Strong Medicine

Carl Sagan once noted  the if you wish to bake an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. The apples come from trees, which come from soil and nutrients, which come from atoms, which come from…well, you get the idea. Narrowing that focus a little, architect Gilles Saucier had a similar approach to his design for the University of British Columbia’s new Pharamaceutic Sciences Building: “If we really want to connect with the history of pharmacology,” he asserts, “we have to start with trees.”

Montreal’s Saucier + Perrotte Architects worked with UBC architect Gerry McGeough and Vancouver firm Hughes Condon Marler Architects (HCMA) to design the $133-million, 23,000-square-metre edifice, amalgamating four smaller buildings scattered around the campus.

As lead designer, Saucier employed the concept – the ghosts, let’s say – of two enormous trees to generate the plan and massing of the building. Two multi-floor atriums evoke the negative space of huge trunks, while the cantilevered, cubic glass and cedar rooms that project sporadically from the western facade suggest their billowing branches.
“Historically, this area was a very dense forest,” notes Saucier. “There’s an embedded memory of the site being covered with trees.” Pharmacology itself, he points out, derives in large part from ingredients found in trees and shrubs. And the interface of the geological landscape and the vegetation that covers it has been an underlying interest of Saucier’s since he studied botanical sciences in the years before he entered Université Laval’s school of architecture.
In Vancouver, the suggestion of a building’s purpose within its outer skin has defined a few notable projects, in particular the petri-dish-cum-DNA-strand evoked within the window patterns at the B.C. Cancer Research Centre, by Henriquez Partners Architects; and the bar code patterns that grace UBC’s Sauder School of Business, by Acton Ostry. Saucier argues that his tree concept is an inside-out, three-dimensional generator within the whole of the design rather than just the cladding.

The building doesn’t resemble the forms of trees; it acts like them, at least in theory. (The western facade’s canted concrete bank suggests the sloping base of a tree trunk, although to local skateboarders it happily suggests a ramp at a skateboard park.) As you enter the building, you step into an expansive and dramatic passage rather than a typical lobby. The intention, says Saucier, was to evoke a stroll through the space between huge trees or rock formations.
Does it work? On a conceptual level, sure, if you like: the multi-storey atrium, topped with a gridded skylight, creates a light well to the ground floor, like sunbeams on a forest path. On a conscious visual level, though – with its concrete floor, shards of black metal, and the origami folds of its wood-sheathed ceilings – it feels more like its own man-made creation, the hollowed-out interior of a giant sculpture.

The public ground floor departs from standard university architectural introversion, often most pronounced in the secret-filled halls of science and technology faculties. Here, HCMA has served a crucial complementary role. The local project architects have experience in orchestrating massively complex health and tech facilities, and they managed to solve a daunting gaggle of challenges. These range from intellectual security (the fourth floor is a private firm’s R&D quarters), to action movie plot lines involving the containment of radioactivity, virulent bacteria and volatile gases.

Through the elegant full-height glass of the individual laboratories, you see panoplies of perchloric fume hoods, nuclear magnetic resonance machines, and lantern-like snorkels to suck out whatever noxious vapours pervade the workspace. It takes a great deal of intensely pragmatic design work to configure the proper placements and interconnections of such requisite equipment, as project architect Craig Lane confirms.

The building has earned  LEED Gold certification, for whatever that’s worth, but spares us the usual clichéd signifiers of louvred glass, brise-soleils or bamboo toilet paper holders. With many of the ceilings and walls clad in Western red cedar, it projects an unusually warm persona for such a tech-minded structure. And the presence of deftly lit interior bridges and off-the-grid windows imbue the core atriums with an unmistakable sense of openness and invitation – that this is a truly public space, not just for the pharma­ceut­ical  elite.

That, too, was the design intention, says Saucier: “Any university has that responsibility now. If we don’t approach it as a public space, we’re kind of missing the point.”   
Adele Weder