The 6th Day|Museum of Anthropology, UBC — cedar poles and glass standing in for a hospital

Location guides for The 6th Day put the film's hospital interiors at the Museum of Anthropology on the University of British Columbia campus, and once you have been inside the Great Hall the choice makes sense. The room is a glass wall thirteen metres high on a concrete post-and-beam frame, with grey daylight pouring in off the water and nothing soft anywhere. Point a camera along it and you have a corridor in a well-funded institution of the near future. Point it the other way and you have one of the great museum rooms in North America.

Arthur Erickson designed it and it opened in 1976, the frame consciously scaled to the post-and-beam houses of the coastal First Nations whose work it holds. The Great Hall stands house posts, figures and monumental carvings against that glass, so that the poles are lit by the same sky they were raised under, with the Strait of Georgia and the North Shore mountains behind them. Bill Reid's yellow cedar sculpture *The Raven and the First Men* sits in its own rotunda a short walk away.

This is not a decommissioned set. It is a working research museum with about half a million objects, it reopened in 2024 after a long seismic retrofit of that very glass hall, and the collections are governed in partnership with the originating communities. The building is on Musqueam land, and the museum says so first, not last.

Buy a ticket, walk down the ramp into the Great Hall, and give it a minute before you look at anything in particular. On an overcast Vancouver afternoon the light is flat and even and slightly cold, and the concrete goes almost the same grey as the sky. That grey is what the film borrowed. What the film could not borrow is the reason the room is shaped this way — the poles need the height, and they need the daylight.

Location photo: Museum of Anthropology at UBC (Wikimedia Commons).