Features
In Praise of Concrete
Guelph voices laud campus buildings in new book about concrete architecture in Ontario
BY ANDREW VOWLES
For a preteen Wilfred Ferwerda and the other kids growing up on campus in the late 1960s, U of G's building boom meant only one thing. All those earth mounds made for great dirt-bike riding, he laughs. But today's 48-year-old draws a straight line between his childhood as the son of a former University herdsman and a chapter he co-wrote for a new book about concrete architecture.
Ferwerda, an engineer and project manager with Physical Resources, and Ian Panabaker, heritage and urban design planner for the City of Guelph, contributed a chapter about U of G for Concrete Toronto: A Guidebook to Concrete Architecture From the Fifties to the Seventies. Published this past fall by Coach House Books and ERA Architects, the book focuses mostly on concrete icons that are part of Toronto's urban landscape, including buildings at the University of Toronto and York University. But separate chapters look at Guelph as well as Trent and McMaster universities. (In another personal connection, Panabaker is the son of former McMaster University chancellor John Panabaker.)
In their essay, Ferwerda and Panabaker discuss U of G's campus master plan and five major concrete buildings — the MacKinnon and MacNaughton buildings, the University Centre, the McLaughlin Library and South Residences — that went up between 1967 and 1974.
That construction boom marked U of G's maturation into a modern-day university campus, says Ferwerda. Beyond the campus borders, “it brought full-fledged late- modern architecture to Guelph.”
Panabaker agrees: “Except for some very fine residential projects, there is little of architectural value in the city from that period. On campus, the modern was carefully and consciously stitched into the historical, and it's the quality of the master plan that sets the University apart from a lot of the more controversial projects in the book.”
Acknowledging the knocks against concrete architecture generally — hulking, cold, dank, a “concrete jungle” — both Ferwerda and Panabaker laud the choice of material by the planners and architects.
“I think the beauty of concrete is that it allows architects and designers to express some neat ideas with a material that's fluid but then turns rock-solid,” says Ferwerda. “The period was marked by explorations of an abstract language that tried to express the nature of the material.”
Look at the béton brut texture of a wall in the University Centre courtyard, and you can see how the builders used boards for the framing, he says. “Materiality is brought right to the touch — it's not just abstract. That's an essential modern idea.”
Adds Panabaker: “It's showing the hand of the fabricator. You can read how they were built.”
Glancing upward in the courtyard, he points out how reinforced concrete enables the “gymnastics” of the atrium staircase. “It's jumping across three storeys. There's this incredible social gesture that is also substantial and self-assured.”
Panabaker belongs to DoCoMoMo, an international movement to document and conserve modern architecture.
In their essay, he and Ferwerda write: “The late 1960s portion of the University of Guelph represents a compelling international effort at creating a modern campus plan that highlights the sophistication and maturation of the new concrete architecture. The campus created in the late 1960s and early 1970s represents a refined Brutalism — a conscious effort toward both urbanism and monumentality.
“On the campus scale, these buildings are successfully people-centred, creating identifiable pedestrian-oriented public space. With various levels of success, the emphasis on creating an identifiable urban realm continues into the public routes in the buildings themselves.”
Ferwerda has worked on heritage restoration and conservation of parts of Macdonald Institute and the Ontario Veterinary College. A member of the International Council on Monuments and Sites, he has been with Physical Resources for five years but traces his campus roots back to childhood.