draft THE DESIGN FOR SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY AND THE PROBLEMS ACCOMPANYING ...

462 Pages·2013·23.15 MB·English

by  Duty Reference Archivist

draft
THE DESIGN FOR SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY
AND THE PROBLEMS ACCOMPANYING EXCELLENCE
by Gene Waddell
February 5, 1998
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CONTENTS
Preface 6
Abbreviations 12
A. PRELIMINARIES 14
1. Need for a New College 15
2. Reaction to the Macdonald Report 19
3. Shrum 22
4. Site Selection 33
B. DESIGN COMPETITION 39
5. Planning the Competition 39
6. The 5th through the 2nd Place Entries 48
A. Fifth Place 49
B. Fourth Place 51
c. Third Place 53
D. Second Place 54
7. The Winning Entry 57
A. Educational Approach 59
B. Planning Concepts 63
C. Design Concepts 72
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D. Design Process 77
8. Judging 88
C. PREPARING FOR PHASE I 99
9. Five Winners of One Prize 99
10. Attempts at a Working Relationship 104
11. Development Plan 107
12. Working Arrangement 115
13. Initial Changes by Erickson/Massey 123
14. Erickson/Massey 130
15. Rhone & Iredale 137
16. Kiss 139
17. Harrison 141
18. Duncan McNab and Associates 144
19. Working Drawings 148
20. President and Board 157
21. Academic Planning 162
22. Site Development 176
23. Cost Estimates 183
D. PHASE I CONSTRUCTION 193
24. Materials and Methods 194
25. Gymnasium 202
26. Academic Quadrangle 207
27. Mall Complex 213
28. Library 222
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29. Science Complex 226
30. Theatre 229
31. Initial Landscaping and Art Work 231
A. Landscaping 231
B. Art 234
32. Construction Progress 236
33. Madge Hogarth House 244
34. Mall Roof Controversy 250
35. Design and Initial Assembly of the Mall Roof 262
36. Undermining Erickson/Massey 270
37. Opening 274
38.· Acclaim 277
39. Progress Report 281
E. LATER PHASES 292
40. Building and Rebuilding the Mall Roof 295
41. Completing the Quad 306
42. Landscaping the Quad 308
43. Enlarging the Science Complex 318
44. Shell Station Controversy 326
45. Shell House 337
46. Classroom Complex 341
47. Housing Development Plan 345
48. Louis Riel House 360
49. Shared Fates 367
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F. FURTHER DEVELOPMENTS 386
49. More Acclaim 386
50. Additions 390
51. Conclusion: the Problems Accompanying Excellence 401
A. Competitions 401
B. Visual Knowledge 404
c. Regionalism 406
D. Creating Problems 409
E. Solving Problems 411
F. Concept 413
G. Experimentation 416
H. Trees and Parking 418
I. Design Process 419
J. Aesthetics and Function 422
Chronological List of Articles Primarily About the Architecture
of Simon Fraser University 430
Bibliographies on Erickson 436
APPENDICES 437
I. Competition Statements by the five prize winners
II. Erickson/Massey to Shrum on the Mall roof (April 7, 1965)
III. Erickson to Hean on landscaping (Feb. 14, 1967)
IV. Massey to DeVries on Erickson/Massey (May 13, 1969)
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PREFACE
I have tried in this study to deal with all aspects of Simon
Fraser University (SFU) that had architectural consequences.
Educational philosophy, institutional history, and biography need
to be considered to an unusual extent for an architectural
history because they had highly significant architectural
consequences. SFU was intended to offer alternatives, and it
did. Most small colleges start by attempting to meet the minimal
requirements of accreditation as quickly as possible. From the
start SFU intended to be a full-scale university which set
standards rather than followed them.
While trying to attract a professor to SFU, Chancellor
Gordon M. Shrum wrote, " ... we are starting a large university
from scratch. This has seldom, if ever, been attempted in Canada
before." [Letter to B. N. Brockhouse, Jan. 22, 1964; Shrum
Papers.] The creation of SFU thus provided an opportunity for an
educational experiment and for an architectural experiment, and
even though it is one of Canada's newest universities, it has
been repeatedly named by MacLean's magazine as Canada's best
university. SFU's architecture and site have been major factors
in attracting faculty and students. Much of the educational
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philosophy reflected in the architecture has continued to prove
its effectiveness.
In its Progress Report dated February 15, 1966,
Erickson/Massey wrote "we have attempted in this Report to
explain why the University is the way it is .... " I have
attempted to do the same thing even more fully. In the same
report, they wrote "excellence cannot be achieved without
difficulty but it has been our experience that the problems
accompanying excellence which at the time seem large are soon
forgotten, whereas standards are enduring." [Progress Report,
Section B-3, p. 1.] I have also tried to show what is excellent
about SFU and why it is excellent and how it could be still
become as excellent as it was intended to be.
This is also a book about the turmoil in education in the
1960s. This period marked the end of unquestioned authority--not
the end of authority, but the end of its right not to be
questioned. An integral part of the history of the creation of
SFU is that architects and faculty were treated like students and
