BING THOM (1940–2016)
Bing Thom, a Canadian architect known for his redesign of the building that houses the Arena Stage in Washington, DC, which transformed the city’s southwest waterfront, died on Tuesday in Hong Kong at the age of seventy-five, Martin Well of the Washington Post reports.
Thom’s projects ranged from the Guildford Aquatic Center in Surrey, British Columbia, and the Tarrant County College in Fort Worth, Texas, to the Chan Center for the Performing Arts at the University of British Columbia.
Born in Hong Kong in 1940, Thom and his family moved to Vancouver in 1949. He earned his bachelor’s degree in 1966 from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, where he studied under architect Arthur Erickson, whom he would later work for. He received his master’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1969.
In the 1970s, Thom worked for the Pritzker Prize–winning architect Fumihiko Maki in Tokyo. Shortly thereafter, he returned to Vancouver and opened his own firm in 1981.
Thom’s redesign of the complex where the Arena Stage is located, called the Mead Center for American Theater, involved refurbishing two buildings and adding a third. He connected the three structures with one roof. After the theater opened in 2010, Roger K. Lewis, an architecture critic at the Washington Post, called the $130 million project an “aesthetically bold, sometimes theatrical, architectural ensemble unlike anything else in Washington.”
In a 2010 interview, Thom told the New York Times_, “I sometimes analogize a city to a string of pearls. As an architect I’m as interested in the string as in the pearls.”
Two of Thom’s Hong Kong–based projects, the Xiqu Center for the Performing Arts and the University of Chicago Center, are currently still under construction.
