It seems that more and more often Toronto proves itself to be more than just “world-class”. The Bell Lightbox, at the corner of King Street West and John Street, is a true “world leader” and on November 17, ULI was given backstage passes for a tour of this extraordinary facility. Our tour leaders, Shirley Blumberg (Partner, KPMB Architects), Matthew Wilson (Project Architect, KPMB Architects) and Noah Cowen (Artistic Director, TIFF) gave us fantastic insight into the history, design and functionality of this new facility.

The project began when the world famous Toronto International Film Festival was looking for an ambitious new headquarters that would include offices, education facilities as well as five state-of-the-art movie theatres. A request for proposals was put out to the design community. The biggest challenge? There were no comparables anywhere in the world! When one sees the final product, it is hard to imagine that it was designed entirely from scratch. What was an formerly a fairly uninteresting corner of the City housing a car wash is now Toronto’s hippest movie theatre complex, not to mention an art gallery space, a street-level cafe and one of the hottest new restaurants on the second floor, Luma. All of this presented incredible design challenges for the architect (KPMB Architects), the developers (the Daniels Group, TIFF and the Reitman Family) and the contractor (PCL), particularly regarding the sound issues involving the theatres, but multiplied exponentially by the condominium located adjacent to the lightbox, and which forms part of its design.

KPMB tried to bring the city into the space as much as possible. The theatres are not in the basement but on upper levels and some of them just over the street. They are accessed by red escalators, which give visitors a sense of red carpet arrival to reach the spaces on the upper levels.

The design is as open as possible in order to bring in the city but still respect privacy issues through interesting usage of frick.

There are a lot of elements of interactivity in the building with an outdoor meeting space where films can be shown outside with the City as the backdrop, and a learning room were a group can write, produce, film, and show their works.. A lot of flexibility was used in the design to allow for many different events and activities to happen all at once. The offices are large enough to accommodate TIFF’s needs during the festival when hundreds of volunteers and staff are added. The building had to be forward thinking enough so that the future staffing of TIFF could be accommodated in the building.

We were able to tour one of the great new theatres and experienced first hand its perfect acoustics and compelling sightlines. The theatres will play art-house and Canadian films, and will have many special events, such as Q&A sessions with directors and actors (each theatre has a stage in front of the screen for precisely this purpose). Theatre 3 can accommodate a piano for live accompaniment for silent films! Needless to say, there are many features that are not part of a typical commercial theatre-going experience, including the high-end lounge. However, these films are almost always open to the public and, yes, you can buy popcorn!

There were some challenges that the Bell Lightbox faced, including how to communicate the programming that is going on in the project to the general public. Given that this is an unprecedented type of facility, it is to be expected that there are going to be some growing pains. However, based on the initial reactions, including those from attendees at the Film Festival earlier this year, the result is one all Torontonian are proud of.

ULI was very pleased offer its Members this great free tour of one of Toronto’s most exciting new developments. If you attended this tour and have any feedback, please let us know. Also, if you are aware of any other facilities that would welcome a ULI Tour, please do not hesitate to get in touch with one of your ULI representatives.

Brennan Carroll
Young Leaders Executive Committee
ULI Communications Committee
BLG Canada