Absence of stewardship leads to destruction of architectural masterpiece that was Trent. In addition to serious financial problems, the new buildings at Trent university have destroyed a unique architectural environment. Another "legacy" of the current administration? See also;

• Legal battle shapes up at university - $9.2M in contractor's liens
• Many agree with Ms. Rochon's assessment of Gzowski College eyesore
• Living in Gzowski College may be hazardous to your health.
• Controversy, budget over-runs & legal battles: Give Pres a raise!

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The mugging of Thom's Trent
Some new design at the Peterborough, Ont., university is worthy to co-exist with architect Ron Thom's masterpiece. But, tragically, not all of it, writes LISA ROCHON
Globe and Mail - Wednesday, December 1, 2004 - Page R3

PETERBOROUGH, ONT. -- Emotions provoked by the sacking of Trent University in Peterborough, Ont: disbelief, confusion and anger.

It's impossible to tell the story of modern architecture in Canada without Trent. Designed by Ron Thom, the self-effacing, legendary architect from Vancouver, Trent injected difference into the hard dogma of modernism. Thom insisted on using local stone to feature in his concrete; he studied the shifting water levels so as to set a university residence and public terraces within inches of the river. And he orchestrated movement through the campus like a rigorous dance for youth. For the last 40 years, Trent has reigned as the place where the soul of the Canadian Shield was revealed through architecture.

Though there is architecture of stunning complexity still being produced at Trent (more on this later), the unthinkable has happened. A travesty of design, sprayed in yellow stucco, has been set amid the rugged splendour of Thom's concrete and stone buildings. Peter Gzowski College, a 250-room residence, and the First Peoples Learning Centre share space in the loathsome building. The hulking form snags the eye, hijacking it from the views over the bucolic Otonabee River, so it must come to rest on the yellow misfit.

All style and no content is what you get with the college and learning centre. Desperate to be hip, the L-shaped building attempts a graphic pattern of windows, some small, some large, some horizontal, some vertical that are cut into the stucco wall panels. Dunlop Architects designed the project with Two Row Architect in association with Erik Wilke Architect.

These are Ontario firms, with Two Row based in Ohsweken on the Six Nations Reserve. But the idea of the graphics belongs to something that the hard-edged firm Morphosis might have cooked up in urbane L.A. Compared with the timeless forms of the late Thom, the new building is already over -- yesterday.

One of the potential problems with copying style hipsters is a lack of consistency. The yellow residence building wants to look super chic even though it has value engineering and prefabrication written all over it.

That's not all: On the ground-floor hallway, it wants to become a garish nightclub featuring wanton red lights that dangle from the badly detailed ceiling. Outside, it wants to be something that powerfully erupts from the Earth, as in the gathering space that sits as a separate volume in the courtyard. Consistency is lacking all round.

Unbelievably, there's more damage. In front of the regrettable yellow residence, there's a massive box clad in galvanized aluminum. This is a windowless lecture hall. It's located a stone's throw from the river but it carries all the placeless charm of a grocer's bulk-food barn.

Thom designed the master plan and the original buildings at Trent University during the 1960s. The founders of Trent were a bright, visionary group with youth on their side. Tom Symons was a 30-year-old professor of modern history at the University of Toronto when he was appointed president of Trent. The dream for Trent was to create a collegiate university with a humanized pedagogy that could be delivered to students around the fireplace in seminar rooms.

For his riverside campus, Thom designed a series of sublime medieval castles to gently lord over the drumlins. Much of the inspiration for the exposed aggregate surface of the walls -- a first for Canada -- and the massing at Trent comes from the rugged Morse and Stiles colleges at Yale University that the famous Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen had just designed. But Thom's design for the Trent site has a scale and complexity that goes well beyond what was accomplished at the flat urban site at Yale. Located almost five kilometres north of Peterborough at the edge of the Kawarthas, Trent is a moment of civilization in the wilderness. The Faryon Bridge, designed by Paul Merrick of Thom's office with engineer Morden Yolles, was tied directly into the rock of the Precambrian Shield.

What is remarkable, and an important bonus, is that directly north of the big yellow poseur is the exceptional, recently opened Academic Science Centre designed by Teeple Architects in joint venture with Shore, Tilbe, Irwin & Partners. Lead design architect Stephen Teeple uses the hill that descends steeply toward the Otonabee River to define his approach to the research and teaching centre.

Unlike the concrete aggregate used throughout the campus by Thom, Teeple has opted to slide shards of silver into the hillside.

Chemistry labs require fume hoods to vent toxins away from scientists.

Teeple has turned an onerous programmatic requirement into four delightful above-ground sheds that are clad in crisply detailed galvanized aluminum panelling. One of the sheds features a skin of perforated metal cladding that lights up for a dramatic kick at night.

Teeple has a deep understanding of the design strategies of Thom, so he picks up on ideas about courtyards framed by buildings and some of the exquisite moves the late Vancouver architect made with his strangely angled entrance canopies rendered in concrete. For the science centre, metal rooflines are extended past a double-height atrium to become a folded plane or bird's wing; siding is used to frame sharply angled windows. Chemistry and water-quality labs often look as though they occupy two floors of inhabited space. In fact, the labs only occupy one floor of space at grade with long, dramatic clerestory windows popping up one-storey above the drumlin-like periscopes on a submarine. Sited so close to the Otonabee, the glass-and-metal science buildings present as ghost submarines that have run aground.

With brilliant self-assurance, Teeple has delivered lightness and complex architectural sections that run through and rise up above the land. When the grasses grow tall on the green roof of one of the labs, students will travel through a passage with nature on one side and technology on the other. This is architecture worthy of sharing the campus with Thom.

It's bizarre to consider how the Academic Science Centre could be completed at about the same time as the Peter Gzowski College. Part of the explanation is that the beauty and integrity of architecture is no longer considered, as it once was at Trent, as a facet of an important intellectual experience. The role of master architect -- a position Thom held long after his buildings had been constructed -- has disappeared. So has a powerful committee of architects and former academic staff that, during the 1990s, managed the careful maintenance and restoration of Thom's original buildings. The lack of stewardship means that carefully aligned views to the river from Teeple's science-centre courtyard have been blocked by the hulking mass of the windowless lecture hall next door. It's a case of having a nightmare next door, writ large.

If only what has happened at Trent could be written as a you-win-some, you-lose-some kind of critique. That would require a suburban reading of architecture where buildings are loaded onto former cornfields as stand-alone objects -- and it simply cannot apply to Trent. In Canada, it's forbidden to burn books or slash a knife through a great canvas. It only follows that what's required here as well is a zero-tolerance policy for the destruction of masterful architecture. It's tragic to say, but Thom's masterpiece at Trent is now gone.