50/50|Richmond City Hall — glass and reflecting pools standing in for the chemo ward

Pacific General is where Adam loses his hair, learns the names of the men in the neighbouring chairs, and is handed a prescription for medical marijuana by an oncologist who never once looks him in the eye. The hospital in the film is invented. The building is not.

The exterior belongs to Richmond City Hall, at 6911 No. 3 Road in Richmond, twenty minutes south of downtown Vancouver across the Fraser. KPMB Architects completed it in 2000: an eight-storey glass tower set beside a low circular council chamber, the whole complex laid out around reflecting pools, a stand of birches and a long civic plaza. It reads as a hospital on camera because it reads as institutional calm — pale glass, wide horizontals, water that stays flat.

The building is open to the public on weekdays and the grounds are open always. Walk the plaza and the borrowed geography stops making sense in a useful way: the film's Seattle patient is being treated in a Canadian suburb's municipal offices, on a site surrounded by strip malls, Cantonese bakeries and the Canada Line running up No. 3 Road.

What stays with you is the water. Those still pools are in shot behind more than one scene where Adam is trying not to fall apart, and they hold the sky without moving.

Location photo: Richmond City Hall (Wikimedia Commons).