There's a pay parking lot at Georgia and Cambie that used to be an excavated construction site, which was going to be the new Vancouver Art Gallery. In October last year the hole was filled in and handed to EasyPark as what the gallery described as an interim measure. You can park there now, which is more than the building currently does.
The short version of how we got here: the Herzog and de Meuron design was scrapped in late 2024 when the cost estimate went from around $400 million to roughly $600 million, and the firm and the gallery parted ways. In September 2025 a new team was named, Formline Architecture and Urbanism, led by Alfred Waugh, with KPMB from Toronto. Formline is Indigenous-led and based in British Columbia, which is a meaningful change in who gets to shape a civic building here. A new concept design was expected sometime this year. As I write this I haven't seen one, and I've looked.
I find I have less feeling about this than I'm supposed to. Cities take a long time to build things and Vancouver takes longer than most. The Audain family gave $100 million toward the new building in 2021 and that money is still there. The land is still there, under the cars.
What interests me more is what's happening in the old building at 750 Hornby while everyone waits for the new one. Because it's quite a lot.
There's an Emily Carr exhibition running until November called That Green Ideal, billed as the most comprehensive Carr show the gallery has mounted in more than twenty years. Whatever you think you know about Carr from a grade-school reproduction, the actual paintings have a density that doesn't survive printing. The forest interiors in particular are close to unreadable at a distance and then resolve when you step in, which is a physical experience a screen can't give you and a poster can't either.
There's also Future Geographies, more than thirty artists on climate, running into January, and SANCTUARY, on old-growth forest, in the same period. Jim Lambie's Zobop has been on the floor since last October. Highlights from the Collection is scheduled to run until 2030, which is the kind of date that tells you something about the institution's own expectations for the new building.
The thing I keep thinking is that a city can have an argument about a building for a decade while a very good gallery operates the whole time, and the argument is the part that gets covered. I know the estimated cost of the design that was cancelled. I did not know, until I went, that there was a Carr show on.
This is a general condition and not only an art one. We follow the story about the thing more closely than the thing. It's easier. A cost overrun is legible in a way that a room full of paintings isn't, and it can be discussed by people who haven't been.
I don't have a position on the building. I'd like Vancouver to have a better gallery and I'd like it to be affordable, and I understand those may not both be available. What I'd say, mildly, is that the current building is open six days a week and there's an Emily Carr exhibition in it until November. Whatever gets built at Larwill Park will be judged eventually on whether people go. That habit is available now, in the meantime, in a building nobody is arguing about.
The parking lot will still be there next year.
Sources
- Current exhibitions (Vancouver Art Gallery): vanartgallery.bc.ca
- Vancouver Art Gallery scuttles $600-million building design (The Globe and Mail, December 2024): theglobeandmail.com
- Architects selected: Formline Architecture + Urbanism with KPMB (Vancouver Art Gallery, September 2025): vanartgallery.bc.ca
- Vancouver Art Gallery construction site becomes a parking lot (Daily Hive, October 2025): dailyhive.com