The Times did more than an obituary; their coverage reflects Bing’s international presence, but with a particular focus on this main work in the U.S. – Washington’s Arena stage:
Bing Thom, Daring Architect With a Sense of Place, Dies at 75
Bing Thom, a Canadian architect whose swooping, playful design for the Arena Stage company’s Mead Center for American Theater enlivened Washington’s dreary southwestern waterfront and drew critical acclaim, died on Tuesday in Hong Kong. He was 75. …
“I sometimes analogize a city to a string of pearls,” he told The New York Times in 2010, shortly after the new Arena Stage compound was completed. “As an architect I’m as interested in the string as in the pearls.”
Before he took on Arena Stage, the company used two modernist theaters designed by Harry Weese. The company wanted to move to a more upscale neighborhood, but board members did not want to abandon the original theaters.
Mr. Thom’s solution was to enclose the two theaters and add a third. He proposed a 200,000-square-foot structure that featured a soaring cantilevered roof over an undulating glass curtain wall. When it was completed in 2010, at a cost of $135 million, a critic for The Times compared it to a “three-ring circus under a big top.” …
“Mr. Thom’s biggest achievement may be the third structure, the Kogod Cradle, a site for new and developing productions that is anything but a black box,” The Times wrote about the new theater, which was named after the philanthropist Robert Kogod. “An elliptical space paneled in dark-stained wood, it feels almost spiritual.”
Now this is very delicate ground and I wish the best for Bing’s family: he left them far too early.
Having said that I do not admire his work: he was one of many follower architects who subscribe to a hysteria of “new and different for the sake of new and different“. I haven’t seen this thingie illustrated but his work at Surrey Centre does nothing but confuse and detract from a cohesive urban centre.
His stuff is one of many, many . . .
Thom was one of a slew of “attention attracting empty of content” architects blindly following a cacophany of unrelated, arbirary shapes and noodles that describes a thoughtless society in confusuion and dissarray.
Young up-and-coming architects note, a semiotic with no future!
Bing Thom was one of a multitudeof psuedo-architects who design for effect with no consdideration for context, especially neighbourly urban context: spikes sticking out hither and yon, sloping shapes that defy urban neighbourliness.
RIP Bing Thom but please no more, no more . . .
Everyone in entitled to their opinion. I hope your architecture is better than your website design, unless you are going for the pre-internet look.
Roger – have you never sat inside the Chan Centre and been transported by the acoustics and the ambiance?