Our attention will have shifted from the differences of the mechanistic paradigm of contemporary thought to relationships, the universality that will dominate our new point of view. Basically, design is all about relationships. Relationship is the essence of design. “Do connect” was the simple admonition with which E.M. Forster prefaced one of his books. Connections other than mechanical connections are what mechanistic thought dispelled: The profound, unspoken linkages of meaning. Language has always been a hindrance to communication, for it says the obvious and can only imply the truth by words. Implication is the province of art rather than science, an aspect of architecture that needs nurturing. Yet today the arts are relegated to reason rather than insight.

My work has always had one major source, the land. The land is the compliment and setting for the building and vice versa. The play between object and context is to me the main source of meaning in a composition. My other crusade was to challenge those institutions which were long out of date. Thus I return to my earliest projects to explain this. Having studied the Oxbridge educational examples and the earliest precedent of the university, the 8th Century Al Azhar Mosque in Cairo, preserving the knowledge of classical Greece, I was thus urged to follow the earlier educational philosophy in my first major building complex, Simon Fraser University.  My premise was that the existing North American University in its "campus" conception defied the very principles of university, by fragmenting the institution into its departmental disciplines.  It isolated areas of knowledge rather than relating them.  This was 1963 and to this date, in deference to the concept of interrelatedness, no department at SFU is allowed to have its own distinct building.  

At the central, glass-covered mall is the library, theatre and student centre. The sciences requiring heavy servicing are brought together on one side of a large interdisciplinary quadrangle and the humanities on the other.  Spaces were all are connected by a raised pedestrian bridge, with a glass cover to link each part of the campus to the two summits of the mountainside and containing all the services.  The mountain site determined the principle of terracing as a formal motif.  Antiquity crept in: the ruins of Pergamus, the quads of Oxbridge, the mountain site of the Aztec Monte Alban, the rice terraces of Bali in the overall terracing of buildings and land.  The complex was built into the site rather than on top of it.

This unified concept was further developed in the University of Lethbridge in the Alberta Prairie. A farsighted faculty saw the benefit of reducing even the distinction between the sciences and humanities, as well as the distinction between academic offices and student residences.  The extremes of climate required a compact building.  As at Al Azhar, closed classrooms were reduced for an interconnected seminar space that would act as a student lounge on off hours, to meet a limited budget for lounge space.  If one cut a slice through the building from the top down, you would find laboratories, offices, lecture theatres, seminar spaces, student lounge, offices and student residences; all interconnected and interchangeable.  The complex spanned the dramatic landscape with an absolutely horizontal line of roof in contrast to the contours of the eroded river valley.  The roof of the heating and air conditioning plant became the plaza and outdoor theater.  the boiler stacks became the gateway to a path that led to the river far below. 
 

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