The 6th Day|SFU Academic Quadrangle — Erickson's concrete grid as a research campus of the future

A film about industrialised human cloning needs a place where the science happens, and it found one already built on a mountain east of Vancouver. The 6th Day used Simon Fraser University's Academic Quadrangle and Convocation Mall as the Hopkins/Leung Conference and Research Centre — the institutional face of the story, all raw concrete, deep shadow and hard right angles.

Arthur Erickson and Geoffrey Massey won the competition to design the whole campus in 1963 and opened it in 1965, an entire university conceived as one continuous structure laid along the ridge of Burnaby Mountain. The Academic Quadrangle is the heart of it: a hollow square of two-storey classroom blocks lifted on columns, with a still reflecting pool and a lawn in the courtyard at the centre. Nothing is clad. The concrete is what you see, board-marked and weathering, and the covered walkways underneath run the full perimeter so that students cross the building without ever meeting the rain.

That combination — monumental, unornamented, faintly severe — is why location scouts have used SFU as a stand-in for the future for sixty years, in this film and in a long list of others. It reads as an institution with resources and no warmth, which is exactly what a cloning corporation's research arm is supposed to look like.

The campus is open and you can walk straight in. Take the bus up from Production Way station, come in through Convocation Mall, and then step under the Quadrangle's colonnade and stop. In the courtyard the pool is usually flat, the grass is usually damp, and on a clear day you can see across Burrard Inlet to the North Shore mountains through the gap between two concrete blocks. The building is cold and the view out of it is enormous. That contradiction is the whole design.

Location photo: Academic Quadrangle, Simon Fraser University (Wikimedia Commons).