Custom Architectural Imagineers at Eventscape

What do Frank Gehry, David Rockwell, Gensler and Stantec have in common? They have all hired Eventscape for custom architectural fabrication because, as Eventscape’s website states, “We build things others can’t. We are the ultimate turnkey solution for every architectural and design project; the one-stop shop where we bring your architectural and design vision from sketch to reality.”

Eventscape Marketing and Communications Director Elaine Milne and President and founder Gareth Brennan in front of one of two 1962-vintage Project G rosewood stereo systems at the head office. Made by Canada’s long-vanished Clairtone, the Project G’s space-age styling made it a Swinging Sixties icon, owned by Hugh Heffner and Frank Sinatra. The 1stdibs.com auction website currently lists one at US$ 28,000. Photo © by David Lasker

Eventscape “owns the position” as they say in advertising speak. “Very, very few businesses can do what we do,” said Marketing and Communications Director Elaine Milne at company HQ during a recent interview. “There are people who do millwork, people who do metal work, and glass and solid surface, but no one else I know of who can do it all.” Think of them as Disney Imagineers for hire.

Eventscape’s 150 staff members work in 150,000 square feet spread over three facilities in the Toronto suburb of Etobicoke and another in Long Island City across from Manhattan.

Eventscape headquarters in the Toronto suburb of Etobicoke. Photo © by David Lasker

Their order book includes public art, such as a large glass sculpture to be installed in a Toronto subway station in 2021.

Their projects repose in North America, Europe and Asia. Some of them can even be considered iconic, such as their four-layer, 12,000 lb., 16-feet-high colored glass three-dimensional star logo outside the grand entrance to Mall of America (the continent’s biggest shopping center) in Bloomington, Minn.

Gareth Brennan inspects patinated-bronze samples for a new project. “Often, the designer specifies the intent but doesn’t know how to get it. We do a lot of R and D and exploration of materials.” For one client, they aged metal panels in soil to obtain the desired finish. Photo © by David Lasker

The scale of their projects has grown over their quarter century in business. The largest is a new 75,000 square foot sculptural metal wall comprising 12,000 unique metal parts wrapping around a sports stadium (which shall remain nameless).

They rose to fame for their retail installations in the late nineties after Giorgio Borruso, the Los Angeles-based retail design star, spotted their small ad in Metropolis and hired them to build a string of store interiors that subsequently were widely published. Striking images of the Miss Sixty cocoon change rooms evoking Noguchi paper lamps, and Fornarina’s giant pink fabric light fixtures resembling an alien life form, for instance, graced the covers of design and retail magazines and garnered Store of the Year Awards.

The lounge at company headquarters. Photo © by David Lasker
Industrial-designer workstations. Photo © by David Lasker
Display of custom details from past projects. Photo © by David Lasker

Increasingly, Eventscape has taken on projects for office environments. Often, they aim to enhance collaboration and serendipitous meetings.

“Designers are activating common areas and hallways to create hotel-lounge-like environments where people can network,” said Eventscape President and founder Gareth Brennan. “This encourages chance small meetings. Workplaces are beginning to feel more comfortable, a place where you want to spend more time.”

“In these open environments, designers combine hard and soft material, such as a little seating niche built into a wall with acoustic foam upholstered panels that absorb some of the sound of your conversation.” As a meeting place, such a venue is more intimate and casual than committing to a boardroom. “You can tuck into a seating area for 15 minutes, which in some cases is all it takes.”

An Eventscape case study in point is Capital One’s new Toronto headquarters. With a series of under-utilized service spaces in the middle of each floor, visibility and access throughout the office were impeded. IBI Group gave the central corridors new life by transforming them into destination spaces, creating a connection between the east and west sides of the office.

One corridor boasts fractal-wall niche seating and upholstered faceted panels in a vibrant fuchsia fabric. Another features a blue triangular faceted spiral design element built of powder-coated metal with an upholstered panel attached to each facet face. The continuous, ribbonlike installation, 83-feet long, 12-feet wide and 9-feet tall, comprises 29 individual facets making up benches, canopies and walls.

Eventscape engineered, fabricated and installed feature elements in the collaboration corridors of Capital One’s corporate office in Toronto.

One memorable Eventscape feature wall, a 100-foot-long expanse at Warner Brothers, features oversized blow-ups of vintage LP record jackets that were torn by hand and assembled to portray the familiar “WB”-in-a-shield logo.

Ms. Milne mentioned another trend in interior architecture relating to their work. “The open concept that’s so popular has drawbacks: it’s too loud and there’s too much going on. People are looking for areas where they can have more confidential and private meetings, but within the open office area so that it still feels like you’re part of the whole process and can interact with everybody.”

Display of custom details from past projects. Photo © by David Lasker

To that end, Eventscape is fashioning a set of faceted, boulder-like pods or islands to break up the expansive floor plate of Stantec’s new home-office tower (at 823 feet, the tallest building in Western Canada) in Edmonton, Alberta.

The pods have built-in utilities, such as lighting, sprinklers and even a kitchenette. Instead of building with drywall, which would limit the pods to rectilinear shapes, Eventscape prefabricated frames with faceted forms skinned with wood veneer panels, felt and noise-attenuating upholstered panels. “They will be prefabricated and shipped to the site, allowing Stantec to create more-complex geometries in a prefabricated environment with less interruption in the space,” Mr. Brennan said.

