Medicine Chest: In Vancouver, a new campus building for pharmaceutical studies conceived by Gilles Saucier makes a bold statement while reshaping its context.
Iconic designs don't always make good places. Photogenic buildings that assert themselves as individual landmarks may ignore their context and fail to enhance the public realm. Yet the University of British Columbia (UBC) Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Centre for Drug Research and Development, a new 275,870-square-foot research, teaching, and office facility, succeeds on both individual and community levels. Designed by Saucier + Perrotte Architectes (S+P) of Montreal with Hughes Condon Marler Architects (HCMA) of Vancouver, it's already famous for the Cubist collage of glass volumes that animates its west facade. The entire structure, intended to promote creativity and collaboration among its 790 students and 55 faculty members, provides UBC with a state-of-the-art building worthy of its international reputation. And it transforms a nondescript corner of the campus into a prominent gateway.
UBC occupies 1,005 acres eight miles west of downtown Vancouver and serves almost 50,000 students. Its architecture ranges from Collegiate Gothic to an International Style of concrete, brick, and glass. The campus enjoys a natural setting of breathtaking beauty on a wooded promontory overlooking the Strait of Georgia'but not on its lackluster southeast edge, where the pharmacy school occupies a 2-acre site. Yet the building more than fulfills new campus guidelines intended to increase density, strengthen a sense of place, and promote design quality. Its powerful rectangular form, cantilevered over a recessed ground floor, anchors a busy intersection and a well-traveled pedestrian path. It also frames outdoor space and displays its academic activities in a highly transparent, signature work, whose taut glass skin'in six shades from clear to black'provides a suave counterpoint to a banal parking garage next door and the trio of red-brick masses across the road that house the life-sciences department.
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