GESAMTKUNSTWERK.
“Life as a total work of art” – the concept is prettier than the word.
Vancouver House, Westbank Project’s newest addition to the Vancouver skyline, operates on the “gesamtkunstwerk” ideology popularized in the 1800s by German composer Richard Wagner. The building is comprised of a smoothly sculptural 150-metre tower, a Jenga-like structure slimly sluiced towards the bottom (the curve recalls a carrot one zoned out while peeling). The building’s base at Howe and Beach is proposed as a new mixed-use urban cultural center, featuring light-box photographic transparencies projected on the underside of the Granville Street Bridge, where Rodney Graham’s dazzling chandelier will prominently reside come 2018.
From March 22 to May 18, Westbank is presenting Gesamtkunstwerk: A Curated Exhibition on Architecture and City-Building Ready to Engage the Public, an open-access, multi-media exhibition of the project’s architectural and engineering plans, building models, illustrations of commissioned public art, and the debut of a 1955 Arthur Erikson sketch in which the esteemed local architect imagined a “futuristic Vancouver.”
“This project is operating with complete transparency to allow the public to form its opinion,” says exhibition curator Trevor Boddy.
Vancouver’s future is now available for your perusal.
Gesamtkunstwerk: A Curated Exhibition on Architecture and City-Building Ready to Engage the Public
1460 Howe Street, Vancouver, www.gwerk.ca
March 22 – May 18
Adrienne Matei
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