Campus art installations II: What does architecture really mean?

I have returned — summoned back once more to carry out my burdensome mandate of educating the masses of hungry, cultureless despots under the tragic illusion that wine can be consumed with ice and that Michael Bay makes good, innocently fun movies. Prepare yourselves!

Today’s lesson: Campus architecture… or the lack thereof. These are the buildings in which you study, drink, weep and try to have sex in — perhaps all at once. Their walls are the looming, intensely bland frames in which the picture of your university career exists and may flourish or flounder. But have you ever wondered about the cultural merits of the rooms that you mosey on through in your tired, sheep-like state? Of course you haven’t, you delightful sheeple (sheep people). But that is why I am here, sickeningly condescending though I may be. Prepare yourselves to receive my cultural revelations!

The Clock Tower

Once upon a time, there were two architects named Bengt Edman and Lennart Holm. Together, they designed a building which critic Reiner Banham thought was just nifty. This fancy new movement called “brutalism,” which the aforementioned architects began, was made popular by Banham because he hated people and wanted them to live in miserable hell-holes for the whole of their sad little lives.

The clock tower is an example of this brutalist movement. It is brilliant because clock towers are typically ornate, beautiful symbols of the stratospheric reaches that architecture can achieve. But this one audaciously threw away such conventions and instead opted to be completely fucking hideous.

How bold! This barnacle upon the face of the campus’ aesthetic is the equivalent taking a J.M.W. Turner landscape and painting a big, ugly rectangle right in the centre. Yes, on a campus as beautiful as ours, someone thought it was a fantastic idea to build a clock tower whose only relationship to beauties such as Big Ben is that it is tall and has a clock on it. Oh, and speaking of shitty architecture…

Buchanan Tower and Company

Buchanan Tower is a beautifully constructed, lovingly crafted structure, carefully made to be the concrete embodiment of a fascist orgasm. This abomination to good taste stands over the campus like that monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey and seems to revel in being menacingly dreary and depressing. Just look at its windows! When it rains, the water rolls from them like the tears of the competent architects who were not allowed to design better buildings than this one.

As for the other Buchanan buildings in the complex — if you ever got the feeling that you were a meek little mouse running around a maze of your professorial overlords devising while having all of your hard-earned money slowly hemorrhage from your bank account, these buildings will only enforce that sensation. Walk around this complex for a while and you will soon forget what class you were even going to as well as what your own name is.

But of course, this was all part of the architect’s ingenious intent! Keep the student rabble disoriented and scared — especially the arts majors — otherwise they might revolt and start spreading their intellectual, sexually liberated, reefer-smoking ideals into the public sphere!

Sauder School of Business

Much like the Church of Scientology, this glass behemoth comes across like the wealthy headquarters of some sinister, cult-like organization. Just think! Similar to the minions of a fringe religious sect, Sauderites all wear the required garbs of their order — $500 suits that look like they were selected from the same catalogue that Mitt Romney uses to shop.

And like the Mormon missionaries, whenever other UBC students see a Sauderite, they quickly avoid eye contact, cross the road or engage in passionate conversation with literally anyone else to avoid being roped into a reluctant networking session that eventually leads to you waking up in a boardroom three years later with a marketing degree and no idea how you got there.

This manically maniacal code of Sauderite conduct is very clearly reflected in the structure of the building itself, which has a colour palette akin to a packet of Staples sticky notes and the warm, accommodating presence of that cold, distant hug your boss gave you once when he was trying to forge meaningful, emotional connections with his employees. It is one of the nicer buildings on campus in that it wasn’t built before 1960 and has very little visible concrete. But other than that, it sort of just is.

Tall Wood Building

Its size is certainly impressive and I don’t think I’ve ever seen something like this get it up so fast. It really is hard to say if this building will stand the test of time, but when you compare it to the crusty old exterior of Gage, Tall Wood seems likely to have better endurance in the annals of campus architectural history. Although it doesn’t fit as firmly into the typical style of UBC’s buildings, perhaps that is a good thing! Structural experimentation is sometimes healthy. How will UBC know whether or not it likes something until it tries it? I say that the administration should spread wide open and let Tall Wood’s firm, smoothly laminated beams into its majestic, bushy campus.

Earth and Ocean Sciences

It’s alright, I suppose. Could do with a bit more ocean.

Totem Park

I still have the nightmares — endless, white-washed walls. Showers that the really attractive person living in the next room literally just had sex in. The toilet that smells like last night’s enchiladas. A mattress imbibed with the salty remains of a decade’s worth of freshman tears. A ceiling most likely riddled with asbestos and leaded pipes.

Oh! The horror… The horror… I have escaped, but Totem Park will always chase me in the dark, vulnerable moments of the night. Part of me never truly left. Sometimes when I pass it by, I could swear I saw the faces of those poor souls that did not make it, staring out at me through the windows. Do you think I sound hyperbolic? They literally filmed a horror movie in the freaking basement laundry-room of one of the buildings.

We will leave it there for now. These memories of first-year residence have left me most unsettled. The trauma from even considering the more sinister parts of campus’ architecture has shaken me more than a well-mixed martini at the Uva Wine and Cocktail Bar. I’m going to go look at pictures of La Sagrada Familia and Falling Water to calm myself down. Yes... it will be alright... Gaudi and Wright are there to help. Shhhhhhh… think happy architecture thoughts.

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