that students were treated like children. Problems were solved
by getting rid of the people who caused them, and this included
the architects. It was the end of the way thing had been up
until that ,time, and SFU provides an usually extreme and well
documented example of which indicated a great deal about what
education and architectural design were like before and after
this major change in relationships between administrators and
everyone else.
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I have limited this study to the period from 1963 to 1969-
from the competition for the design of SFU that resulted in the
design of Erickson and Massey being chosen to the end of
Erickson/Massey's direct involvement in the design. Afterwards,
buildings began to be added which partly or wholly ignored the
plan "adopted" to construct the university. About two-thirds of
it was constructed closely following the winning design, and the
remaining third, the residential, area had largely never been
completed, but still could be. To encourage its completion has
been one of my principal reasons for attempting to explain the
importance of the concepts and the excellence of what was
accomplished.
Acknowledgements: A comprehensive study of the Erickson/Massey
design of SFU would not be possible without the nearly complete
records which have been preserved in three archives. Nearly all
of the approximately 700 surviving original design drawings by
Erickson/Massey are in the Architectural Archives of the Canadian
Centre for Architecture (CCA). Robert Desaulnier, Head
Archivist, and Mourade Dieye Gueye, Processing Archivist, have
provided access to this material and arranged for photography.
Nearly all of the correspondence between architects is in
the Erickson Papers at the Canadian Architectural Archives in the
University Library at the University of Calgary (CAA). This
collection also contains an essentially complete set of
blueprints of working drawings by all five of the prize-winning
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firms. This correspondence and the approximately 1,400 drawings
relating to SFU have been essential for determining why the
buildings were designed as they wer~ and the credit which belongs
to all five firms. Linda Fraser's complete cooperation and her
carefully compiled finding aids helped immensely to locate
relevant material within the 20,000 drawings and 55 meters of
files relating to over 200 projects by Erickson/Massey and
Erickson prior to 1976.
The records of SFU are also readily accessible in its
University Archives in Burnaby, and these include Board Minutes,
the first Chancellor's Papers (Gordon M. Shrum), an extensive
collection of photographs of buildings under construction,
original drawings by the firms of Harrison and Kiss, and
manuscript material from the firm of Rhone & Iredale. Access to
these records was provided by Frances Fournier and Enid Britt.
A comprehensive set of blueprints of SFU buildings
~s
completed are in SFU's Facilities Management. Since this set
includes drawings for all post-1969 buildings as well as the
earlier buildings, it is the best single source for architectural
information on the final form of all buildings on the campus.
This information was made available to me by Lou Caruso and James
Atamanchuk.
In most cases I have been able to base this book on primary
sources created at the time the buildings were being designed and
constructed. There have been questions, though, which only the
architects themselves could answer, and I have had the full
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cooperation of at least one principal from each of the five firms
which worked together in the first phase of the design and
construction: Arthur Erickson, Geoffrey Massey, Randle Iredale,
Zoltan Kiss, Robert F. Harrison, and Duncan McNab. I have also
interviewed two architects who helped to prepare the prize
winning design by Erickson and Massey and who helped to prepare
working drawings for Erickson/Massey': Ron Bain and Ken
Burroughs.
Although the first Chancellor, Gordon M. Shrum, died in
1985, he was interviewed about SFU before his death for an oral
autobiography, and a complete transcript of the interviews exists
in the SFU Archives. His son, Gordon B. Shrum, was a member of
the law firm which provided legal opinions to SFU during the
period of initial construction, and he provided information which
helped to me understand the immense influence Shrum had on all
aspects of the university which he initially created single
handedly. Gordon B. Shrum also contributed to the CCA two copies
of the extremely rare Assessors Report so that all ten of the top
prize-winning designs could be included in the exhibition and
represented in the CCA's collection. Shrum's daughter, Laurna
Jane (Mrs. Ian) Strang, had files on SFU which she contributed to
the SFU archives, and these filled a crucial gap in its records.
I am also grateful to other individuals who allowed me to
interview them: Leslie R. Peterson, the Minister of Education at
the time SFU was created; Herbert L. McDonald, the photographer
who documented Phase I construction and who arranged for me to
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