Bing Thom wears a discreet Order of Canada lapel pin. Otherwise, like so many architects, he is dressed entirely in black: black T-shirt, black trousers, black jacket, black shoes. But instead of looking severe or forbidding, he comes across as avuncular. A small man in his early seventies with a shock of white hair, he resembles a wise and benevolent Zen master—think Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid. Thom is presenting a project to neighborhood groups and local residents in Washington, D.C. About thirty people are gathered in a meeting room of the Capitol Skyline Hotel. They all know who Bing Thom is because, while based in Vancouver, he is a minor celebrity here, thanks to his involvement with Arena Stage, a local theatrical institution that he recently enlarged to great acclaim. “It took an outsider, a Canadian architect, to break with the usual habits of large civic architecture in the nation’s capital,” wrote the architecture critic of The Washington Post, who described the striking timber-and-glass building as “both structurally and symbolically brilliant.”
The Arena Stage is in what Washingtonians call Southwest, the location of Thom’s current project. Although it’s only a short walk from the U.S. Capitol, the neighborhood is a part of the city that few tourists ever see. A focus of urban renewal in the 1950s, the area was essentially bulldozed and replanned as a collection of superblocks following the idealistic but misguided urban design formulas of that era. The result is a mixture of Brutalist-style federal office buildings, apartment blocks, public housing projects, parking, and lots and lots of wide open space. “A five-minute walk can seem awfully long if there’s nothing there,” Thom tells his listeners. He reminds them that he first came to Southwest in 1965, as an architecture student on a scholarship tour. He recalls being appalled by the devastating effects of urban renewal and saying to himself, “There must be a better way to build cities.”
After describing the general context of Southwest, Thom asks people to gather around a small architectural model that he uses to explain his concept. This is an unusual project. Thom’s clients are Mera and Donald Rubell, wealthy art collectors from Miami. The Rubells have decided to build a gallery in Washington to house their notable collection of contemporary art, but being business-minded (they own the Capitol Skyline Hotel, which is across the street from the proposed gallery), they have partnered with a developer specializing in urban housing to include five hundred apartment units on the large site. The site is unusual, too, for it contains an old abandoned high school, the Randall School, which, despite its shuttered condition, is a cherished local landmark.
Thom explains that the original portion of the school, a listed Colonial Revival structure of the early twentieth century, will be restored and will house the art gallery as well as a restaurant and a cooking school. Behind the old building will be a courtyard surrounded by new apartments. These mid-rise buildings have large openings, both at ground level and above. “We’ve tried to free up the space so that the building can breathe,” he says. “It’s very open, to allow the public to come through and wander in the courtyard.”
Returning to his slide presentation, Thom takes people through the building plans, floor by floor. His is a conversational style, simple and unaffected, without the usual jargon that afflicts so many architects today. He doesn’t make a formal presentation as much as tell stories. “When I first met Mera Rubell, I told her that I was interviewing her as much as she was interviewing me,” he says. “She was a little taken aback, and I explained that I didn’t want to spend my life with people I didn’t like.” His point was that good architecture is the result of active collaboration. And not just with clients; Thom once told an interviewer, “My client is more than the person who pays me; my client is society and the public.” He stresses the civic responsibility of the architect, and his message to the Southwest community is that making architecture, especially good architecture, is a long and arduous process that requires support from many sides. “We have to deliver this baby, and it will take a lot of effort.”
Thom has been coming to Washington regularly for the last thirteen years, and the city has become, if not exactly a second home, a familiar place. He is designing two other projects here: a neighborhood branch library in Woodridge, in the northeastern corner of the city, and a large $625 million mixed-use development in Silver Spring, Maryland. He has been invited to join the mayor’s commission on the nearby Anacostia River waterfront, and he is also collaborating in a study with the city’s planning office. Thom likes this long-term involvement. “It is nice to know that you’re not just a hired gun,” he says.
It’s time for questions from the audience. In Washington, neighborhood issues, such as traffic, zoning, and economic development, are overseen by locally elected commissioners, who are also here today. Local demands can hold up projects and require concessions, so this meeting is important to the future of Thom’s project. Much of the discussion is focused on what is generally called gentrification, that is, the tendency of new development to raise real estate values, which can be a mixed blessing for existing residents. A local community organizer observes, “Every time low-income tenants see a dump truck going down the street, they feel that much closer to being pushed out of their homes.” A black woman expresses concern about the fate of those who live in public housing. How will the proposed project help them? A retired architect sums up the general mood of the meeting. “You’re going to be the five-hundred-pound gorilla in this neighborhood. We’d like you to be a friendly gorilla.” Everybody laughs; the mood is upbeat. People have been won over by Thom’s low-key approach. They like the fact that the boarded-up school, which has stood empty for decades, will be renovated and put to use. They also like the openness of Thom’s design and the mixture of uses. “This will be a twenty-four-hour place,” a resident says approvingly.
