Come September, the scene will play a part in downtown Toronto, as an elaborate architectural conceit high up on the Toronto International Film Festival’s new TIFF Bell Lightbox building. There, on the corner of King and John Streets, a dramatic staircase echoing the Villa Malaparte’s will rise from the southwestern corner of a spacious sixth-floor patio, with a view not of the Gulf of Salerno, alas, but of drab condominium high-rises. Still, a few months ago, when I found myself stumbling over construction equipment on top of the unfinished building with Piers Handling, director and CEO of TIFF, and Bruce Kuwabara, the Lightbox’s lead architect, they were both giddy about the steps, like kids showing off the coolest part of their new fort.
The staircase, which led up to a shabby fence dividing the structure from the indoor swimming pool of the Festival Tower condominiums above, is essentially spectacle. Both Handling and Kuwabara were pleased that it had survived the inevitable budget tightening during construction. Despite the ubiquitous drywall dust and the frantic clamour, Handling was clearly already fantasizing about the glamorous movie stars who would pose there, embodying the world Mourlet described. “I told them to put planters up there,” the TIFF director grumbled — condo developers don’t always have refined aesthetic taste.
I’d met up with Handling and Kuwabara in the developers’ makeshift headquarters, on the third floor of a former pub just behind the building. The room was plastered floor to ceiling with intricate plans scrawled over with notes. Taken together, the structurally intertwined Lightbox, Festival Tower, and below-ground parkade make for a seriously complicated project. But Handling and Kuwabara weren’t especially concerned with logistics; they’re big picture guys.
In his early sixties, Handling is a tall man with piercing eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses and a booming, authoritative voice. Kuwabara is slighter, intellectually intense, and evidently restless, with a quick-witted, mordant sense of humour. They bounced ideas off each other with the ease and fluidity of colleagues who have had their heads immersed in a landmark project for a long time, which they have: they’ve been working together since 2003, when Kuwabara and his firm, Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg Architects, were awarded the contracts to design the Lightbox and the Festival Tower.
The complex marks TIFF’s risky multimillion-dollar gambit to do what no other major Canadian cultural institution has managed to accomplish: create an authentically world-class, leading-edge centre. From its relatively simple origins in 1970s Toronto, TIFF has evolved into far more than a ten-day annual film festival. Under its umbrella are the festival itself; TIFF Cinematheque, one of the premier cinematheques in the world; the Film Reference Library; and Sprockets, a children’s film festival. Handling knew early on that he wanted to move his already complicated organization to a new level, and that doing so would involve giving it a permanent home. “I thought it would be a shame not to use the leverage the film festival’s success gave me,” he said. “We had some money put aside for research, so we commissioned a space-needs analysis for cinemas, a gallery, learning centres, and the like, and I took the board to Europe to see film museums in Berlin, London, Paris, and Lyons.” The result was the Lightbox, the only building of its kind in North America — a monumental centre devoted exclusively to the art of cinema.
Viewed from the outside, the Lightbox signifies cinema in all its historical complexity, from the grandeur of Cecil B. DeMille epics to the subtleties of recent European cinema. The ground floor is enclosed by vertical windows that sweep laterally around the corner from King West to John Street. The main entrance, tucked beneath a slightly pitched roof, unspools onto a massive central atrium and twin escalators to the second floor, where TIFF’s star-studded galas will take place.
The exterior glass of the third, fourth, and fifth floors alternates between transparent and semi-transparent, creating a punctuated flow of horizontal strips that evoke moving lengths of celluloid. This pattern is interrupted in the building’s western quadrant by the dark, opaque cubes of two theatres that jut from their surroundings, seeming to float free. Set with vertical blue lights, these cubes do not so much expose formal structure (as one might expect in a high-modernist building) as assert that here the experience of cinema is primary, and that it is often private and introspective.
Adjacent to the bravura red carpet atrium will be a spacious gallery, which will provide insight into film and film history. “We’ve asked people over the years to donate archival material — we have a lot of stuff from David Cronenberg, like the props from Naked Lunch — but we’ve never had anyplace to put it,” Handling told me. This marriage of film and museum is extremely timely: increasingly, major international institutions are mounting exhibitions about the making of films. (The Tim Burton exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York will travel to the Lightbox this fall.) And the boundary between film and the visual arts has lately broken open in a way unseen since the early twentieth century. Winnipeg filmmaker Guy Maddin has staged exhibits at places like the Power Plant in Toronto, for example, while painter Julian Schnabel and photographer Sam Taylor-Wood have both made acclaimed feature films in recent years.
The building’s state-of-the-art theatres occupy the second and third floors: one with 550 seats and a well for an orchestra, set up to screen both 3-D and 70-millimetre films; then others with 350, 250, 150, and 80 seats each. All are controlled from a central projection room, a cube that extends out into the main atrium. Hermetically sealed from the outside world, the theatres give TIFF immense flexibility: programmers can have a live orchestra perform a score for Battleship Potemkin; screen 2001: A Space Odyssey in the 70 millimetre in which it was originally shot; show a Hollywood epic in 3-D; or simply present additional screenings of important films that command smaller audiences.
Kuwabara and his team at KPMB were a natural choice for the project, since they have been covering Toronto’s urban landscape with cultural institutions for years: in addition to the Lightbox, there is the Gardiner Museum, the Royal Conservatory, and the award-winning National Ballet School. Kuwabara’s work has a reputation for clarity, openness, and lightness of touch, eschewing showy ornament in favour of integration with the city. Indeed, even the Festival Tower seems subtle and elegant compared with the ugly, nearly identical glass and concrete complexes that litter Toronto’s harbourfront. KPMB insisted that its balconies be made of fritted glass, which, in addition to keeping furniture and bikes and laundry out of sight, will reflect the cityscape back to itself. Atop the tower will sit an immense light box, a beacon visible across the city.
“Architecture has to be both visionary and practical,” Kuwabara told me. “From the initial brief, you know what parts of the project have to be there, and what happens then is that a theme gets put forward and the architecture becomes a compelling narrative that drives the design. It will really be as though the city invades the building.” He added, “We the audience become the subject of the building. This is about coming into the building, seeing a great film, and stepping out and seeing the city.”
