Boreal cloister

Architectural Review, The, July, 1997 by May Southgate

The new University of Northern British Columbia is one of the most remote such institutions in the world. Situated on Cranbrook Hill above Prince George some 300 miles north of Vancouver, the forested site has views over the town to the Rocky Mountains. The first phase of the campus serves 1200 students and contains four main elements: library, laboratory block, conference centre and administration building. Though Prince George is quite a long way below the Arctic Circle, it has a continental climate and, while it can often be bright and sunny, winter temperatures descend towards -40degC, with wind effects on top of that. So if the academic community was to have any hope of success, it was vital that the four main buildings could be linked in such a way that students and staff did not have to struggle into massively padded outdoor clothing when they wanted to move from one building to another. Hence the Agora.

This has been described as the glue that physically binds the university together, but it has a social and perhaps spiritual purpose as well, for it contains most of the non-academic common functions of the fledgling institution, for instance, the bookshop, dining hall, student service offices, and even a small chapel. Its shape is intended to reinforce the community in a more subtle way. Basically, it consists of a broad route contained in a one-storey structure round an open sun-facing court that links all the lower elements of the academic buildings; its roof can be used in summer as terraces that make similar linkages at, in effect, ground floor level (court and terraces are referred to by the architects as the lower and upper plazas). Because of the fall and lie of the site, the court overlooks the landscape and the town, offering views to both plazas.

The Agora is of course the cloister of the university, a place in which students can meet informally, stroll and chat. These informal qualities are enhanced by the addition of two important and functionally strictly unnecessary spaces: the winter garden that connects the enclosed cloister with the sloping landscape above, and the student service street which inserts itself into the masterplan between library and lab block. The winter garden is an enclosed grove of academe, its roof carried on abstracted timber trees over terraces that fall down the hillside like a huge flight of wide steps - the sort you find in some eighteenth-century landscape gardens. These are used by the students in all weathers for chatting, relaxing and messing about, but popular though the place is, it could do with a bit more planted undergrowth to soften it and help it live up to its name. The student service street also has a roof supported on dramatic wooden struts, though here they are propped from the stone-covered arcaded wall which fronts the student offices. The struts carry a pitched timber roof, which is curved in plan to create a play of form and light that draws you into the light double-height semi-submerged volume. The offices themselves offer counselling, registration, advice about study programmes, financial aid and so on.

The falling site is turned to good use in the other main spaces of this complex. The bookshop is virtually underground (indeed it is under that part of the terrace which forms the ceremonial entrance to the site). But it is lit by two very large prism-shaped lanterns in wood and glass that not only pour light downwards but, at terrace level, frame the gable-end of the library as the appropriate finale of the ceremonial axis. The dining hall terminates the cloister and is formed to reduce institutional atmosphere by making the roof as a series of wedges. These spiral out from the half-round stair drum so that clerestories can be formed; they gradually ascend as they turn until the space is high enough to allow an internal upper level which connects with a dining terrace next to the ceremonial entrance axis. The handling of volume and light allows a large number of interconnected places of different ambience to be created.

Both human and environmental aspects of the complex are promising. The cloister is formed in heavy materials (concrete and so on) which provide thermal mass. Its windows are shaded to prevent excessive summer sun penetration, yet allow low winter rays to enter. Any excessive heat build-up in summer is reduced by opening lights at the top and bottom of the glazing between which a stack effect ventilates the spaces naturally. In winter, the place is partly warmed by waste heat from the big buildings which is supplemented by radiant heaters on the glazed side. It also provides means of transferring excess airflow from the academic buildings to the plant for use as boiler combustion air.

One of the requirements of the university's master plan was that the agora should be 'regionalist' in nature, and the complex has succeeded very well in this, forming a series of places which respond effectively to the extreme climate and to the exigencies of the rocky forested site. It could be a model for future public buildings in the area (though it is to be hoped that they do not copy the crazy-paving-like stone cladding too faithfully).