Cost Of Planned Vancouver Art Gallery Building Soars By 50% To C$600 Million

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The budget for the new Vancouver Art Gallery — the glitzy centrepiece of the city’s attempts to revitalize its cultural scene — has ballooned by 50 per cent, from $400 million to $600 million, throwing construction timelines and design plans into disarray.

The gallery released a statement Thursday, blaming the budget increase on “unprecedented and unforeseen” recent construction cost escalation, saying this will force a change of the building design and indeterminate delay on construction. The design for the striking new building, by Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron, was unveiled in 2015.

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The news represents a “blemish” on the reputation of Vancouver’s arts and culture, said Bob Rennie, founder of the Rennie group of real estate companies and one of Canada’s leading collectors of contemporary art.

Rennie, who also serves as president of the Tate Americas Foundation, has long been critical of the gallery’s approach to its new building and what he called “the audacity to think we can handle a $600 million building.”

“As an art collector, what we need is white walls. We don’t need starchitecture. An art gallery should be about the contents, not about the box,” Rennie said Thursday. “There’s been so much celebration (about the new building) … and now to have it not go ahead is a blemish, and I don’t think that we should be tampering with the reputation of our amazing city of Vancouver this way.”

Plans have been in the works for more than a decade to move the gallery from its current home in the former courthouse at 750 Hornby St. into a new, purpose-built facility six blocks east along West George Street, at Cambie Street.

The gallery’s future home, a city-owned property called Larwill Park, had been a parking lot and was the site of a temporary modular housing project providing homes for 98 people at risk of homelessness, until the homes were dismantled last year to make way for the gallery’s construction.

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The gallery said it has raised more than $350 million to date, and completed early pre-construction work at the park site earlier this year.

In 2012 — when the new art gallery’s cost was publicly estimated to be around $300 million — Rennie told CBC News he favoured the idea of the gallery expanding through a series of smaller satellite sites instead of one very large, expensive building.

“Let’s look at spending $150 million on a Vancouver Art Gallery, rather than $600 million,” Rennie said in 2012. “I have a concern that we have no head offices, we’re not a financial centre … We have to look to the future and punch below our weight, rather than constantly punching above it.”

On Thursday, Vancouver Art Gallery CEO Anthony Kiendl pushed back against criticisms the plans were overly audacious.

“In terms of square footage and scope, it’s not out of the ordinary, it’s not excessive. It is, in fact, more modest than other major Canadian cities,” Kiendl said. “Vancouver has the strongest visual arts community in the country, one of the strongest in North America, and it’s very fitting to have an appropriately large place that recognizes all the incredible artists and artwork that’s created here.”

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The cost escalation was “a symptom” of what has been happening across the entire construction sector, said Kiendl, who has held his current position since 2020, when he came to Vancouver after leading Saskatchewan’s largest public art gallery.

“I take it in stride, I’m incredibly optimistic about the future of the gallery, I’m confident we are going to get there,” he said.

Previously, the gallery had expected to begin construction in October. On Thursday, Kiendl said construction will not begin this year, and couldn’t say whether it might begin next year.

Regarding the new building design, Kiendl said the gallery will look to “retain as much as we can of the original design, but look at how we can live within our means and be fiscally responsible.”

“We’re not going back to the drawing board,” he said.

dfumano@postmedia.com

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