Trophy wall and awards display. Photo © by David Lasker

Speaking of fractal and faceted themes, they’ve noticed an uptick of such commissions. “We do see trends,” Ms. Milne said. “There was a time when everything was organic. In the last few years we have seen a lot of faceted projects come across our desk.

“Faceted is more cost-effective than organic curves because only a handful of materials can achieve sweeping organic forms. Those shapes are challenging to do and expensive.”

Organic-curve-ready media that spring readily to mind include Corian, Dupont’s pricy solid-surfacing material, and good old cement, which while inexpensive on its own is nonetheless costly to work with because it requires custom temporary formwork for pouring. Once the concrete hardens, hand sanding and polishing are required to eliminate seams.

Solid surface fabrication. Photo courtesy of Eventscape.

A current plum job exemplifies the firm’s one-stop-shop capability. The Eleventh is the luxury 137-room Six Senses hotel with architecture by Bjarke Ingels Group and interiors by Paris-based Gilles Bouchez, who created the chichi realm inside New York’s Baccarat Hotel.

“It’s slated to be one of the most exclusive hotels in Manhattan,” Brennan said. “We’re doing all the features for the hotel, from the 20-foot-tall solid wood front door to louvers that move with the sun.”

A gearing system will open and close the 100 window louvers automatically.

“The challenges are not only aesthetic but functional,” explained Eventscape Project Developer Herman Mejia. “We’re building mockups of the mechanics. The designer wanted solid-wood louvers, but solid wood would not behave properly. So, we developed an interior core extrusion that’s cladded with wood. The look is there and the performance as well.”

Project staging area. Photo courtesy of Eventscape.

The design brief also calls for solid stone elements as heavy as 11,000 lbs. “How do we make this beautiful vision, take it to New York through all their small little streets and fit through the door?” he added.

Can the hotel floor handle the weight of the stone elements? Eventscape has a structural engineer on staff to address such issues.

Then there are maintenance factors to ponder. “Will the specified materials stand up to use over time? Can they be cleaned? Can they be repaired? We have to take all these challenges into consideration during the estimating and fabrication stages,” Brennan said. “We look at the entire picture.”

Mejia gets the first look at job prospects. “Part of my role, being at the front end, is to be the first pair of eyes to see what the vision is, whether it is a napkin sketch, a developed rendering or a full set of documents that act as marching instructions. We get all levels of visions.”

Sadly, Brennan said, “A large majority of proposals don’t get built because of price. It’s difficult for a designer to know exactly how much it will cost from a rendering. The ones that don’t get built often are the most adventurous because designers have taken a chance to do something unique and different.”

Eventscape’s three-dimensional representation of the logo of the Mall of America in Bloomington, Mn., is the centerpiece of the mall’s grand entrance. The four-layer, six-ton exterior glass star, over 16 feet high and 16 feet wide, is made of 3/4”-thick laminated colored tempered glass sections, white LED lighting and a stainless-steel frame. A sensor-activated heat trace immediately melts any snow or ice falling on the star. Photo courtesy of Eventscape.

To arrive at a budget estimate, staff members model the prospective project in engineering software that depicts the structure, skin, lighting and installation context so that every element can be costed. “We will build it without compromise exactly the way it’s rendered,” Brennan said. “When we do put a price to it, it’s real. We’re not just guessing.”

Gazing into the crystal ball, he foresees increasing use of new media such as projection mapping, which began as high-end light shows for deejays and performers. The technique turns objects into a surface for video projections. “They can change the look of that surface, such as projecting onto parliament buildings, then all of a sudden it looks like the parliament buildings are collapsing.”

Projection mapping adds oomph to retail, for instance, by turning a wall of merchandise into a memorable, often whimsical, attention-grabber. Picture a rack of running shoes, for instance, where each shoe coming alive with pulsating phosphorescent hues.

“A lot of media companies provide the content, but somebody has to build out the objects that are there, otherwise you’re just left with TV screens on a wall,” he said. “We try to build it out so that it feels like it’s an integral part of the space.”

Milne, with a background in stage design, fabrication and public relations, joined the firm 15 years ago. Brennan, who was born in Manchester, England, grew up north of Toronto in Bolton, Ont. (His father, no surprise, was an engineer.) Having started a deejay business in high school, he had a Eureka! moment during a gig at Toronto’s SkyDome stadium, deciding it would be more rewarding to provide the visual rather than auditory elements. Soon, he was a supplier to high-profile event planner Jeff Roick of McNabb Roick Events.

Mock-up of the over 2,000 seats and 450 custom seats and tables engineered, fabricated and installed by Eventscape at Toronto Pearson International Airport gate areas. Photo © by David Lasker

“I transformed from doing the music to doing props, lighting, anything visual for events,” he said. “Then that took on a life of its own. In the early days, I was inspired by rock-and-roll stage sets by Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones, these grand visions on stage. I set up Eventscape to do that type of work.”

Gradually, he transitioned from events to trade shows, creating booths for Global and Teknion at Toronto’s IIDEX-NeoCon, and from there to retail.

And that, dear reader, is how a company that has nothing to do with events got its pithy and sonorous, if curious, name.

David Lasker is President of David Lasker Communications in Toronto and Associate Editor of Canadian Interiors. He can be reached at david@davidlaskercommunications.com.