The plan to move the Vancouver Art Gallery to a dramatic new location on False Creek near BC Place, announced with great fanfare two years ago by Premier Gordon Campbell, is dead.
The Globe and Mail has learned that gallery director Kathleen Bartels has gone back to negotiating with the city for an empty block on Georgia Street across from the Queen Elizabeth Theatre.
"After examining 12 different sites, very early on, this one rose to the top," Ms. Bartels said yesterday of the Larwill Park site, a parking lot - and former home of a bus depot - that was the location of LiveCity Downtown and the Canada Pavilion during the Olympics.
The gallery is squeezed for space, able to exhibit only about 3 per cent of its permanent collection at any one time, and has been hunting for a new location for years.
"Pure and simple, we need to expand," said Michael Audain, chair of the relocation committee. "The building is far too small."
The False Creek plan for the gallery involved a 320,000 square foot building - more than double the VAG's present size. At the time of the announcement, Ms. Bartels told The Globe: "You couldn't find a more exciting site for a new gallery, I don't think, anywhere in the world."
But a feasibility study found it would be expensive to build there and underground storage would be impossible.
"That really compromised any potential architectural glamour that the waterfront site may have offered us," said board chair David Aisenstat.
There were also concerns about the location. "It did move them further away from centre ice," said the city's planning director Brent Toderian.
In late January, the gallery informed the city that it was no longer interested.
Word of the move a few blocks east of its current location follows a wildly successful Olympic period for the gallery, with around-the-block line-ups and smashed attendance records. It was in the heart of the action, a stone's throw from the zip line, skating Olympic mascots and last Sunday, jubilant hockey fans. Olympics or not, this area is where the city congregates.
The gallery has been under intense pressure to stay where it is.
"Where they are now was just branded as the most active place in the city during the Games. And they want to move? They have the 100 per cent location now," said Bob Rennie, a condominium marketer internationally renowned for his contemporary art collection and private gallery in Chinatown. "They should just go underground. The Louvre did it."
Mr. Audain said that option would have forced as much as 90 per cent of the gallery underground.
"We're boxed in here, and it's time to move."
Although the province has committed $50-million to the new building, it could cost as much as $400-million.
The move is by no means a done deal. The city has identified Larwill Park as a potential spot for an office tower, and other groups are eyeing it.
"We've said to the VAG: if this is a site that's of interest to you, don't restrict yourself to a concept that precludes you from sharing the site potentially with a tall building or anything else even," said city manager Penny Ballem.
But the gallery, which has held some "very preliminary meetings" with "some of the most famous architects in the world," according to Mr. Aisenstat, wants a standalone, iconic building.
"We simply would not embark on a project of this magnitude with ordinary as our goal."
Frances Bula is a freelance reporter
