The 6th Day|Vancouver Central Library — the coliseum that plays a cloning empire

Replacement Technologies is the company at the centre of The 6th Day: a corporation rich enough to clone your dead labrador over the counter and quietly rich enough to clone you. When the film needs to show that empire from the outside, it shows a curved wall of pale precast concrete wrapping around a glass core, ramping upward in tiers like something Roman that got lost in the Pacific Northwest. That is the Vancouver Central Library, and it needed no set dressing at all.

Moshe Safdie and Downs/Archambault finished it in 1995, five years before the shoot. The ellipse is not a real coliseum wall but a freestanding colonnade of study carrels, wrapped around a rectangular book stack, with a glazed atrium in the gap between them. Vancouverites argued about it for years — too Roman, too theatrical, too much money — and then filled it. It is the busiest library in the country by visits per capita, and the promenade inside the curve holds coffee counters and cheap sandwiches under a sixty-foot glass roof.

The building has been playing the future for thirty years now, on this film and on many others, for a simple reason: nothing about it reads as any particular decade. The concrete gives it weight, the ellipse gives it menace, and the glass gives it the cold institutional gloss that a script needs when a corporation is about to be revealed as monstrous.

Go on a weekday and take the escalators to the top floor of the promenade. From there you look straight down the curve of the outer wall through the glass, into the sliver of open air between the two buildings, and you understand what the camera was after. Then walk out onto Georgia Street and stand where the wall meets the sidewalk. Up close it is not sinister at all — it is students, strollers, and a busker under the arch.

Location photo: Vancouver Public Library Central Branch (Wikimedia Commons).