“We’re designing to budget, not budgeting to design,” said VAG CEO Anthony Kiendl. “We’re working within our means.”
The Vancouver Art Gallery is looking for a smaller, simpler, and less-expensive design for its new home, after scrapping a previous plan last year amid ballooning costs.
After cutting ties last month with globally renowned Switzerland-based architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron, the VAG will search domestically for the next architect to design its new building. Last week, the gallery’s board of directors approved a plan to invite 13 architectural firms — all Canadian — to apply to design the new gallery, Anthony Kiendl, the Vancouver Art Gallery’s executive-director and CEO, told Postmedia in an interview this week.
The requests for proposals expected to go out soon to the Canadian architects, Kiendl said, will be “based on a ceiling limit in terms of budget and a designated scope.”
“We’re designing to budget, not budgeting to design,” said Kiendl, who arrived from Saskatchewan in 2020 to lead the VAG. “We’re working within our means.”
It’s too early to know the new building’s overall size, but it will be “significantly smaller” than the 310,000-sq.-ft. Herzog & de Meuron building, Kiendl said. But the plan is to double the gallery’s current amount of exhibition space — from a little under 40,000 square feet to around 80,000 — while also providing four purpose-built classrooms, incorporating Indigenous culture in the design, and achieving a high standard of green building, he said.
“It’s probably too soon to say much beyond that,” Kiendl said. “But really, it’s about art and people. It’s not about the architecture. It’s a place to show art and to learn about art, and those are the priorities.”
The target budget — based on cost estimates for other recent similar buildings in Canada — is $12,000 per square foot for hard construction costs, said Jon Stovell, who took over last year as chair of the VAG board and is also president of local real estate development firm Reliance Properties.
For a 200,000-sq.-ft. building, that would put construction costs around $240 million, with other “soft costs” — things such as design fees and financing — on top of that.
The new project will cost less, said Stovell, not only because it will be a shorter building, but also because its design, “while still beautiful, will be a lot more straightforward than the past design was.”
Over the past 12 years, the VAG had been able to raise about $355 million toward the gallery’s new home. Much of that total has not yet changed hands, but was pledged for the completion of the now-abandoned Herzog & de Meuron building. Kiendl said he has been encouraged by donors’ desire to support for the new vision. He added that in December, after news broke about the VAG cutting ties with the Swiss architects, the gallery received an anonymous $4 million donation.
Stovell said there will still be a “significant fundraising exercise” required for the new building, “but nothing like it was before. It’s a much smaller and much more realistic number that can be achieved.”
Vancouver artist Hank Bull, who served on the VAG board from 2014 until early 2024, said he was disappointed that the gallery’s current board cut ties with Herzog & de Meuron, considering the firm’s global reputation and other celebrated projects.
“There’s a lot of people who are upset. I’m upset. But (the board) probably did the right thing,” Bull said. “If they decided that the cash wasn’t there, they made a prudent decision. They’re good business people.”
Bull wishes someone from the municipal government would take more of a leadership role on the gallery project because he believes the city’s vibrant visual arts community deserves a world-class new building, he said. “I think there’s a failure at the level of the city.”
Jin-me Yoon, a Vancouver artist who has exhibited at the VAG in the past, said that the gallery has outgrown the repurposed former courthouse on West Georgia Street that has been its home since the early 1980s.
“It’s vital to have a new building,” Yoon said. “Buildings, like other aspects of our society, are manifestations of what we value. … And it’s important to value art, not just as icing on the cake. It’s the cake. It’s important.”