Anthony Shelton is excited. The director of Vancouver's Museum of Anthropology is showing me where the finishing touches are being applied to the building's $55.5-million redesign, with just 72 hours before the grand reopening (the iconic Arthur Erickson building has been shut for the past six months), and there's still a lot to do. The reorganized Great Hall is a hive of activity - with scissor lifts and mini-cranes resetting huge sculptures- and everyone is more than a little antsy about the presence of building inspectors, clipboards at the ready.
More concerning is the fact that the museum currently has no entrance: The front of the building has been given a makeover, with the addition of a Welcome Plaza to showcase two specially commissioned Musqueam artworks. Right now, however, the spot where Susan Point's abstract granite tile mosaic is destined to live is simply a wooden template cut into the concrete. And worse, the entrance stairway leading from the car park to the museum's doors is still under construction.
"I'm sure it'll be fine," says Shelton with a shrug. "They've got to be finished by Sunday, or we'll just have to paint them and call it an interactive exhibition - one you have to scale the edges of."
He may sound blasé, but it's not entirely convincing: We reroute ourselves more than once in order to avoid accidental contact with the inspectors. "They make me nervous," he says, laughing.
The redesign was led by Noel Best of Stantec Architecture, with Erickson consulting. (The famed octogenarian has not been able to call himself an architect since 2005, when he fell out of favour with the Architectural Association of B.C. for refusing to take the 18 hours of annual continuing education it now requires of registered professionals.)
Shelton and his team are nearing the end of a massive project, split across two phases. Phase one, the construction of a new building to house the museum offices, archives, state-of-the art storage facilities and library, was completed last year and doubled the total size of the museum. The timing was important, he explains, because they needed to trim the overall budget. "This way, we saved around $3-million because we were able to use the new building to store the contents of the original building while we worked on it," he says.
Phase two is being rolled out over the next year: Tomorrow sees the unveiling of the spruced up Great Hall, with its soaring wall of windows overlooking the Strait of Georgia, a new and enlarged museum store, the Welcome Plaza, and new landscaping of the rear area. Late spring will see the completion of the Bill Reid Rotunda (home to The Raven and the First Men) and a revamped lecture theatre. By January of next year, a new café will be open, as will 1,300 square metres of display space for artifacts from around the world, and a 750-square-metre space for temporary exhibits. On top of that, Shelton confides, there will be a major announcement next month concerning the future direction of the museum.
"We want to do everything to the highest standard," he says. "The museum is known internationally, but we haven't done any work on it in 30 years and it was looking a bit tired. We want to make it sparkle again."
That sparkle will include exhibition cabinets from Italy. "Goppions are the Rolls Royce of case-makers," says Shelton, smiling proudly. "They did the cases for the Mona Lisa, the Crown Jewels in the Tower of London, the U.S. Constitution - and we are the first museum in Canada to have them."
Top of the range glass and lighting means that the colour spectrum in the cases will be almost that of daylight - in order to represent the works in the most natural state possible. Copper handles will subtly reference the value of the metal in first-nations culture. The lecture theatre will be upholstered in Italian red leather. "I am haunted by beauty," Shelton says, clearly delighting in the extravagance of it all.
With grandiose plans come high expectations - something Shelton welcomes. "By North American standards, we will be a big museum and we have got to really step up," he says. "The new space will mean that we will be able to host the kinds of large touring exhibitions that were never able to hit Vancouver before, and we want those exhibitions to be top quality, cutting edge - and even a little bit dangerous sometimes."
He is also shrugging off "the sterile B.C. idea that galleries do decorative art and museums do artifacts and history.
"We want to break those polarizing, invalid genres and create new types of exhibitions that will startle people," he adds. "We are looking at anthropology in the widest sense of the word - it's about culture in all its forms. There needs to be a strong culture of critical thought in order to make sure our museums become really vigorous, active places.
"We are moving on" he declares. "And Vancouver will have to move on, too."