts 18 of the columns made of recycled Douglas fir chips.
be as frank as he has been,” says Trevor Boddy, an independent ar- chitecture critic and urbanist who has observed Thom in Vancouver since the late 1970s. That out- spokenness — in favor of a more egalitarian, open, humane land- scape — hasn’t always been to Thom’s short-term gain. Now he brings his intellectual force to Washington, where other Canadian architects — Arthur Er- ickson, Douglas Cardinal — have failed to extend their influence. With the opening of Arena Stage, a high-profile project with a gala chaired by the president and first lady of the United States, Thom steps into the Washington spot- light with the ideal personality to succeed: gregarious but unassum- ing, and resolutely focused on problems others don’t always see. Arena’s opening will present him with more opportunities, more temptations to expand from a large, busy boutique firm to a huge, bustling, corporate one. But it’s not clear he wants to change how he has always done business.
Thom was born in Hong Kong in 1940, into a family of Chinese descent with complicated roots in Canada. His grandfather had emi- grated to Canada and Anglicized his name at a time when Chinese immigrants were barely welcome. But Thom’s father, trained as a pharmacist, was so infuriated when authorities refused to grant
She’ll conquer the world … one heart at a time.
him a license to practice that he relocated the family back to China. Then the communists came to power and Thom’s mother took her three boys back to Canada. Thom grew up in a largely white neighborhood and had to relearn Chinese later in life. He considered himself a radical in school. He studied architecture at the University of British Colum- bia as an undergraduate and earned a master’s in architecture from the University of California at Berkeley — where he was given a teaching job in ethnic studies af- ter students, angry about Viet- nam, protested for a less Eurocen- tric curriculum. He worked for a while for the great Japanese archi- tect and urbanist Fumihiko Maki. But it was in the office of Erickson, the Vancouver architect who de- signed the much maligned Cana- dian Embassy on Pennsylvania Av- enue, that Thom took on his first big projects, and gained the skills that would make him a profound influence on the Vancouver land- scape. It wasn’t, however, an easy fit. “Arthur was a great architect, but he didn’t give a damn about money,” says Thom. Some of Er- ickson’s buildings have the grim, stolid blankness of brutalism, but others, especially the well-sited ones that have gathered a cloak of greenery, feel primitive in a good way, magical emanations from the earth. Thom’s architecture, fluid and gentle, is more detailed, warmer, made of trees, not rocks. “Bing has inherited Erickson’s
mantle,” says Boddy, not just be- cause he is the most prominent ar- chitect in Vancouver, but also be- cause he is “the conscience of the city.”
At 42, Thom left the Erickson
office, discouraged by his mentor’s complicated relation to fame and fortune. The older architect was chasing work around the world and overextending himself. Even- tually he went broke. The unpleas- ant drama is still fresh in Thom’s mind. It seems to influence how Thom conceives of risk — it shouldn’t all fall on the client’s shoulders — and his reluctance to expand beyond what can be man- aged by his team. Thom’s debut as a solo practi-
tioner, however, didn’t come at an auspicious moment. “When I started my office, the interest rate was 18 percent,” he says. Nobody was building any- thing. Thom found a dreary ware- house space tucked under one of
October 1-24, 2010 by Samuel A. Taylor; directed by Stephen Rayne
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Vancouver’s bridges and offered to improve the space for free rent. In a forthcoming book on his work — which reads like a spiritual primer for young architects — Thom says he survived his early years by be- ing both an architect and an entre- preneur. “We would find a real estate op-
ransformation
portunity, design the project, as- semble a consortium of investors, build the project, and sell it,” he writes. “This allowed us, a rela- tively young and modest-sized practice, to work on interesting projects with a fantastic client: ourselves.” There was also high-profile work for expositions, including a plywood pavilion for Expo ’86 in Vancouver, built on a shoestring, and the Canadian national pavil- ion for Expo ’92 in Seville. Later in the 1990s, he designed the Chan Center for the Performing Arts in Vancouver, the project that brought him to the attention of Molly Smith, artistic director of Arena. The Chan fully embodies the spirit of Thom’s work: Set into a hillside, near the water, the build- ing hides its bulk by placing some elements underground and break- ing up the spaces into a series of round or oval pavilions. Canted glass walls make the relatively
