Cantos, Allegro!

The Cantos Music Foundation’s bold initiative to develop in East Village and create a Canadian Music Centre is bringing some of the world’s best architects to...the King Eddy Hotel. Meet the five finalists and their projects.

It took a group of iconoclasts to make the first leap into development of East Village – the Cantos Music Foundation, a self-described ”national catalyst for discovery, innovation and renewal through music.“ The foundation engages the community in musical experiences through an endless variety of music programs and lessons and the display of its collection – over 700 musical artifacts, from 18th century organs used to create sacred music to ‘60‘s-era synths that contributed to the composition of tunes of a somewhat more profane bent.

Visionary and ambitious, Cantos quickly saw the potential of East Village and the pertinence of one of its last remaining landmarks, the storied King Edward Hotel – a legendary live blues venue for decades. Cantos and CMLC inked a deal for the Eddy property, and Cantos promptly started an international design competition for a new Canadian Music Centre, a space that would integrate the Eddy and also provide some 80,000 square feet for the instrument collection, the public programs, an education research centre,recording studios, a radio station, a seven-days-a-week live music venue.

CMLC relishes this kind of development relationship – a partner that sees beyond a single project to its potential for rejuvenation and revolution – not to mention one that’s making architectural connoisseurship part of the city.

The Music Centre project showcases a ‘bring it on’ attitude that’s characteristic of Cantos and its Executive Director, Andrew Mosker. Five short-listed architectural firms – from 66 that expressed interest – simultaneously unveiled their treatments to the public and the selection committee, which includes Senator Pamela Wallin, businessman Thomas D’Aquino and architect Ric Singleton.

The firms are a who’s-who list of experts in the design of museums and cultural institutions, a sector that has produced spectacular buildings worldwide: Ateliers Jean Nouvel from Paris, which is also currently engaged in the MOMA tower in New York and a re-imaginating of ”Le Grand Paris“; Allied Works Architecture of Portland, celebrated for its transformation of a historic downtown Portland building into an iconic creative workspace and for its striking museum designs, including the Museum of Art and Design in New York; Diller Scofidio and Renfro of New York, which redesigned Alice Tully Hall in New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, was also the firm of record on New York’s High Line, an urban park suspended 30 feet above the street on an abandoned industrial rail line. Studio Pali Fekete of Los Angeles designed the Getty Villa Museum in Malibu and the Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo, among many others. Saucier + Perrotte of Montreal, the only Canadian firm in the race, recently completed the spectacular Schulich School of Music at McGill in Montreal, and has designed a raft of other museums and cultural institutions nationally and globally.

Visit www.cantos.ca