Vancouver Magazine
Best Thing I Ate All Week: (Gluten-Free!) Fried Chicken from Maxine’s Cafe and Bar
A One-Day Congee Pop-Up Is Coming to Chinatown
Anh and Chi Teams Up With Fresh Prep, Making Our Foodie Dreams Come True
A Radical Idea: Celebrate Robbie Burns With These 3 Made-in-BC Single Malts
Wine Collab of the Week: A Red Wine for Overthinkers Who Love Curry
Dry January Mocktail Recipe: Archer’s Rhubarb Sour
Last Chance! Join Us at VanMag’s 2023 Power 50 Party
5 Things to Do in Vancouver This Week (January 23-29)
Vancouver Foundation: Fulfilling a Dream
The Ultimate Winter Staycation Guide 2023: 6 Great Places to Explore in B.C.
B.C. Winter Staycation Guide 2023: 48 Hours in Tofino
B.C. Winter Staycation Guide 2023: Everything You Need to Know About Whistler’s Creekside
5 Super-Affordable Wedding Venues in Metro Vancouver and the Fraser Valley
PSA: Please Do Not Buy These 3 Things for Valentine’s Day
10 Great Sweats to Honour International Sweatpants Day
Cities with new convention centres usually find they aren’t really centres of anything. The typical specimen is a sleeping giant—sprawling, unwelcoming, a squasher of street life.
What, then, are we to make of the 338,000-square-foot edifice that projects into Coal Harbour? After four years of traffic-choking, pile-driving, headache-inducing construction and at a cost of $883 million, the Vancouver Convention Centre extension, which trebles its size and launches from the seashore out over the water, has claimed one of our most treasured patches of real estate, at the foot of Burrard Street.
Is this giant a friendly one? We can dispense, first, with the idea that it’s just a box. Yes, the exhibition hall—a kind of underground airplane hangar at nearly a quarter-million square feet—is a raw cavern into which hundreds of thousands of name-tagged delegates will eventually file. But the centre’s ballrooms and foyers—girded all round by bright walls of glass—are smart, refreshing to walk into, even inspiring. Throughout, the walls are plated with pixels of hemlock, as though they were actually towering stacks of unfinished two-by-fours. Their crisp, modernist lines contrast (gracefully, for the most part) with the Arcadian vista of Stanley Park and the North Shore mountains. The main ballroom, built to accommodate 2,900 diners, is spangled with hundreds of lantern-like chandeliers, hanging at varied lengths from a lolling ceiling that mimics a seaside hillock.
The expansion is not a complete success: the grand, sighing sweep of the exterior, which mounts upward from adjacent parkland, hiccups when it hits a series of self-conscious lamps that look like enormous concrete bendy-straws. Then, on the city side of the centre, three gargantuan “district markers” (50-foot lamps, essentially) are meant to guide in foreign conventioneers—and were thus made so twisted and striking one can’t help but see them from blocks away.
This centre is generally, though, an accommodating behemoth. The seawall wraps around the building, passing what will eventually be shops on the ground floor. (They will first serve as studios for media during the Olympics.) Nearby Harbour Green Park reappears on the centre’s concrete shoulders in an extraordinary, six-acre, living roof.
That roof redefines the city’s oceanfront, provides a visual terracing from a forest of skyscrapers down to the water, and—here’s hoping—frames a humbler, more transparent, and more sustainable gathering place for today’s business delegate.