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O HAPPYDAYJuly 26 at Koerner HallBen Heppner and the TorontoMass Choir join forces toperform Gospel favourites fromhis childhood. You won’t wantto miss this beautiful andheartfelt evening.

A BIG BANDCELEBRATIONwithRANEE LEEAugust 2 at Koerner HallAn uplifting evening of the best of the BigBand Era – the music of Benny Goodman,Count Basie, Glenn Miller and more!

R4 G THE GLOBE AND MAIL . | SATURDAY, JULY 28, 2018

The roof on the cathedralflashes in the afternoonsunlight, and an answering

shimmer comes back from acrossthe street, off the steel mesh thatwraps one side of the ThéâtreGilles-Vigneault. “You see the waythe sun reflects off the tin roofshere, and we wanted to respond tothat,” says one of the theatre’s ar-chitects, Katsuhiro Yamazaki ofAtelier TAG. “It’s a small thing, butsometimes you see a quality in amaterial and you just want tobring it out.”

That is indeed a minor detail on

a sizable building, an 860-seattheatre with a full fly tower, in thistown in the Laurentians. But theMontreal firm makes the details –and the big decisions about formand volume – matter. Here, TAGhas produced an elegant three-di-mensional sculpture, in concrete,steel mesh and warm wood, thatcomplements the art that’s per-formed inside.

The theatre is a real accom-plishment for an architecture firmthat’s basically unknown outsideof its home province. Yet TAG, ledby a partnership of Yamazaki andhis wife, Manon Asselin, routinelypunches above its weight: Theyare serious talents with a string oflibraries, museums and theatresof international calibre.

Their practice could only haveevolved this way in Quebec andwith luck their expertise will

come to benefit the rest of thecountry. “We are children of thecompetition system,” Ms. Asselinexplains in an interview. She’stalking about Quebec’s system ofarchitectural competitions,which are mandated by the prov-ince’s Ministry of Culture for allmajor projects.

Ms. Asselin is being literal.TAG’s first job was a competitionwin, the Châteauguay Library onthe South Shore, which they wereawarded in 1997. They built it to-gether with the larger firm JodoinLamarre Pratte, which would alsocollaborate on a string of futureprojects, including Théâtre Gilles-Vigneault. The result was goodenough to win a Governor-Gener-al’s Medal in Architecture, theprofession’s highest award inCanada; and TAG have won threemore, most recently this year for

their Hornstein Pavilion at theMontreal Museum of Fine Arts.

There, TAG’s design pulls themuseum out toward the street; itsmonolith of white-oak stairsserves as passageway, as a place tolinger and as an object in itself.Wrapped in a sheath of glass andsteel, it shows off the couple’s rig-orous spatial intelligence andtheir skill at creating social spaces.

In Saint-Jérôme, there’s a simi-lar move: The theatre’s lobbyopens up to the street with athree-storey glass wall that con-nects the interior spaces with agenerous plaza. A ceiling of cross-laminated spruce, folded into anorigami-like wave pattern, seemsto pass from the lobby to theworld outside. “We’ve made it thefifth façade of the building,” Ya-mazaki says, “and there’s a fluid-ity between inside and outside,and that wood canopy covers youeven before you come in.”

Throughout the building, thereis a consistency and integrity tothe design decisions, from thewayfinding and signage (crispand minimal) to the handrails onan adjacent ramp (likewise) toshaping of the auditorium itself:slats of white oak that provideacoustic treatments trace the pe-rimeter, curving in and out withthe walls in a sinuous counter-point to the geometries else-where.

The quality of this design relieson their acquired expertise, butalso on a passion for the detailsthat clearly drives the couple. “Wehave a small office,” Asselin says,“and it’s very important for us tokeep it small; if you grow, youspend your time designing uni-versity bathrooms to pay people’ssalaries.” Instead, the couple andtheir office of 10 work downstairsfrom the couple’s family home, ina greystone near the McGill cam-pus.

This is a common strategyamong intellectually ambitiousarchitects: Keep it small and focuson quality, rather than profit mar-

gin. What’s unusual is the scale ofprojects that TAG, together withallies such as Jodoin LamarrePratte, have been able to pull off.“In the rest of Canada, it would becompletely impossible for a firmlike ours to get a job like the[MMFA],” Asselin acknowledges.

That is true. And the province isthe better for having used designcompetitions for so many publicprojects. To be sure, it’s not per-fect – it now favours bigger firmsrather than upstarts. But there’sno question that choosing a de-sign, rather than hiring the lowestbidders, as governments tend todo across Canada, produces bet-ter places. Architecture matters.And that viewpoint produces anecosystem of people who caredeeply and create good work,such as TAG and fellow GG win-ners Saucier + Perrotte, ÉricGauthier and Chevalier Morales.

This has spinoffs for the largerculture.“We’re kind of now in a sit-uation where people recognizethat … we don’t do cookie-cutterarchitecture. We put in a lot oftime and research to think aboutthe project.” Projects include afive-storey office renovation,within the iconic Place Ville Ma-rie, for the Business DevelopmentBank of Canada. Their first projectout of province – the Calder Li-brary in Edmonton, designedalong with Calgary’s Marc Boutin– opened earlier this year.

Meanwhile, TAG are also en-gaged in redesigning the dome ofthe Saint Joseph’s Oratory ofMont-Royal, a boost for an impor-tant tourist site. That project, inpartnership with the Montrealfirm Architecture49, involves a re-design of the oratory’s museumand also a new observatory withinthe dome of the basilica – a newlookout point on the landscapethat this couple and their teamare doing their best to reshape,detail by excellent detail.

Follow me on Twitter @alexbozikovic

In the Théâtre Gilles-Vigneault, Atelier TAG shows how keeping it small and focusing on quality can pay big dividends

ALEXBOZIKOVIC

OPINION

SAINT-JÉRÔME, QUE.

Atelier TAG has turned Théâtre Gilles-Vigneault in Saint-Jérôme, Que., into a three-dimensional sculpture that complements the art performed inside. JAMES BRITTAIN

Public architecture without compromise

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