UBC/UEL Updates Discussion
 

The University of British Columbia's Point Grey campus is undergoing significant changes, complete with new residential communities, overhauled infrastructure, improved faculty buildings and expansion to museums and other civic amenities.

UBC Winter Sports Centre
http://www.vancouver2010.com/images/venue_display/ubc_winter_sports_centre.jpg?

UBC Sauder School of Business
http://www.sauder.ubc.ca/AM/Images/newbuilding/images/LandingPage.jpg

University Town
http://www.universitytown.ubc.ca/images/utown_map.gif

University Boulevard
http://www.universitytown.ubc.ca/images/ublvd_1.jpg

Irving K. Barber Learning Centre
http://www.ikebarberlearningcentre.ubc.ca/images/swnight_new.jpg

If you're going to post a poll, please post some pics. I'm too lazy to look for them myself.

Which development is university town? Is that the new tounhouse stuff over on Westbrook?

"The top students, teachers and researchers are attracted to campuses that have an energetic, intellectually stirring social environment where they can live and where they will be encouraged and inspired to do their best work.

Like all great universities, the University of British Columbia is evolving. A conventional commuter campus for much of its history, the university is returning to the original vision of its founding architects who in 1914 described "…a university city in an idyllic setting."

University Town residents will enjoy unparalleled learning opportunities amid breathtaking surroundings of mountains, sea and forest as well as back-yard attractions such as the world-renowned Museum of Anthropology, the internationally acclaimed Chan Centre for the Performing Arts and state-of-the art recreational facilities.

As the University grows with the creation of University Town, the three pillars of sustainability (ecology, economy, and community) are the foundation for the planning and implementation of all new academic buildings and residential neighbourhoods."

http://www.universitytown.ubc.ca/

I thought University Blvd was part of the University Town project. Isn't University Town the thing involving redoing University Blvd, redoing the SUB plaza, taking out the grassy knoll and putting in an underground bus loop, taking out the pool etc and putting retail and new buildings all along University between Westbrook and East Mall? Or is that something separate from University Town? Or is it just one of many components of University Town?

http://www.universitytown.ubc.ca/archcomp/exhibit_poll/TeamA/TeamA/Slide1.JPG

I think University Town is at 16th and East Mall.

I saw a petition being passed around that's petitioning against the developing of the grassy knoll and the construction of the underground bus loop to generate revenue to pay for projects during one of my classes last week. I didn't sign it.

My understanding is that UniversityTown is a marketing campaign designed to obtain student support for the development of market residential at the university. It's a vague collection of concepts that means something slightly different for each individual neighbourhood, but the basic point is to build market residential. The website provides many examples of how to use the word sustainability in a sentence. I'm not actually opposed to it. I just can't stand any material written by marketers, marketers themselves, and pr websites that don't say anything. Same thing with ecoDensity. It's not so bad if you actually read the official documents.

Ya, I noticed it too, they had a booth in the SUB plaza. I didnt bother signing it either.

From the looks of that rendering, it appears there's no convinient way to get from McInnis/Bus loop to East Mall without going all the way around the SUB (unless they have some strategically places doors, but going inside and then out again 20ft later will just slow everyone down). I'm also gonna miss that grassy knoll, its a great place to snooze/do hwk, if the weather is nice. Still, overall it looks like a good project.


Other ones to mention are the Biodiversity Reseach Center, between Biology and Kaiser building, (just starting pouring foundations), and the Chem Building, which is having its interior gutted and redone.

hmmm the underground bus loop really appeals to me. owell, if it ever does get built, i'll probably be long graduated already

The rendering is a poor one - the eastern building does not butt up against the SUB.

Are they really going to replace the admin building with a lowrise condo building? That seems wasteful to me. Doesn't have to be a highrise but you'd think it would be at least as tall as the new building across the street.

Methinks that space between the gym and the lowrise condos would be a bit awkward.

