Let's Get One Thing Out of the Way First

Culturally sensitive eyes in my little province of the world were, this past weekend, turned expectantly towards the opening of its greatest-to-date monument to the visual arts. The every aspiration of Edmontonian culturati found glorious expression in the grand reopening of the Art Gallery of Alberta on January 29th, January 30th, or January 31th (depending on whether you dropped $500 on a gala dinner plate; cut the proverbial ribbons with upsized chrome scissors; or settled to be one of 350 people/hour getting in for the low, low price of printing out a digital form). Relentlessly branding the place for months on end, AGA marketers have been stocking shelves, delivering press copy, and selling every square inch of the new building’s plaque-able surface to civic boosters – entities regional, national and corporation-al.

In any event, self-styled supporters of the arts have largely embraced not just the new building but the schtick that accompanies it as well. I spoke with one longtime participant in the gallery's endeavours who believes wholeheartedly that the AGA's new building exemplifies charter donor John Poole's exhortation to "build it right and cut no corners." Although I would not wish to dampen such sincere enthusiasm (I recognize the benefits of having a new and improved regional gallery), for myself I cannot so heartily affirm Randall Stout’s scrawling building as a sign that Edmonton has finally arrived among the world’s most refined and cosmopolitan cities. Because I’m paying close attention to it, and because sustained attention begets appreciation, and because practiced appreciation develops taste, I recognize significant flaws in the new building.

There has been enough muckraking of dissenters that I feel I must first state the obvious: criticality does not a hater make. I for one always try to put honest words to my thoughts and to pay as little mind to popular opinion or political tactic as possible. I understand that my opinion is contrary to many of those most closely involved in this city’s culture scene, but who in principle would disagree that diverse opinions only have a chance at becoming dialogue (and who doesn't value dialogue?) when they are allowed to butt one against another?

Mere contrariness becomes no one; even so, I really can’t get behind calling the loopy parts of the structure “the Borealis”, as Stout and Co. are said to do. I’ve been privy to all sorts of trash talk about the place and I’ve heard it referred to by tradesmen as “the Borealis” exactly once and sarcastically, at that. It is little wonder that such a high-minded tag hasn’t caught on, not least since the stainless steel loop-de-loop doesn’t look remotely like the northern lights. “Plane Crash”, a regular-joe reference that I’ve heard numerous times already, could stick but even I hope it doesn’t. I’m looking for a more endearing term that is attentive to the primary visual quality (the gestalt) of Alberta’s premier visual arts centre: incongruity. For lack of the perfect moniker, I’ll just refer to the New Building hereon in as the “Newb”.

I grant that upon first approach the New Building is impressive, albeit in the same value-free way that we might understand when someone says a painting is ‘interesting’, and inasmuch as whatever impression it does leave is indelible. In daylight, obdurate-cast facets of glass repel rather than attract, but under a night sky the glassy façade glows in a pleasantly inviting manner. Inside or out, night time is when the Newb is at its best – disjointed silver cockles soften into aqueous moieties and awkwardly canting steel erectors recede when interior illuminations overtake the sun's. Stout’s lighting designer earns a respectable grade by redeeming the exterior from 24-hour frigidity.

And yet, as I feared in the months leading up to this opening weekend when all that was possible was to peek into the construction over its street-side hoarding, the place is disorientingly scale-less. Walking up to the Newb yields unreliable information about how many stories tall it may be, or about what it might feel like on the inside. With the visible entrances made of tall, all-glass gates; perplexing aperatures into a patio in the upper reaches; and little to no indication of how the Newb's loops structurally grip the ground, the human-scale information that we generally take for granted when navigating through our urban architecture is almost entirely absent.

There is one consistency to be found in the New Building: disorienting perspectival cues. Enter the atrium and even those most reliable of all human scale indicators, other people, appear diminished and at a distance – as though seen through a convex lens. Beside the PULL sign on the doors there should be an additional warning: “Objects May Be Closer Than They Appear”. The polished natural concrete floor is the only immediate proof that one has not stepped into some sort of veneered vortex. The lowest ceiling available to hook your visual pitons into is about 30 feet up. At a glance silver and white metals rake across the upper reaches, not wisping ephemerally as cirrus clouds but looming heavily like the bottom of an airliner at that fraught instant before it touches down. Of all the dramatic effects that it would be possible to achieve when designing an experimental building, I’d be willing to bet that vertigo is not any architect’s most desirable. (Except for a rollercoaster architect.)

Even the primary light feature that beckons one in from the cold turns out upon inspection to induce a dizziness of its own. A Plexiglas column of frosted blue light juts from the concrete like some retro-futuristic spatial distortion weapon. It shares a quality specific to black light in that it doesn’t stop wavering long enough to for the eye to settle comfortably upon it. Think of how blue Christmas lights seem to be simultaneously right in front of you and impossibly distant, then imagine a 30 foot tall electric blue bulb and you may be able to appreciate the dimensional shifts it causes. Never even mind how difficult it is to focus on the names of the New Building’s donors printed in black vinyl on the surface.

