Along Came a Spider|Vancouver Art Gallery — a courthouse in disguise, doubling for Washington

Most of this film is not Washington. It was made in Vancouver between February and May 2000, and the crew's job was to find British Columbia buildings that could carry an American capital's weight. The Vancouver Art Gallery at 750 Hornby Street was one of them, used for exteriors.

It works because it was never meant to be a gallery. Francis Rattenbury designed it as the provincial courthouse, opened in 1911, with a colonnaded portico, a dome, and a pair of stone lions on the Georgia Street steps — the full neoclassical vocabulary of Anglo-American officialdom, built by an architect who also gave Victoria its parliament buildings and Empress Hotel. Point a camera at that portico and crop out the mountains and you have a federal institution in any city on the continent. Arthur Erickson converted the interior in 1983 and flipped the building's orientation toward Robson Square, so the grand old front steps now serve mainly as a place to sit.

That is the pleasure of standing here. The steps are always occupied — students, buskers, protest signs leaning against the plinths, someone eating noodles beside a lion. A building designed to intimidate has been thoroughly domesticated by the people who use it, and the film borrowed only the intimidating half.

Go inside as well; the Emily Carr holdings are the largest anywhere, and the top floor still has the courthouse's original rotunda light. Then come back out, stand on Georgia at the bottom of the steps, and frame the portico the way the location scouts did. It is a small trick, and once you see it you cannot unsee it in any Vancouver-shot thriller.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons.