The new building of the National Music Center (NMC) of Canada is located in the historic part of the city - East Village - and includes a historical and architectural monument - the brick building of the King Edward Hotel (1905), where the legendary blues club was located. The plot for construction is cut in half by the street, therefore, even in the competition task, it was supposed to connect the two parts of the building with a "bridge". In the constructed building, this passage is located at a height of 20 m, but despite its dramatic appearance, it is still not the most interesting component of the project: more attention is attracted by glazed tiles, which cover not only the facades, but also some of the surfaces in the interior. The Dutch company Tichelaar Makkum, which has already worked with Allied Works Architecture on their renovation of the New York Museum of Art and Design, made it especially for NMC.
The building, which took its own name - Studio Bell, in honor of its sponsor, Canada's largest telecommunications company, includes a convertible concert hall with 300 seats that can be connected to the lobby, spaces for permanent and temporary exhibitions, and Canadian and country music halls of fame. and - in the second building, which includes the King Edward Hotel - recording studios, radio stations, rooms for resident artists, an educational center, spaces for less formal live performances. In terms of the richness of the program, NMC has no analogues in the entire North America.
The five-storey building consists of nine "towers". It combines two load-bearing systems: the arches supporting the vestibule ceilings at the ground floor level, and the structure to which the concert hall is "suspended".
