Bing Thom's architectural creations - sometimes playful, always outside the box, increasingly green - grace neighbourhoods across Vancouver and around the world, ranging from serene, temple-like homes to the cylindrical, zinc-clad Chan Centre for the Performing Arts at the University of British Columbia. His latest work, the Sunset Community Centre, which opened last month on the Punjabi Market strip of Vancouver's South Main Street, appears from above as a lotus flower and has garnered praise for employing natural light in almost every room while incorporating such local materials as B.C. hemlock. This interview is part of a new series asking people famous for their connection to place about where they come from.
Thanks in part to the grace and simplicity of your work, and also your determination to team up with local craftspeople, you're considered by many to be a hometown hero. How has Vancouver, in turn, been an inspiration to you?
I think Vancouver is a truly authentic city, in that it doesn't try to be other places. Fortunately, it's comfortable being itself. It's popular for cities now to import star architects, for instance, and so far we haven't done that. I think it says something about a city when it doesn't require other people to speak for it. That's one thing people should
know about Vancouver: its confidence.
Also its experimentalism. When I work with craftsmen, in glass or wood or concrete, they are always willing to experiment with me. When I work in New York or Texas or Washington, everybody is so concerned with making money, they don't want to try the unusual. People come here because they really do see an alternative culture, because Vancouver is on the edge. We're a farm-team place for the cultural inventions of other cities. You find that in filmmaking, in music, in visual arts, in cooking. Our restaurants are phenomenal. They're authentic - they haven't lost their culture. I just came back from having lunch in a Malaysian restaurant called Jonker Street [on Pacific Boulevard], where the chef told me he tried to open first in Los Angeles. "I couldn't serve the kind of food I serve here - no one would eat it," he told me. You don't have to dumb it down in Vancouver. The city's palate is willing to collide with other cultures.
What building - other than one of your own - best sums up the essence of the city?
There are two: The Burrard Street Bridge, because you can go over it or under it - in a kayak, in a boat or by ferry - and it's your gateway to the city. It's also a wonderful heritage bridge. The other is Robson Square, designed by Arthur Erickson. It's our public open space, a garden really, and to have a garden right downtown is a great thing.
What building or architectural landmark in Vancouver do you wish you had designed?
The Vancouver Convention Centre, which is now finished on the waterfront. I had an alternative proposal for it that I thought was much better. It's a big blob on the waterfront that does nothing for the city. The one I proposed, on the east end of the downtown on False Creek, would have added an extra urban park to the city, not blocked any views and revitalized a part of the city that's underserved.
If a visitor had to choose one place to go to get perspective on the city, where would that be?
You have to get onto the water. When you look at the downtown, we're a relatively small city, but from a distance you see how dense we are. It's like New York.
Or you can go up to the mountains - Grouse Mountain is good, or any of the tall ones - and look back down onto the city. From there, you'll see the density of buildings, smack up against nature.
You can live in the city and go for a swim at lunch in English Bay. I swim from May to October in the ocean every day. I work eight minutes from home - my office is under the Burrard Street Bridge; I lose a few clients who can't find me, but that's all right - so I try to go to the beach before work and when I get off.
If you're visiting, rent a boat. You can do that on Granville Island or at the edge of Stanley Park. A little motorboat or a kayak. A kayak, on False Creek or English Bay, is a perfect way to see Vancouver.
Do you have a favourite
neighbourhood?
My home is in Kitsilano. You have to go there. It's midway between downtown and the university, so you get this mix of working people, intellectuals, arts people, foreign students - all in a neighbourhood that for a long time was the centre of the hippie area. It still has residual hippie shops - craft stores, stores that import stuff from the South Pacific, from Eastern Europe. On Fourth Avenue you can buy sports equipment - snowboarding, skiing, bicycling stuff. And we have the best video-rental store in the world: Videomatica. I just rented Akira Kurosawa's I Live in Fear.