modest lobby seem larger and connect it to a dense, forestlike setting. The acoustics, designed by the famously finicky Artec Consul- tants, are renowned. But it’s the rhododendrons and
evergreen trees that most distin- guish the project. The university thought they should be removed so visitors could see the ocean. Thom demurred, and went so far as to tag individual plants for re- planting after the project was fin- ished. The theater is now covered in vines, surrounded by old- growth trees and giant bushes. Ar- chitecturally, it has its eyes on the ground, centered and happy in its place, rather than straining toward the horizon. The instinct to preserve also de-
fines Thom’s major project of the last decade, a town center in the suburban Vancouver city of Sur- rey, where he masterminded a plan to build a university atop a shopping mall, anchored by a new office building. The project reviv- ified an unloved plot of sprawl, the kind of car-centered, nowhere space that blots the landscape all across North America. Thom’s plan — to keep a struggling mall and add “activating” uses — seemed an oddball idea. “Most developers, and archi- tects, would have looked at that
shopping mall and said, ‘Let’s get rid of it,’ ” says Andrew Petter, president of Simon Fraser Univer- sity, which located one of its four campuses in Thom’s Surrey Cen- tral City. “To see a university at the heart of that city was really excit- ing.” It wasn’t really a city when
Thom got involved, but now it is beginning to feel more urban. Thom has stayed involved and is building a library near the com- plex, and has persuaded the city to relocate its offices to the same area. “The tenacity Bing has ...,” says
Surrey Mayor Dianne Watts, her voice trailing off in admiration. “He started working with us long before he had gray hair.”
NIC LEHOUX/BING THOM ARCHITECTS
NATURAL APPEAL: Thom’s Chan Center for the Performing Arts in Vancouver caught the eye of Arena’s artistic director, Molly Smith.
There are elements in Surrey, and the Chan Center, that recur in Arena Stage. Large wooden col- umns define both Surrey and Are- na, and the inclined glass wall that links the Chan to its forest glen is also repurposed in Thom’s Wash- ington design. The old Arena thea- ters have been retained, just like the inelegant shopping mall Thom saved, a gesture that places preser- vation above beauty. Unless, of course, the key to Thom’s aesthetic is that he doesn’t recognize a false dichotomy between preservation and beauty. Thom says he remembers
TWIN VISIONS:Two views of the Vancouver-based Thom’s Aberdeen Center, with its glass facade, in Richmond, B.C.
Washington, including Southwest, where his new building is open- ing, from when he visited decades ago as a student. The vast, barren landscape of L’Enfant Plaza was under construction, and Thom re- members seeing Southwest as an empty, plowed-under district, waiting for “urban renewal.” He was horrified. “If you scratch me deep enough,
my other great love is philosophy,” says Thom, whose thesis analyzed three questions: “What is a prob- lem? When is a problem a prob- lem? When is a problem solved?” L’Enfant Plaza is a classic example of architects and planners getting all three of Thom’s thesis ques- tions wrong. Thom is considering opening
an office in the District. He is al- ready working with the develop- ers and art collectors Don and Me- ra Rubell to integrate a hotel and art museum into a renovated Dis- trict public school building a few blocks from Arena. He is curious about Tysons Corner’s new masterplan. He knows the South- west waterfront, building by building, and is convinced it could be as bustling as the Vancouver waterfront. Thom has a habit of adopting places, like Surrey. He may be thinking about adopting Washing- ton, a city stultified by decades of colorless, inoffensive architecture. He senses a deep, philosophical and cultural problem at the core of a city that has long been content just to build buildings and muddle through with little magic or fan- tasy. And he may already be work- ing on solutions.
kennicottp@washpost.com
STUDIOTHEATRE.ORG 202-332-3300
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