Limelight

The story

Lee Lifeson Art Park in Willowdale was conceived as an art park rather than a conventional green space, and the bandshell was to be its visual and acoustic centrepiece: a stage backdrop for community performance on the amphitheatre slope.

Paul Raff Studio authored the form as a continuously double-curved surface with no repeating geometry. Our job at Eventscape was translation, not design: find a way to build that surface exactly, while meeting structure, transport, lifting, weathering, and vandal resistance in an unsupervised public park.

What I did

1. Rebuilt the artist's form as a production digital model and tested it for constructability, so that the steel, foam, composite, and tile all worked from one geometry.

2. Set the segmentation strategy: 24 CNC flip-milled sections on a steel rib structure, built and shipped as two halves bolted along the spine, with lifting points designed in.

3. Ran the prototyping and sample programme with the artist, including the black glass mosaic finish, hand-cut where the curvature was tightest.

4. Oversaw fabrication and installation, finishing with a single 300-ton crane lift over mature trees and live utility lines, onto the City's footings, without damage to the finished stage.