Glenbow Museum keeps renovation costs down by taking a concrete approach – literally | Canada Voices

On the fifth floor of a Calgary construction site, Glenbow Museum director Nicholas Bell gestures at the heavy grey ceiling overhead. It is waffle slab, a grid of reinforced concrete that was a fixture of brutalist architecture of the 1970s, and it’s the not-so-secret ingredient that is keeping the museum’s renovation on track.

“We are told you can drive a tank into any corner of the building: It was extremely overbuilt,” Bell said, adding no one could afford to pour so much concrete today – nor could the museum afford to tear it all down. But the building was aging and leaking: The solution was to keep the concrete. “In large part we’ve been able to work with what we have, and that has kept the cost substantially lower. Not everybody has that luxury.”

There are current or proposed museum renovations going on all across the country but several have struggled with rising construction costs. The Vancouver Art Gallery has parted company with its architect after costs for a new building rose 50 per cent, while renovations at the Musée d’ art contemporain de Montréal are years behind schedule. But at the Glenbow, that immovable concrete has paradoxically provided an affordable way to do an overhaul intended to provide better public access and new galleries.

The solution, from the architecture firm Dialog, is to pierce the building with new windows and a central skylight, remove a grand staircase to make room for a three-storey atrium, open up a new glass entrance on the Stephen Avenue pedestrian mall and add a fifth-floor terrace on an existing roof.

Museums cost about $1,600 to $2,000 per square foot to build, but because the Glenbow is adding much less new material it is only budgeting about $450 per square foot for its renovation, Bell said. Meanwhile, the museum was able to time its closing to the pandemic and offer temporary exhibitions at the Edison office building from 2022 to 2024. It plans to reopen in 2026, two years behind its original estimates, but has stuck to a total budget of $205-million, of which $130-million is the base building.

“As we reopen, we hope that this project can serve as a bellwether for other Canadian cities. We can see how hard it is to build a new cultural infrastructure now; costs are high across the board,” Bell said, adding that Glenbow’s project might be particularly instructive to other institutions in Centennial-era buildings that are now aging.

“Is there an opportunity to work with existing infrastructure in a way that is more affordable but still as impactful as tearing it down and building a new building?”

Lacking both windows and an obvious front door, the Glenbow’s existing building dated to 1976 and was not much loved, partly because the original architect’s brief was to build a museum as part of a hotel and convention centre complex. The result was an eight-storey vault-like box with the collection stored on reinforced floors above four storeys of public space. (The weight of collections storage is a challenge in building any museum, but good designs usually feature exhibition preparation space that is adjacent to the public galleries and storage that is easily accessible.)

In reshaping this box, Dialog has taken an approach similar to the trend-setting Broad Museum in Los Angeles with its slanted glass entrance cut away from its cheese-grater cladding. Dialog has sliced off one corner of the Glenbow building to give it a new glass entrance and wrapped it in concrete panels in an undulating, light-catching pattern.

Crucially, those panels are being cast by the Calgary company Heavy: No supply chain issues there. On the other hand, the cost for special art storage systems – banks of rolling compartments made of compressed steel – doubled to $5-million during construction.

But generally, the Glenbow’s timing has proved lucky, as has its former status as a provincial agency. All of its collection of Canadian, Indigenous and global art and artifacts acquired prior to 1996 belongs to the province of Alberta. (The collection was originally assembled by Edmonton oilman Eric Lafferty Harvie, who founded the museum in 1955 and named it for his ranch.) So, when the existing building began to leak, the province had to do something to protect its assets. Then-premier Jason Kenney announced the province would pay for one-third of renovations just before the pandemic hit; the subsequent closings gave the Glenbow time to concentrate on the project and start fundraising.