Now updated with images from four of the projects...

^Thanks for the added info/images. I'm happy to see the University Town/University Blvd relationship cleared up... that is that University Blvd is a "neighbourhood" of the overarching University Town plan.

i have a condo in hampton place...5735.

The Irving K. Barber Learning Centre could emerge as a darkhorse. It's starting to look very nice as construction progresses, and it could become an architectural focal point on the UBC Campus.

I've noticed that the MOA expansion has yet to receive any votes. This is actually a pretty big project - $52 million, at least. It should solidify the MOA as one of Vancouver's most notable cultural tourism destinations.

New U.B.C. theological neighbourhood is less than divine TREVOR BODDY
From Friday's Globe and Mail
POSTED ON: 20/04/07

http://images.theglobeandmail.com/archiv...20/revan-boddy-0420/vanboddy20re1big.jpg

The University of British Columbia's theological colleges used to be set within a verdant park at the gateway to the campus. The colleges are still there, but now they have become almost invisible, lost within the latest of the residential neighbourhoods that have made the U.B.C. campus the Greater Vancouver Regional District's fastest-growing area. One of this city's most sublime sites has been densified, but the results fall far short of divine.

The story of how an academic theological precinct became a theological neighbourhood mainly home to residents without campus connections is one of the collision of worldly mammon with heavenly good intentions.

It all begins with special leases for college buildings granted in U.B.C.'s early years for each of the major Christian denominations: Roman Catholic, Baptist, Presbyterian, Anglican and United churches. So eager were campus officials to attract and keep theological colleges — the spiritual foundation for most older Canadian universities — they granted them leases running not the 99 years typical for other on-campus institutions, but for 999 years. Their future secure, a series of college buildings were then constructed from the 1920 through the 1950s on wide lawns backed with lush plantings, a serene, bucolic, and yes, meditative gateway to the campus along Chancellor Boulevard.

By the late 1990s, the theological colleges were facing both fading enrolments and failing buildings. With condo developments starting to rise all over campus, the college's long term leases turned out to be a hugely valuable asset, since exploited to the hilt. Under the terms of their leases, revenues generated by the sale of college properties to developers have gone not to general U.B.C. accounts, but to the colleges themselves, turning some of nation's poorer theological institutes into some of its richest. I have no problem with this windfall, but the resulting architecture and public spaces are a huge disappointment.

This is particularly apparent in the spaces and buildings around the Iona Building, the severe grey granite 1927 building for the United Church that long acted as the entranceway citadel for the entire Point Grey campus. The stern bearing and Collegiate Gothic style of this six-storey college is no match for the 14-storey Corus condo tower that now looms behind it. The tower was moved to this unfortunate location because of strenuous objections from residents in the long-established Endowment Lands neighbourhood to the north.

With a dazzling view of Burrard Inlet and the North Shore mountains, the space in front of the Iona Building should have become the key urban plaza for the mid-rise, medium density development that now surrounds it. Instead this space is ungainly, unsightly and undefined, but the blame for this lost opportunity has to be spread around. Campus planners and on-campus developer UBC Properties Trust talked about this as the hub for the new neighbourhood, but did not stand by their convictions through design and development. Intercorp, the private sector developer of three sides of this would-be square did not load retail functions and townhouse doorways around it, which might have enlivened this public space's edges. For its own part, the United Church college insisted on retaining a dozen parking spaces located at what is, by rights, the centre of the square. Vehicles stationed there now have one of the best views in the city, but then Hondas and Chevrolets don't have eyes.
Early plans for the neighbourhood show a grand boulevard with a rivulet-fountain proceeding from Iona's tower to Chancellor Boulevard. In a somewhat questionable appeasement to residents on the other side of this key campus access road, the new duplex housing along this edge are not only the smallest in scale, but also detailed with gables and period detail to recall suburbia — the suburbs of Calgary, it seems. [ooh, burn! ;)]
Formerly, U.B.C. visitors were greeted by vast lawns and quaint colleges; now they get a strip of Cowtown. What is worse, ungainly mock-bungalows at either side of the entrance of this road up to Iona now effectively reduce campus visitor's views of the college to milliseconds as they pass by on the main boulevard. As there are many ways this density could have been achieved without blocking views to the old building, I am obliged to ask: what profiteth it a theological college to gain a housing development, if it looseth its own presence?
The architecture and housing layouts completed to date by Intercorp and Bastion developments are the equal to or better than other recent condos on campus, but this is faint praise, as U.B.C.'s new housing design standards elsewhere are surprisingly low.

