The Age of Adaline | Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, UBC — the old library wearing a new building

The film needs a medical school, somewhere with the authority of a place that has been teaching people for a hundred years. It uses the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre on UBC's East Mall, and the choice is a better fit than the production probably intended.

What you see from the outside is two buildings at once. The Gothic Revival stone core is the 1925 Main Library, built in the collegiate style that UBC used to announce itself as a permanent institution: pointed windows, buttresses, carved stone that has weathered to grey-green. Between 2005 and 2008 the rest of the old library came down and a glass-and-concrete centre went up around and behind that surviving wing, so the 1925 façade now stands inside a modern atrium rather than facing the weather. You walk through the historic entrance and come out into daylight, six storeys of it.

That is a building doing what Adaline does. The old face is kept intact and the whole structure around it has been replaced more than once.

Go inside and stand in the atrium looking back at the stone. From there you can see rain hitting the glass roof above a wall that was built to be an exterior and now never gets wet. Students walk past it reading their phones. It is open to the public, and the reading rooms upstairs are as quiet as the film pretends they are.

Location photo via Wikimedia Commons.