“This is a room for music and nothing else,” says Marianne McKenna, the award-winning Toronto architect who has drawn the dream assignment of reinventing Massey Hall for the future.

McKenna, the M of KPMB Architects, certainly strikes me as the perfect choice for this Herculean task, given the fact that she was the architect of Koerner Hall, that jewel in the crown of the Royal Conservatory of Music, which keeps delivering bliss on Bloor St. W. week after week.

At 10 a.m. on the first Sunday of April, attired in glitter-free black working duds as part of the Spur Festival, McKenna was giving a group of 20 people, including me, a tour of Massey Hall, with an emphasis on the head-spinning enhancements she is planning.

Festival of ideas? Now that’s a Big Idea

One thing McKenna makes clear is that she intends to erase that phrase “and nothing else” in the course of making over what now stands as a beloved, historic and iconic temple of Toronto music history, which must also be described as crumbling, faded, uncomfortable and inconvenient.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” she says.

I wouldn’t disagree, but the trick is to make Massey Hall a state-of-the-art venue for the 21st century without losing the magic that has made it, since 1894, a great place to hear music.

Or as McKenna has been cautioned more than once: “Don’t screw it up.”

Well, both the architect and Charles Cutts, CEO for the Corporation for Massey Hall and Roy Thomson Hall, are committed to getting everything right and taking as much time as necessary to be sure of that.

So don’t expect the grand reopening of the new, improved Massey Hall to take place anytime soon.

At the moment, the place is in phase one of a process that is scheduled to take seven years. That means for now work is being done on two underground levels of a newly acquired piece of land just south of the hall.

Design plans for the hall itself will be worked out circa 2016. Construction may not begin until 2018 and the hall will probably be closed for two seasons. So it’s safe to predict the reopening will not take place in this decade.

The long, winding road of Massey Hall’s so-called revitalization began in 2012, when MOD Developments — which is about to build a 60-storey condo tower over a historic bank building on Yonge St. — turned over a large piece of land behind its tower (extending east to Victoria St.) to Massey Hall. That allows the hall to expand southward, which is critical, since the otherwise landlocked hall has nowhere to go on its north, east and west sides.

“We’ve been waiting 120 years for this piece of land,” says Cutts.

The first phase, currently underway, involves demolishing an old building (the Albert building), then digging eight metres below the surface of the newly acquired lot to build a foundation and a new two-level basement to house updated mechanical and electrical goodies.

The biggest gain in this phase is a loading dock, the lack of which has been the biggest inconvenient truth of working at Massey Hall for 120 years.

Ever since its 1894 opening, according to Cutts, “every lighting instrument, every speaker and every grand piano has had to be brought in through the front door and then down the centre aisle.”

In the next phase, there will be a new six-storey building on that new land, north of the present hall. Within those walls will be lobbies, social venues, side stages, dressing rooms, washrooms, elevators, storage room and other back-of-house perks.

But the biggest challenge will come late in the game when it’s time for McKenna to transform the original Moorish Revival-style auditorium into something much more than a square room for music, while preserving its DNA.

Many decisions will be made later, but McKenna rattled off a list of some crucial goals:

Walkways will link the old building to the new.

The best acoustical-sound equipment will be secured, but the hall will work equally well for natural sound and electronically enhanced sound.

Robert Essert, the great London-based acoustician, will be a key member of McKenna’s team.

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The exterior fire escape system will be scrapped.

The box office (where customers waited in the rain) will be eliminated

New seats will be installed.

Sightlines will be improved

Stained glass windows will be restored and the covering removed.

Stairs on Shuter St. to the building will be removed.

At the moment, no one is prepared to say what the final cost of all this will be. My prediction: north of $100 million.

McKenna is not a self-promoter, but two things she said to the group on the tour gave me high hopes.

First, she learned a lot about concert halls through her work on Koerner.

Two, her approach starts with the insight that when you go to a concert “what you hear is what you see.”

In other words, when you go to a live event, you do not listen with your eyes closed. Whether you realize it or not, the quality of the experience is heavily influenced by the environment (including visual surroundings) in which you are hearing music.

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