UBC Fire Hall Artists' Studios
Not a rosy picture - guest commentary
In my story on relocating UBC’s old fire hall, I quoted John Metras as saying:
"The art studios that were in the Old Fire Hall have been temporarily relocated to swing space in the Wesbrook Building. We are working with the Faculty of Arts on a separate project to develop a permanent home for these studios.”
Shortly after publication one of the faculty who had their studio in the old fire hall wrote me with the following response.
As Gareth James notes below we demonstrate our priorities and values through the actions we take. Taking the old fire hall studios away and replacing them with a decommissioned basement science lab leaves the artists questioning UBC’s values.
I asked UBC Facilities for their response:
“We understand that this relocation has been difficult for the AHVA faculty. Wesbrook was the only space currently available to accommodate them. Our team has tried hard to renovate the space to a good quality standard to meet their needs recognizing the age and limitations of the building. We will work with AHVA to address specific concerns. This is meant as an interim space as we work with the Faculty of Arts on planning for a permanent location” (UBC Facilities, December 20, 2024).
Gareth’s full comment follows.
A Comment on Accommodating Artists, by Gareth James
Unfortunately, [Metras’ quote is] incorrect, and reflects the difficulty that the Visual Art faculty who were displaced in this move have had in having the impact on their research understood and accommodated.
All three displaced faculty were offered what were quite frankly awful spaces in the basement of Wesbrook. Half of them had been forced closed because a flood had caused a mold problem. Some of them still stank from the remains of their use as a lab conducting some sort of biological research into sea life. One faculty member’s work was damaged during the flooding accident.
The spaces offered are seriously deficient as even temporary replacement facilities. Only one of the displaced faculty are using those spaces.
As the occupant of the sculpture studio on the ground floor of the Old Fire Hall, I have not been provided with a functional replacement sculpture studio. I was offered a narrow ribbon of low-ceilinged ex-lab spaces in Wesbrook’s basement, accessible only via a long winding internal corridor and normal office doors, completely unworkable as a sculpture studio. Perhaps the quickest way I can explain why this is unworkable is by asking you to imagine eliminating all the modern and contemporary sculpture of any art collection that can't fit through an office door (let’s say at least 70% to be conservative).
Since July, as a direct result of the Sauder Expansion, the Department of Art History Visual Art and Theory has therefore inarguably had its research facilities significantly diminished. The Old Fire Hall Sculpture Studio had been in our department for forty of the 98 years of the Old Fire Hall’s existence, so its second life as art studios was almost as long as its original existence as a Fire Hall.
Losing this facility has had a devastating effect on my own research (imagine Forestry Sciences losing its woodshop for example), and leaves me and my colleagues without adequate replacement space for the immediate and foreseeable future. Given that the Sauder project has been in development for about a decade it is extraordinary that there were no concrete plans in place for long term replacement for displaced facilities, let alone temporary ones.
When Planning informed us that no like-for-like space was found to be available on campus (the rule of thumb that has governed all building projects on campus), I and the other affected faculty members accepted the reality of this fact, and proposed that a temporary off-campus space be rented and its modest cost factored into the Sauder Expansion project. This proposal (which would hardly cause a ripple in the $120 million budget of the new building) was put forward as a positive problem-solving compromise and supported by the Head of our department, but it was rejected higher up the foodchain with no further discussion or exploration.
Sadly I think that this demonstrates as clearly as can be done, how the research and teaching of the Sauder School of Business is more greatly valued than research in the visual arts. It is a painful irony that the new building’s “Creative Destruction Lab” will now occupy the footprint of the Old Fire Hall’s original location, especially since the design had originally allowed the Old Fire Hall to remain in place, before the floorplan was swivelled 180 degrees in order to necessitate the removal of the Old Fire Hall.
Outside of the University, artists have long contended with the forces of gentrification that make their workspaces unaffordable. It’s depressing however, to see this same force embraced here at UBC. “Creative destruction” has a specific historical meaning in the field of economics. The Austrian economist Joseph Shumpeter popularized the term to describe how capitalism destroys existing social and economic forms in order to make the capital embedded in them freshly available for new forms of profit. The political geographer, David Harvey has revisited this idea via the concept of Accumulation by Dispossession, influenced by the work of Rosa Luxembourg, and in that context it becomes evident how this logic is also foundational to colonialism as well as the exploitation of the unequal distribution of wealth endogenous to the modern capitalist nation state.
Brutal. I’m familiar with those spaces in Wesbrook.