ABSTRACT
There is a Harvard convention that each department should have a unique identity and stand in its own building. Higher education at the University of British Columbia followed no such convention, though the buildings that stand now each tell their own disciplinary, political and educational stories. The triumph of modernism and modernist architecture in the post-war years, of which the War Memorial Gymnasium was an outstanding example, came to a symbolic end in North America, some say, when the Pruit-Igoe urban housing development in St Louis was dynamited in 1972 because it had become an uninhabitable environment for the low-income people it housed.2 It was an expensive lesson for standardized, modernist urban housing schemes, some of which had proved to be disorienting, inhospitable and socially destructive – seriously damaging the urban fabric. Critics claimed that these building schemes epitomized the ability of modernist architecture to depress the spirits of those who inhabited them.