Some of the best parts of the new development are the student residences that come in at double the condo area development of 1.2 times as much building as site area. Parking for these uses the Dutch idea of "Woon Erfs," with pavers removing distinctions between roadway, sidewalk and the stoops of flanking student lodgings.

This urban design idea and the residence architecture comes from Delft-trained architect Jan Timmer, commissioned directly by the university. Mr. Timmer saw the project through an early phase, but alas, the university did not retain him when designs and development plans got more specific — and in need of independent judgment — later on. Mr. Timmer is frank in admitting that the built result does not always rise to the hopes expressed in his own 2001 planning guidelines: "a dynamic interplay between economic, social, ecological and spiritual issues in the building of a sustainable community."

This is the most physically blessed and high profile of all the redeveloped corners of the U.B.C. campus. Too bad the neighbourhood's stewards at the UBC Properties Trust and university administration did not treat it that way.

I agree with much of that. Although I don't get his affection for "vast lawns." Some other sticky points for me:

This is a pretty serious exaggeration. I'd be surprised if 10% of the traffic into UBC came from that direction.

I know what he's saying, but we should keep things in perspective and remember that the buck ugly Gage Towers have been standing right there for 30+ years.

http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/campus/gage.html

http://angel.library.ubc.ca/cgi-bin/geti...0&DMTEXT=gage&REC=5&DMTHUMB=1&DMROTATE=0

http://angel.library.ubc.ca/cgi-bin/geti...0&DMTEXT=gage&REC=1&DMTHUMB=1&DMROTATE=0

http://www.maps.ubc.ca/PROD/images/photos/836_a.jpg

Also, to claim the Iona building is "no match" for a modern highrise is a pretty serious slight against it, in my opinion. It must be about as tall as a 10-story residential building, no?

http://angel.library.ubc.ca/cgi-bin/geti...TEXT=theology&REC=4&DMTHUMB=1&DMROTATE=0

I believe this part is talking about where I live... Marine Drive Residence, which has had one highrise tower and one lowrise (5 storey) building completed for about 2 years (this current school year being its second), with 2 more highrises under construction. I like the way it has this "Woon Erf" thing going on but the parking can be a bit ridiculous in that there are no marked spaces by my building yet everybody parks in various places and randomly gets ticketed. My sister had her car parked out front for 10 mins and came back to find a ticket while other people have parked their car for much longer and seemingly get no ticket. The stupid thing is that they don't have any signs up to tell you whether you're even allowed to park there or not or for how long etc. It's mostly used as a loading and pickup zone of sorts so ticketing generally isn't a problem but they should at least put some sort of signage up. Anywho, these are the best pictures I have of my residence. Unfortunately it looks like I haven't got any that show this "Woon Erf" concept. I guess I could take 5 mins and go take a pic of it right now but... maybe later.

http://i59.photobucket.com/albums/g296/raggedy13/100_6662.jpg

http://i59.photobucket.com/albums/g296/raggedy13/100_6666.jpg

My place is the one with the stunning ground floor view of the fire hydrant.
http://i59.photobucket.com/albums/g296/raggedy13/100_6788.jpg

Nice location you've got. Close to the MOA, Nitobe Gardens, the Chan Centre, and of course, Wreck Beach.