Vancouver experiment: Reinventing a modern university campus

This paper addresses questions of heritage and change as considered through the paradigm of modern architecture as 'experiment'. It argues for alternate ways of preserving modernist ideals associated with educational structures and landscapes, through a renewal of 'the experiment'. The post-war university campus was a key place of research and development for architecture, landscape and urban design in Canada. Known for promoting modernism since the 1950s, the University of British Columbia's design schools and campus structures are also known for teaching and demonstrating sustainable design. UBC upholds itself as a 'living laboratory' that seeks a deep integration of operational and academic efforts in sustainability challenges. More fundamentally, increased participation of the ancestral Indigenous keepers of the land, the Musqueam people, is reflected in educational programming and a metamorphosis of the public realm. Through consideration of selected projects, this paper illustrates how maintenance, renewal and transformation objectives are interwoven to create distinct outcomes for heritage conservation, resource re-use, and, renewal of the relationships to BC's First Nations people