As well as the construction budget, $40-million has been set aside to rebuild the permanent exhibitions and deliver programming. What visitors will see is a large collection of 20th- and 21st-century Canadian art, one of Canada’s most important collections of historic art belonging to First Nations as well as a global survey of other cultures. After the notorious 1988 Spirit Sings survey of global Indigenous art that was mounted in Calgary’s Olympic year without consulting First Nations, the museum has built a strong relationship with the Niitsitapi (or Blackfoot) community in particular. A new gallery dedicated to that culture will feature evolving exhibitions with veteran Cree curator and artist Gerald McMaster co-ordinating input from elders. (The museum has also repatriated about 350 Niitsitapi ceremonial objects to date.)

The Glenbow is also reaching out to international communities in Calgary to bring more context to its collection of global cultural material. For starters, community members of Ethiopian, Mexican and Indonesian heritage will be helping the Glenbow select what artifacts to show and stories to tell. There will also be open storage that the public can visit, and a small theatre at the back of the building on 9th Avenue.

One of the biggest improvements the new Glenbow will offer is free general admission, funded by the Shaw Family Foundation, making the new JR Shaw Centre for Arts and Culture the first major museum in Canada to offer free admission to all visitors.

Pointing out that public collections belong to the public, Bell said he felt that the “one free weeknight” schemes popular across the country or the Art Gallery of Ontario’s move to offer free admission for those under 25 if they register don’t go far enough. He pointed to the free Smithsonian institutions in Washington as an example that encourages diverse audiences and brief lunch-hour or after-work visits.

“Wouldn’t it be remarkable, if we were able to provide every Calgarian, every Canadian, every visitor the opportunity to come here and enjoy and participate from the same opportunity, to be within this civic space and to say, ‘It doesn’t matter if I have $20 in my pocket or not. I can come here. I can participate.’”

Projects under construction

Canada’s museums and public art galleries are in building mode, adding new wings, renovating heritage buildings and updating Centennial-era infrastructure – or dreaming of it. In the past two years, projects at the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax and the Royal B.C. Museum in Victoria have all had to pause owing to high costs.

The VAG dropped its architecture firm last December after the costs on the $400-million plan to build a nine-storey new building rose 50 per cent. The gallery has paused construction and is now looking for a new architect. In 2022, the Nova Scotia government pulled out of a plan to build the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia a new $137-million home on the Halifax waterfront when construction costs threatened to rise at least 18 per cent. The same year, the B.C. government dropped plans to renovate the Royal B.C. Museum when the $789-million price tag became a public controversy.

Undaunted, the New Brunswick Museum in Saint John last summer broke ground on a $130-million renovation of a heritage building while the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria is in the early stages of planning a new building on Victoria’s waterfront.

Here are four projects currently under construction.

The Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto is in the midst of a $130-million project to redo its front entrance and ground floor, where admission will be free. It is also adding gallery space on the second and third floors. The budget is being raised entirely from private donations. The renovations, including the improved Bloor Street entrance, are slated to finish in 2028. The museum says it can stick to the budget it announced in 2024 partly because it broke ground immediately after that announcement.

The Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto will open the Dani Reiss Modern and Contemporary Gallery, a new wing dedicated to 20th- and 21st-century art, in spring 2027. It says it is sticking to the original budget of about $100-million, which had inflation factored in from the start.

The Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal is now four years into a renovation of its Place des Arts home first announced in 2016 for a 2020 completion, and unveiled in 2018 on a budget of $44.7-million. The museum closed in 2019 but reopened five months later when the project stalled amidst rising costs. The museum now says it is sticking to a revised budget of $116.5-million and has pushed its reopening date to 2028, four years later than estimates given in 2019. In the meantime, it has been offering programming in the Place Ville Marie since 2021.

The Musée des Beaux Arts du Québec took over the project to build a wing dedicated to artist Jean-Paul Riopelle in late 2021 when the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts pulled out, deeming the plan too expensive and too disruptive of its existing building on Sherbrooke Street. The Quebec City version was announced as a $42-million addition but that was before designs were finalized. The Espace Riopelle is now sticking to a revised budget of $84-million and is scheduled to open in fall 2026.