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Royal Conservatory Of Music - Telus Centre for Performance & Learning (KPMB)

Today on Bloor St.
Lots of construction! 1 Beford pit is on the left. What do you call those mobile cranes over the RCM and 151 Cumberland?

P1050623.jpg
 
The roof of 1BE might extend beyond the top of the photo, though. I'm not sure if it would or not, but it would be close.
 
From the Star:

ROYAL CONSERVATORY
TheStar.com | entertainment | Lessons in music for the masses

Lessons in music for the masses
Managers want to open up new spaces to the community

Jun 04, 2008 04:30 AM
John Terauds
CLASSICAL MUSIC CRITIC

Three years after demolition began at the Royal Conservatory of Music, next door to the Royal Ontario Museum on Bloor St. W., administrators are planning the grand opening of the new and renovated spaces on Sept. 3.

The class and practice rooms in the new Telus Centre are nearly complete and Victorian-era Ihnatowycz Hall (formerly McMaster Hall) awaits finishing touches. The new concert venue, Koerner Hall, will not open to the public for another year.

The clean lines of the campus, designed by Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg Architects, look impressive – no less so than the school's academic offerings.

Conservatory managers took advantage of the completed rehearsal hall in the Telus Centre to pull the wraps off a number of new academic initiatives. Most of them will end up putting even more community into what the Royal Conservatory calls its Community School.

Once the doors open in September, anyone passing by with a laptop will be able to walk into the Telus Centre to visit a learning space dedicated to electronic music creation.

"It will be like a museum admission," explains composer Shaun Elder, who is the mastermind behind another new venture: Virtual Music. This is a purpose-designed computer application that gives students instant tools with which to compose music.

A brief session at a laptop confirmed that the software allows the user to create music instantly – and intuitively.

"We were surprised how students want to start making their own music right away," Elder explained. There are Flash tutorials for each step, but the interface makes them next to unnecessary.

Tested and honed at the Royal Conservatory's Calgary facility, Virtual Music is the smart bomb among the conservatory's growing arsenal of 21st-century learning weapons that use computers and the Internet to bring children and adults and music together.

A dozen Grade 2 pupils from Bellemere Public School and their teacher, Laura Bernstein, demonstrated how they can link geometry lessons with dance. Credit goes to the conservatory's 14-year-old Learning Through the Arts program.

It's not just about vocal and instrumental lessons any more.

Simon promises that all students, both children and adults, will have open access to "super Sundays," when the rehearsal hall will offer group classes in everything from classical music to jazz, world music and even turntabling.

Although Torontonians will have to wait until September 2009 to hear concerts at the new, 1,140-seat Koerner Hall, Simon plans a week-long festival of big names to give the opening a sense of occasion.

http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/article/436509

AoD
 
And the Globe:

A sneak peak
Floods of light. A concert hall that promises to be world-class. And a home for music from classical to hip hop. Welcome to the newly renovated Royal Conservatory of Music
JAMES BRADSHAW

From Wednesday's Globe and Mail

June 4, 2008 at 4:49 AM EDT

A sneak peek at the Royal Conservatory of Music's new Toronto home yesterday offered a glimpse of a much expanded, technologically sophisticated space designed to extend the conservatory's reach from education into social change.

The Telus Centre for Performance and Learning, as the new home has been dubbed, is in the final stage of construction, with most of the main rehearsal hall and five floors of soundproof studios ready to use. Some public spaces, such as a 50-seat café in the atrium where the historic building joins the new and a display area for antique instruments, have yet to take shape.

The building's public areas offer floods of natural light as well as stunning views of the University of Toronto's Philosopher's Walk and the neighbouring Royal Ontario Museum through large windows, glass roofing and an outdoor balcony atop the south façade.

President Peter Simon said the facilities will be complete and open by September, the only exception being the 1,140-seat Koerner Hall performance space, a venue Simon hopes will be acoustically among the world's great halls, which is expected to open in September, 2009. (The $50-million second phase of the conservatory's $110-million capital campaign was launched recently under the direction of former Bank of Montreal president and chief executive officer Tony Comper and his wife, Elizabeth.)

Rebirth is the dominant theme at the conservatory, including a new slogan proclaiming that "the Finest Instrument is the Mind." Faculty, staff and students are champing at the bit to move back to Bloor Street, having been temporarily relegated to a retrofitted Toronto District School Board building for the past two years. One staff member said their second home served its purpose but was less than ideal, lacking in soundproofing and airflow among other things.

Still, Simon says they were fortunate to have found such a large site that could house them in one location. The new building also promises a crucial renewal of the historic but dilapidated conservatory building, which Simon described as "well past its prime."

Technology is paramount to Simon's stated goal of promoting a holistic vision of a society where creative activity is the domain of every person. Not only will the technology allow for cutting-edge musical composition and recording, Simon says, it also gives the conservatory the capacity to spread its programs to schools across and even outside Canada.

New offerings opening for online registration on June 9 include arts-based English-as-a-second-language classes, a children's series entitled Music Makes You Smarter, courses for seniors and professional-development courses for teachers and musicians.

A parallel stream continues offering courses in diverse forms such as traditional Chinese instruments, hip hop, jazz and rock, while introducing instruction in new media.

