TORONTO.- The Marianne and Edward Gibson Art Museum at Simon Fraser University has won an architectural design award six months after opening in Burnaby, British Columbia. The first purpose-built art gallery on the Modernist campus of SFU is designed by Hariri Pontarini Architects of Toronto and Iredale Architecture of Vancouver. The project won Design Excellence from the Ontario Association of Architecture.

The museum’s prominent positioning at the forested plaza gateway to the campus speaks to the importance of the facility’s role as a bridge between university and community. The 14,000-square-foot (1,125sm) facility serves not only as a hub for collecting art and an academic resource, but also as a welcoming and easily accessible amenity for the adjacent mixed-use community that shares the plaza.

“The Gibson is designed to be flexible and redefines the traditional notion of an art gallery,” said Siamak Hariri, founding partner of Hariri Pontarini Architects. “Free- flowing circulation with community rooms and a living room with fireplace serve as attractors and blur the line between education and public use.” The museum celebrates its setting in nature where wings of the single-storey structure reach out and exchange views to the woods and mountains beyond while animating pedestrian pathways by revealing activity within.

The museum’s striking angular form is conceived as a cultural thoroughfare that supports end-to-end movement with access to the campus, making the Gibson an inviting passageway that fosters unforced exposure to art and encourages casual interdisciplinary interaction. "The Gibson is an absolutely remarkable space, one that brings the outside world in and encourages our visitors to spend different kinds of time with art, ideas, and one another,” said Kimberly Phillips, the Gibson’s director. “This gallery can be the porous sponge between the public and the university and bring people into welcoming, light-filled spaces infused with art.”

The Gibson is a Class A gallery space with environmental controls to protect exhibitions and archives. It is also highly sustainable as an all-electric, LEED Gold-registered facility that emits no greenhouse gasses. A simple palette of locally-sourced mass-timber, custom brickwork and large panels of glass support the strong connection to its natural setting. The museum occupies only one quarter of its site, leaving the rest to be renaturalized in its mission to reinforce the connection with its environs and to make art a part of everyday life.