Innovation September-October 2023

UBC's Gateway health education building, currently under construction, was moved from the original site to a larger space as the designers incorporated the landscape and open space recommendations from the Musqueam knowledge keeper. I llustration : C ourtesy of P erkins &W ill

DECOLONIZING INPUT STARTS WITH YOURSELF Building owners, said Caron, “have the largest potential for decolonization. But I put ‘owners’ in quotation marks. I do remind people that UBC was built on unceded territory. There was never an agreement from the Musqueam to give or sell land to UBC. UBC is grappling with what that means, just as the City of Vancouver is, just as corporations and private citizens are.” Engineers are grappling with it, too, “and what I’ve understood is that they want to be a part of this incorporation of Indigenous worldviews. But a consultant has limited leverage,” largely because it’s the developer who has the

that this is incompatible. You’re designing a health building that provides no space for ecological restoration. There’s no relationship here between human health and the health of the landscape around it.” The architects, from Vancouver’s Perkins&Will, listened and agreed. They couldn’t change the zoning or the square footage and wanted to keep the wood construction style. The only other choice was to move the building. Fortunately, UBC had an undeveloped site to the north they could expand into. “No buildings had to be knocked down,” said Caron. But the change still meant significant time spent in re-design and re-approval, as well as the loss to UBC of developable land that, though small in size, would still carry a mid-seven-figure price tag. To avoid at least some of this, “I thought the takeaway would have been that they should have involved knowledge keepers at a far earlier stage,” he said, “but the architect told me she wouldn’t have changed the way it unfolded because it actually made the learning experience more profound, and it strengthened the relationship with the Musqueam knowledge keepers going forward, who knew they were listened to.” The final design for the Gateway building won a Canadian Architect Award of Excellence in 2021. According to Canadian Architect (November 29, 2021), prominent among the reasons for that win was a site response that “began with a ‘re-wilding’—a recognition of the importance of landscape and open space to the Musqueam Host Nation and a desire to reconceptualize the site in its forest state."

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