High Art: Marianne and Edward Gibson Art Museum, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC
PROJECT Marianne and Edward Gibson Art Museum, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC
ARCHITECTS Hariri Pontarini Architects (Design Architect) with Iredale Architecture (Architect of Record)
PHOTOS Ema Peter Photography
Completed this fall by Hariri Pontarini Architects with Iredale Architects, the Marianne and Edward Gibson Art Museum stands in a prime location on the edge of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C. Siamak Hariri describes the building as “a new gateway” to SFU, given its location at the eastern end of the mountaintop campus. But to this observer, it feels like something arguably more important: a cultural thoroughfare.
Interdisciplinary connectivity was Erickson/Massey Architects’ big concept for the university’s original 1963 master plan and academic quadrangle. The architecture would encourage professors and students of biochemistry to fraternize with their peers in sociology and so forth, and the cross-fertilization of ideas would enrich the entire intellectual ecosystem. That was the theory, anyway. In reality, the discourse between disciplines rarely achieved the levels envisioned by Arthur Erickson. But this museum may well be the architecture to accomplish that original goal.
Unlike most museums with a clear single entrance, the main circulation route connects entrances at either end of the building: this is museum-as-promenade. The design approach treats art as an offering rather than an exhortation. Especially on rainy days, students can enter the 1,125-square-metre museum to shelter for part of their walk, or just hang out in one of the two art-filled lounge areas.
“It’s not by accident that we have a long table here,” Hariri says of the first hang-out area, a triangular space near the front entrance. “The table brings people together.” And as they sit, they are surrounded by magnificent views: a panoply of trees and campus life on one side, and a powerful art installation on the other. (For now, that piece is artist Liz Magor’s 1997 work Blue Students/Alumnos en azul, an assemblage of haunting cyanotypes on paper.)
Hariri sees this passive contextual exposure as the most likely way to draw previously indifferent students into authentic, unforced cultural appreciation: “The kids will rub shoulders with the art, and then years after finishing their studies, they might say: ‘Hey, I really liked being around art, I miss being around art.’ They’ll remember how it enhanced their lives.”
The Erickson/Massey team’s vision held to a now largely outdated view that compelling people from different disciplines to literally cross paths would encourage them to strike up conversations and share ideas. The Gibson thoroughfare, by contrast, offers its diverse campus strollers the direct experience of art in a more organic, unforced, and substantial way. Even more so when the kinesiology student or physics professor stops to rest in a hang-out space and finds him- or herself surrounded by art.
Walking down the central spine of the Gibson is a bit like driving through an automatic carwash in terms of episodic drama: you’ll be blanketed by a sequence of discrete installations that transform even a commuter stroll into a sequence of visual experiences. During the opening exhibition, “Edge Effects,” your stroll starts with Magor’s cyanotypes; you then pass by Choctaw artist Jeffrey Gibson’s walnut bas-relief carving, Germaine Koh’s conceptual stoneware food cart, and perhaps end in the black-box room with a video installation by Jin-Me Yoon. Oh, and lots of other experiences in between, including a library and study space.
The original site was half its current size and, had it stayed that way, the architects would likely have been confined to a shoebox form. Supported by the curatorial staff, the design team convinced the university to enlarge the site, allowing the architecture to stretch out horizontally in discernible geometric volumes that weave through the trees on the site, with generously glazed walls that splay out to the landscape. (Yes, the building owes much of its openness and joyful brightness to all that glass—unusual and potentially problematic for an art gallery—but Hariri assures us that every window will soon have a blackout blind at the ready.)
Hariri conceived this project, as others, by imagining and sketching images that suggest trees and primordial geometric forms. In the final plan, the forms create discrete exhibition, research, and lounge spaces inside the building, and nature-framing nooks outside of it.
With little more than a bronze-sheathed entry pergola to define its front façade, the Gibson offers a counterpoint to the phantasmagoria of museum-as-pilgrimage-site that some museum boards have demanded since Frank Gehry’s 1997 one-off masterpiece in Bilbao Guggenheim. That approach doesn’t work for a museum embedded in a university, bereft as they are of tourists and big budgets. But the Gibson’s focus on enriching the visitor experience also distinguishes itself from the typical museums and galleries in university campuses, many of which are painfully banal, and frequented almost exclusively by a smattering of art students, scholars, and practitioners. The vibe inside those unmemorable white boxes is as dull as their architecture.
“Students have informed us that art museums on university campuses feel intimidating, even exclusionary,” says the Gibson’s director, Kimberly Phillips. “I felt we had to move through the project with intention: who are we building this for?”
The obvious answer is the SFU community—the faculty and students in art history and visual arts, but also in every other discipline. Notably, the wider public will now also become more of an end-user. Burnaby Mountain has been barnacled with condo developments in recent years, and now roughly half of the people living around the campus are not affiliated with SFU; the Gibson team aspires to welcome that demographic as well.
“Art museums are not known to be very porous places; they’re places that are sealed up,” notes Phillips. “But here at the edge of the campus, we can be the porous sponge between the public and the university.”
This first year will be an “experiment,” Phillips allows. Foot traffic and outreach will be hugely enhanced if plans for a street-to-mountaintop gondola come to fruition. And the museum will be more visible and welcoming if the SFU brass carry out plans to move the adjacent bus loop—it currently photo-bombs the subtle front entrance—and replace it with a landscaped performance space.
In the meantime, the museum is an architectural gem that is destined to attract purposeful and incidental visitors from day one. “It was important that we create a place that opens horizontally: to green, to light, to view, to delight,” says Phillips. “So you want to be here. You want to hang out here.”
Client Simon Fraser University | Architect Team Hariri Pontarini Architects—Siamak Hariri FRAIC, Doron Meinhard, Jaimie Howard, Ladan Nicknam, Lindsay Hochman, Ramin Movasagh, Nasim Marefat, Steve Kang. Iredale Architecture—James Emery MRAIC, Denis Gautier, Susanna Houwen, John Viera MRAIC, Hayley Robbins, Tong Zheng, Ilya Dorakhau | Structural/Envelope RJC | Mechanical/Electrical/LIGHTING Introba | Landscape Durante Kreuk | Interiors Hariri Pontarini Architects | Contractor Scott Construction Group | civil Stantec | Area 1,125m2 | Budget $26.3 M | Completion September 2025
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