"What the new building has given us a chance to do is unleash or unveil a series of new programs that are more focused on people of all ages, whether young children or adults, in becoming active in creative things, and perhaps it will stimulate a rebirth of music activity by all people across the nation," Simon says.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080604.wrcm04/BNStory/Entertainment/home

AoD
 
I'm curious to know what programming they'll have in the Koerner - I hope it won't be exclusively big name performers and that the students will play there often. It'll also be interesting to see what effect the opening of the new hall will have on the wonderful but sadly underused George Weston Recital Hall.
 
We have another year to wait for the Koerner - but everything else (AFAIK) at the RCoM opens on September 8.

42
 
The high point for RCM's old building

TENILLE BONOGUORE

August 30, 2008

The crowning moment has finally arrived for the Royal Conservatory of Music's crowning monument.

An 11.5-metre spire knocked down during Hurricane Hazel's rampage in 1954 is being rebuilt and will be revealed to the public when the scaffolding comes down next month.

Only the spire's base remained after the massive storm hit Toronto, killing 81 people. The spire itself simply disappeared.

A protective covering was placed over the wooden base, and over the years the spire became the item that could wait, sitting a nudge too low on the priority list behind washroom upgrades and roof repairs.

Plans for its reinstatement began to form in the early 1990s, but the company in charge of renovating the Bloor Street West building - KPMB Architects - had to shelve their drawings for more than 10 years due to a lack of funding.

The current RCM overhaul, which will culminate with the opening of the Telus Centre for Performance and Learning, finally made it possible to replace what KPMB associate Robert Sims said was an integral part of the 1881 building's overall aesthetic.

"The building has very tall, vertical lines in its design, [and] it really needed this capping element. It seems a little truncated on the top without it," Mr. Sims said. "Proportionately, it really makes the building really elegant."

Once the spire and its finial - the ornamental point on top - are complete, it should be visible from many blocks away, he said. "It's really the apex of the whole facility. ... It needed this extra [height] of spire to really reach for the sky."

Sticking to the 1881 plans by the original builders proved difficult, said KPMB principal Marianne McKenna.

Some workers came out of retirement in order to work on the heritage elements, like special wrought-iron work, while other, younger workers learned a new set of old skills.

"The trades are not around any more," Ms. McKenna said. "When we did the restoration inside Mazzoleni [Hall], we had older people and they were wonderful."

Toronto company Clifford Restoration proved essential in staying true to the 1881 plans, she said, with its younger workers taking great pride in mastering the old skills.

Should another hurricane with the force of Hazel hit the city, the new spire will be up to the challenge. While the exterior is being kept as true to its original form as possible, the wooden frame has been replaced with an internal steel frame to give the structure added strength.
 
From The Globe and Mail:

Quiet and refined: The new conservatory is like a sexy librarian out on a date

JOHN BARBER

jbarber@globeandmail.com

August 30, 2008

Ronald Reagan was president-elect of the United States when Toronto architect Barton Myers drew a scheme for the revival of the glorious but decrepit McMaster Hall on Bloor Street, then and now the home of the Royal Conservatory of Music. A slim, glassy point-tower condo dominated the composition, skewing its symmetry while demonstrating, despite the architect's skill, the contingencies of building culture on these shores - especially then.

Almost 30 years later, the architect's former students, led by Marianne McKenna, are finishing the job. The elegant type of tower that Mr. Myers envisioned for the conservatory site, so novel at the time, is now the leading expression of urban chic. But not here. The new conservatory is packed with studios, not condos.

Two such condo towers are now going up right across the street - where they belong. But at the conservatory, a densely packed charge of pure culture has replaced the envisioned condo. What it lost in visual drama over the decades, the scheme more than gained in the scale and ambition of its program.

Rather than surviving by dealing off air rights for a condo, the conservatory has expanded dramatically. Rather than demonstrating the weakness of local culture, it shows Toronto at its best, its modest dress disguising unlimited intention.

The new conservatory is so very fine it almost redeems that wild Grendel next door, the transfigured Royal Ontario Museum, confidently answering the beast's rude challenge to local culture with a lesson in quiet refinement. Its style is that of the sexy librarian - out on a date. So go round the back and check out that curtain wall. While you're there, let your eyes devour the hidden façade of the original museum building, which faces Philosopher's Walk and has survived a third major upheaval without surrendering its architectural primacy in the overall composition.

The original Crystal scheme envisioned a monstrous attack on that façade, too, but budget cuts killed it - a process mirrored, in reverse, by the growing endowment and expanded ambition that ultimately killed the conservatory's condo plans. The dialogue that now takes place across that sanctified ravine, the cultural heart of Toronto, is complex and resonant.

Unlike the Crystal, which emerged out of the blue (its genesis in a series of convention-destroying geometrical squiggles drawn in 1978), the new conservatory epitomizes modern Toronto style - something that originated in the Philadelphia studio of Louis Khan and migrated north on the backs of a South African Jew, Jack Diamond, and Mr. Myers, his then-partner, a former U.S. Navy pilot from an old family in Virginia.

Mr. Diamond remains the orthodox practitioner whose work continues to reflect strict ideals of civic rectitude. Mr. Myers's successors, the firm of Kuwabara Payne McKenna Blumberg, are more designerly. Former students in the style and offshoot firms are now unaccountably numerous. What unites them is not style in itself but a fundamental respect for the existing urban fabric and its claims on any new intervention.

Local culture doesn't happen fast. It took as many decades to rebuild the conservatory as it took years to desecrate the poor museum. Sometimes it is painfully hard to detect. The new conservatory is appropriately glamorous, but its true greatness will be revealed to the ears, not the eyes.
 
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