An architectural snore.
That’s the tragic upshot of the highly anticipated TIFF Bell Lightbox. It could have been a poetic work touched by the sultry light of Atom Egoyan’s films. The exterior might have been sculpted as a vessel of drama, made gritty and raw as Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men. There might have been elements of unsettling surprise, the way Wim Wenders amazed us in Wings of Desire.
Citizens, lower your expectations. What could have been released as a summer blockbuster of epic, original architecture turns out to be barely alive.
In the heart of Toronto’s entertainment district, the new headquarters for the Toronto International Film Festival bullies King Street West with mostly blank walls clad in painted metal panels. And, rising from the five-storey TIFF podium, the 42-floor Festival Tower condominium has opened the floodgates to a rash of towers in a district once distinctly, delightfully defined by its Victorian houses and brick warehouses.
Directly north of Festival Tower, the earth has already been opened up for the 43-storey Cinema Tower, designed by Kirkor Architects and Planners, which also served as the architects of record for the Bell Lightbox and Festival Tower. Next to it is the 42-storey Pinnacle on Adelaide. The Charlie tower – 32 storeys of “condos that love you” – is going up at the corner of Charlotte and King; nearby is the 30-storey M5V by Core Architects.
From its inception, the idea of a year-round headquarters for TIFF had gathered a star cast of backers and designers into its fold. In 2003, Bruce Kuwabara and Shirley Blumberg of KPMB Architects won the design competition tendered by TIFF and a consortium called the King and John Festival Corporation, made up of Hollywood producer Ivan Reitman, his sisters Agi Mandel and Susan Michaels, and Toronto developer Daniels Corporation.
The Reitmans donated the prime downtown land for the TIFF showpiece; Daniels donated its management fees associated with construction of the complex. The promise of a major centre dedicated to film inspired many acts of generosity – from festival board chair Paul Atkinson to the late impresario David Pecaut, and from fundraising campaign chair John Tory to the federal and provincial governments, which donated a combined $60-million to the project.
Certainly, the TIFF Bell Lightbox will become the city’s definitive hub of cinema culture, with five technologically supreme theatres, richly appointed seating, exhibition space, and a $10-million endowment to nurture young filmmakers. But in embracing the vision of TIFF to go big downtown, the city has sacrificed on a couple of fronts.
The lively Victorian cheek-by-jowl rhythm of King Street, where three-storey brick buildings house a collection of restaurants and outdoor-adventure stores, is now heavily shadowed by the new King Kong of culture. Height is not the only nasty gorilla on the street: Apart from the occasional relief pushed into the Lightbox façade, the building sets up a series of windowless walls containing cinemas within.
Rather than the kind of architectural drama found in the much smaller but emotionally charged Cinémathèque québécoise in Montreal by Saucier + Perrotte Architectes, the Lightbox is revived by some specific architectural close-ups. These include some chic watering holes and eateries designed by KPMB.
The second-floor Blackberry lounge features a long, white-marble bar and direct views onto the street. Connected to it is Luma, a restaurant with enough texture and restraint to make you feel instantly welcome; there are long leather banquettes, walnut on the floors and walls, and Eramosa stone, too. Elsewhere, there’s some repressed drama in the south walls of two cinemas clad in dark zinc and punching out over King Street; in the two-storey entrance atrium; and in an airy ground-floor restaurant with monumental sliding glass doors.
