Vancouver's New Convention Centre

Pam and I had a lit­tle free time this week­end, so on Sat­ur­day, we head­ed over to the water­front, and were among the first cou­ple of thou­sand peo­ple who walked around the new Con­ven­tion Cen­tre. The project, which has been under­way as long as we can remem­ber (and prob­a­bly was offi­cial­ly start­ed before we even arrived here in 2005), has come in hor­ri­bly over bud­get, and I do remem­ber sto­ries of some of the met­al used in the build­ing being stolen. How­ev­er it is done, and in time for the Olympics, as well as a few year’s worth of con­ven­tion book­ings in the space from 2010 onward.

Pam and I both liked the archi­tec­ture of the build­ing, espe­cial­ly the impres­sive wood walls and green roof. It’s def­i­nite­ly as much an eco­log­i­cal state­ment as it is a build­ing; there are even res­i­dent bee­hives and a bee­keep­er for main­tain­ing them. I under­stand that this wasn’t the first time that some of the gen­er­al pub­lic had seen the inside, as friend and blog­ger Tiny Bites cov­ered the 2009 BC Restau­rant Hall of Fame gala at the same venue a few days ago.

The space is large, but sev­er­al places get the great view of the Bur­rard Inlet and the moun­tains. For this open­ing day, they had sev­er­al acro­bats and oth­er per­form­ers on hand, and I got some video of them. Here’s a tour, includ­ing a per­for­mance from a group who’s dress­ing room said ‘Cirque’. I’ve looked and not found any­thing that said it was Cirque du Soleil, but I’m think­ing it cer­tain­ly looked like them:

Here are some oth­er stills, if you are not keen on watch­ing video of some of the same:

Want more? Here’s a slideshow on Flickr that has these plus a few more:
Slideshow: Open­ing Day at the Van­cou­ver Con­ven­tion Cen­tre