50 great Canadian interiors, from 50 years of Canadian Interiors

• Published in: Canadian Interiors Vol. 50; no. 7; p. 35
• Main Author: Totzke, Michael
• Format: Trade Publication Article
• Language: English
• Published: Toronto IQ Business Media 01.11.2013
• Subjects: History; Interior design; Canada
• ISSN: 0008-3887; 1923-3329

"The client [the infamous 'burlesque' club on the lower end of Yonge Street]," [Fred Parera] tells the writer, Richard Cadoret, "wanted to divest the club of its backroom image and make it festive and colourful - to legitimize the place." Cadoret weighs in: "The tone is set with bright wall graphics and white female mannequins reminiscent of those in the Milk Bar sequence of Stanley Kurbick's A Clockwork Orange." Not shown is the dance stage with Lucite shower stall, designed to "clean up the act." In designing the museum, the Toronto architectural firm had a superior shell to work with: the old Goudy's department store, once the jewel of Kitchener's main drag. Stripping back the building to its 1870s steel skeleton gave the design team a remarkable vocabulary to incorporate into the museum's "exploration of art and technology" mandate. The "planetary wall" in the atrium playfully introduces a circular motif. An aboriginal gathering place of uncommon grace ("Xthum" is a Hul'qumi'num word meaning basket and drum). As contributing writer Adele Weder puts it, "A small jewel of a project, the gathering place is designed in one corner of Kwantlen's "C" Building, warming a starkly officious space with reams of cedar strips that curve from wall to ceiling and crest into what looks like a breaking wave at the top of the room."