Chan is Quite Lyrical

by Robin Ward / Vancouver Sun (May 28, 1997)

The Chan Centre at UBC is the most up-to-date performing arts center in Canada. Designed by Bing Thom Architects, it contains a 1,400-seat concert hall, a 180-280-seat theatre, and a 160-seat cinema all nestled on a tight site just east of the north end of the campus' Main Mall.

It is arguably the best of a bevy of buildings that has appeared at UBC over the past five years. Like most of its contemporaries, it is a stand alone "signature" building, the product of a major architect's pen and a generously signed private cheque (from the Chan Foundation, Hong Kong, with contribution from the Royal Bank, BC Tel and the provincial government).

During construction the Chan Centre looked like a concrete bunker but it has turned out to be lyrically tuned to the Point Grey landscape. You have to go back to the Museum of Anthropology, designed by Arthur Erickson over 20 years ago, to see a similar sensitivity at work. It's significant that Thom once worked in Erickson's office. Different styles and functions aside, a strong regional continuity links the two projects.

The most striking exterior feature is the concert hall's drum-shape form, a response to the problematic site that is partly forested (no trees were chopped). The drum shape eliminates hard edges; the building looks as if it has drifted ashore and nudged gently into the landscape. This is its best aspect; unlike most signature buildings it's undemonstrative, its bulk reduced partly by the trees and the slope of the land but also by the decision to clad the exterior with zinc panels.
These reduce the mass with a chameleon-like reaction to the climate. Light or shade, rain or shine, the weather and the sky are acknowledged as if the building were a living part of the land. This organic quality is repeated in the entrance pavilion, a smaller drum that plays a soft overture to the main hall. Less tuneful are the boxy exteriors of the theatre, cinema and loading bay on the east side.

Inside the drama theatre, movable galleries (they can be jacked up with compressed air) allow for flexible seating configurations from arena to conventional stage. But the space is a bit oppressive, and might have been improved if skylit like the Elizabethan theaters it emulates.

The concert hall, however, is superb. Double wall and roof construction create a building within a building. Masonry and concrete construction ensure acoustic separation, while curving outer corridors, some skylit, eliminate the usual back stage clutter. The auditorium's walls are curved at each end, but parallel at the sides like traditional 19th-century European concert halls (whose excellent acoustics designers now try to echo).

Columns and structural cables that look like violin strings create an 18th century Venetian effect (Vivaldi's Four Seasons immediately springs to mind). Indeed, the forest outside seems part of the experience: the piazza outside the foyer or along a lofty glazed, curving promenade where the rhythm between the forest and the hall creates a soothing sense of place.

The hall is equipped with a 37-ton acoustic canopy that can be raised or lowered for different types of performance. But despite attempts to "dissolve it, to make it like a chandelier," it hovers with all the subtlety of a flying saucer. Illuminated with 400 lightbulbs, it's a distracting symbol of control at odds with the sense of music freely flowing through the organic spaces that Thom has created.