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“I like buildings that create crossovers that normally wouldn’t happen, combining an art gallery with a cooking school and housing,” Thom observes after the meeting. This attitude to design is probably influenced by his early experience with Arthur Erickson, whom he worked for in the 1970s. At the time, Erickson, who died in 2009, was Canada’s premier architect—the first Canadian architect ever to garner international recognition. Thom oversaw two of Erickson’s highest-profile urban projects: Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto and Robson Square in Vancouver. The best Erickson buildings have a timeless quality. “Arthur always said that he was not interested in what changes, but in what doesn’t change,” Thom recalls.
After leaving Erickson in 1981, Thom opened his own office. His early work was in Vancouver, but the Canada pavilion at Seville’s Expo ’92, a striking box clad entirely in zinc, brought him national recognition. Five years later, he designed the Chan Centre, a performing arts complex at the University of British Columbia. The twelve-hundred-seat concert hall, housed in an ivy-covered concrete drum, received rave reviews. The Globe and Mail called it “one of the most architecturally innovative and musically rewarding performance spaces in Canada.”
The Chan Centre led directly to Arena Stage—and Washington. He took on other projects as well, including Tarrant County College, a downtown campus in Fort Worth, Texas; a town center for Surrey, British Columbia, that includes a university campus improbably located on top of an existing shopping mall; and a striking public library, also in Surrey. The architectural style of these buildings defies easy categorization. Erickson was largely impervious to architectural fashions and did not have a signature style, and Thom has followed his lead. Sometimes Thom’s buildings incorporate high-tech details that recall Renzo Piano, but warm and woodsy rather than cool and machinelike. The Surrey town center and Arena Stage are all swooping curves and glass walls supported by timber masts. The Surrey library goes even further, and its plastic forms reminded me of the early German expressionist Eric Mendelsohn. The Randall School project, on the other hand, will be a disciplined composition of rectangular volumes, piled up on one another like children’s building blocks.
Thom learned another lesson while working for Erickson: what happens when an architect takes on too much work and spreads himself too thin—by 1980, Erickson’s best work was behind him. “Some firms grow very large and end up chasing clients—and chasing fame,” says Thom. “When I started the office, I was determined not to be that kind of architect.” Bing Thom Architects, run by Thom and his longtime partner, Michael Heeney, currently has forty employees, which is unusually small at a time when star architects regularly employ a hundred people or more. “The size of my practice is limited, since I can only keep four or five projects in my head at a time,” says Thom. “But we are a top-heavy firm. More than a third of the staff are senior, experienced people who have been with me a long time. That makes a big difference.”
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Following the Washington meeting, Thom leaves for Hong Kong, where he is starting a major new project. The Xiqu Centre is a performing arts center dedicated to the revitalization of xiqu, the traditional Chinese opera that is a stylized combination of singing, acting, music, dance, and martial arts. The $350 million building, one of the largest civic buildings ever undertaken by Bing Thom Architects, may well be the capstone of Thom’s career. It has already resoundingly cemented his standing as an A-list architect, because the design competition for Xiqu Centre featured some of the best architects in the world: the international powerhouse Norman Foster; Moshe Safdie, who had just completed an acclaimed performing arts center in Kansas City; Jack Diamond, who had opera houses in Toronto and St. Petersburg under his belt; and the Dutch firm Mecanoo, which has built award-winning cultural buildings all over Europe.
Thom dislikes entering competitions, because he believes that they are too impersonal and make it impossible to work directly with the client. “In my whole career of thirty years, I haven’t done more than ten competitions,” he says. But this time, he had made an exception. The subject of xiqu interested him (his wife is a dancer), and the chance to build an important cultural landmark in the city of his birth—he came to Vancouver with his parents at age ten—was too good to pass up.
Xiqu Centre will be the gateway to the West Kowloon cultural district, an ambitious effort to position Hong Kong as an Asian cultural hub. Thom and his collaborator, the local architect Ronald Lu, raised the main auditorium up in the air to create a large weather-protected public space at ground level that is open to the street through the four corners of the curvaceous building, whose form is said to be based on a traditional Chinese lantern. The jury, which voted unanimously for Thom’s entry, said it was won over by the way that his modern design embodied the essence of Chinese opera through its openness to street life, its sense of a gateway, and its evocation of a traditional courtyard. It also singled out the curvilinear form of the building as an imaginative expression of the ancient Chinese concept of qi, or life force. Score one for the Zen master.
I have known Bing Thom since 1965. We were both students on the scholarship tour that visited Washington’s Southwest, as well as public housing projects in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, where we witnessed the ravages wrought by urban renewal firsthand.