I've already written elsewhere of unconvincing surface treatments throughout. The zinc cladding looks believable until you're within 6 feet, the lobes of stainless sheet steel only appear seamless and smooth from six hundred feet distant. Obviously, inside the Newb you are brought within those parameters, and compounding the sense that every visible surface is only a membrane are unconvincing junctions between disparate materials. Patches of fir lath do not nicely complement rolled and burnished steel; tempered glass does not join with concrete in any easy way. It is my experience that solid, discrete, believable junctures are crucial, imperative really, to achieving unity with disparate materials. Weakly designed, or weakly constructed? I suspect some combination of each. A bit of scuttlebutt from the Artist/Industry event: winging stainless swoops as well finished as on one of Gehry's buildings would've required another $20,000,000.

That there are customized views from the second and third floors onto Sir Winston Churchill Square, and of City Hall in particular, is one of Randall Stout's most leaned-upon justifications for a 60 foot high glass atrium. In order to catch a cohesive glimpse of the city beyond a viewer must either accept a composite fly's-eye view by willfully ignoring the geometric oddity of the broad steel window casings, or shuffle forward and back and all around then tilt his head just-so. Other than in the vestibule, there may not be a single pane of atrium glass that stands square and plumb. I have heard dozens of people resort to defending the incongruities of the AGA’s New Building by saying, “at least it’s not square”. But it is so far out of square that I don't think the Newb catalyzes its architectural environment effectively, not within city limits. To lay it on a bit thicker: it is a colossal cubist head so emphatically narcissistic that the rest of the Square is rendered moot in its presence.

Fortunately, excellent gallery spaces easily compensate for their shell, which is adequate in the way that the hermit crab’s chosen home is so long as it is big enough to retreat into. (Interestingly, after writing this I saw the Globe and Mail quote the AGA’s chief curator likening the relationship of the building’s interior and exterior to those of a conch shell.) The gallery spaces are generally voluminous but of a decent variety to accommodate the various arrangements specific to the needs of nearly any imaginable exhibit: intimate or blockbuster, classical or contemporary. Truly excellent lighting and environmental systems enhance the possibility of presenting truly world-class exhibitions. As a museum for exhibiting art the Newb is a notable improvement over the slowly-failing Brutalist building that preceded it; as a space for human occupancy, the first shell was the more homey.

But note that art is not among the first things to confront a visitor to the Art Gallery of Alberta in its New Building. Whatever art one might find is a long ways in, past the blue-lit spire, ZINC the restaurant, Ernest C. Manning Hall, Shop AGA, the white hottub sculpture that is the front desk, and art is not visible from any site line even 40 steps in. Except for the possibility of showing art made of impervious materials (steel sculpture, say) there is no remedy as the vast atrium is an environment insufficiently controlled to protect the more fragile arts from mould and degradation.

It is not only the AGA's facade and surrounds that have changed. The easily intuited www.artgalleryalberta.ca has now been recast as www.youraga.ca and “Your AGA” adverts have cropped up as far afield as Medicine Hat, AB. A dubious five-colour acronym logo that reads ASIA as naturally as it does AGA replaces the much classier black and red full-name version. To his staff, Executive Director Gilles Hebert recently described The Art Gallery of Alberta as “a new organization”; and certainly, any institution that throws so many resources into re-branding itself twice in three years (its staff having grown at least 150% in the same period and primarily in marketing/development) cannot simultaneously retain a clear sense of its longer history. Traces of what the Edmonton Art Gallery (EAG) had been good at/good for over the years has been regrettably displaced, and all but forgotten.

My cynicism is admittedly tempered by certain statistics – by various measures the Newb is a popularly acclaimed hit. It has been solidly sold out. The gala VIP event filled up long in advance of its privileged first night; the Artist/Industry party was over capacity; somewhere in the range of 10,000 timed tickets for the two or three days following the ribbon-cutting ceremony were claimed online in about 24 hours; membership sales are at an all-time high; and wedding receptions are booked solid through 2011. It was immensely encouraging to see so many people milling around an art gallery over the weekend, and even the first day of paid admissions seemed significantly busier than I was anticipating.

Glorious details not unlike these have been released to the press on a weekly basis for months on end prior to Saturday the 30th, and for its part the press has been glad to report as fact anything AGA spokespeople declared as such. In a TV interview the mayor quixotically spoke to hypothetical complaints by people who might say the Newb is only more urban blight and by perturbed hockey fans who might feel that their true culture has been co-opted and tax dollars funnelled into the Newb instead of a New Arena: he said they could dislike the New Building if they wished but that they could not, must not, deny it its place as a necessary symbol of Edmonton’s pre-eminence. The press agrees, it would seem, for there has been hardly a whit of journalistic pressure applied since the moment Randall Stout was acclaimed.

This is surely the most propitious opportunity we'll ever have have to critically consider the Art Gallery of Alberta's contribution to architecture in Edmonton. At least until another 50 years have passed and more moneyed civic champions of the arts bequeath the AGA sums for its New New Building. Like it or not, the Newb is what we'll be stuck with, for the remainder of my lifetime anyhow. What we 'must' do is get critiques of its architecture-ality out of the way now so we can start considering the art that it will house.