A response to Matthew Mohtadi
The Jackman building, much like the law, warrants a careful and nuanced reading.
In 1478, members of the Pazzi family staged a coup d’état against the powerful Medici family. During High Mass at Florence Cathedral, as the bishop raised the Host into the air, two assassins lunged toward Giuliano de’ Medici, stabbing him nineteen times. He died, but his brother, Lorenzo, escaped. In the aftermath, the Medici hunted down eighty suspected conspirators throughout Italy and executed them all. However, as one author writes, it was more than mere retribution for the attempted assassinations; it was also punishment for their failure.
My motivation for writing this article is similar. In the October issue of UV, Matthew Mohtadi (1L) penned a half-sardonic, half-satirical critique of the Jackman Law Building. His polemic’s irrationality struck me more than its irreverence. The Jackman building deserved better than Mohtadi’s clumsy indignities. With this article, I hope to set things straight.
I disagree not only with Mohtadi’s conclusion—that the building “sucks”—but also with the analysis that led him to that conclusion. Although I understand Mohtadi’s frustration with the Jackman building’s restrained aesthetics, I believe that a more sympathetic and purposive evaluation of the building reveals its merits and that those merits outweigh its flaws. Ultimately, I do not position myself an apologist for an imperfect building; I simply take a more generous view of our home away from home.
Before turning to my own assessment, it is useful to briefly review Mohtadi’s article, wherein, he rails against the Jackman building’s “blandness” and “monotony.” Mohtadi declaims the “rectangular columns” which adorn the outside of the building, finding them “boring and unimaginative.” Mohtadi also finds the interior simultaneously too white and too grey. In his opinion, it is simultaneously dreary and stress-inducing. The lack of art also contributes to the building’s dullness. Mohtadi takes to the atrium’s fireplace for reasons other than its drabness. Nevertheless, his dismissal of the fireplace fits in with the rest of his criticisms in that it turns wholly on a question of aesthetics.
A close reading of Mohtadi’s article reveals that its title is too bold for its scope. When he says that the Jackman building sucks, what he really means is that it is ugly. Mohtadi’s disenchantment is understandable. Despite the fact that the building engages all of our faculties, for those of us who can see, vision can dominate our experience of space. Hence, we are willing to cut more slack to a building that appears beautiful, in spite of its other shortcomings. Take, for example, Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe’s Seagram building in New York. It is one of the most iconic, admired, and imitated buildings, even though it is also one of the least energy efficient. Wanting to behold beauty is legitimate and fundamentally human.
However, Quintilian, the Roman rhetorician, once mused that beauty is usefulness. Certainly, it is reasonable to expect buildings to do more than look good. Rather than measuring a building’s worth against arbitrary criteria, informed only by immediate, visceral responses to design choices that one does not understand, one should recalibrate one’s aesthetics to reflect the nature of a building. After all, one would not call a lemon a “bad orange,” simply because it failed to be sweet.
The Jackman building is a work of architecture. Writing about Le Corbusier’s revolutionary “Maison Dom-ino,” Peter Eisenman, the famed deconstructivist architect, observed that “architecture is both substance and act.” In other words, architecture is more than mere geometric planes or structure. Architecture occurs when “use conditions” imbue those things with meaning. For example, a staircase is only a series of recessions and elevations into space until someone walks on it. The act of walking up or down, to reach another level, gives the formal substance of the staircase meaning. That act defines and justifies the substance of the staircase form. Thus, architects like Le Corbusier and Eisenman would, at least, agree that the most sensible criteria by which architecture could be judged is functionality. In plain English, functionality describes how well a thing does what it was intended to do.
Mohtadi’s article is meant to be satirical, but satire demands a studied appreciation of its subject. Without that, it succumbs to its own ridicule.
As I implied above, Mohtadi’s article adduces no evidence that the Jackman building fails to satisfy the only legitimate purpose that one could ascribe to it as a building. Mohtadi makes no substantive criticism of the building at all. Indeed, it is ironic that, in his diatribe, he references two of the building’s greatest functional successes: the carpets and the sun shades. Mohtadi may have hoped for livelier floor covering, but he cannot deny the dampening quality of the library’s carpeted floors, which allow students to come and go in relative silence.
It is also clear that he gave little thought to the practical implications of the sort of uninterrupted glass expanse about which he fantasizes. Apart from the structural considerations of bending forces and buckling, such a huge amount of glass would be very inefficient to heat in the winter, and it would cause a greenhouse effect in the summer. Those consequences would undermine the LEED Gold rating that the school sought during the design phase (the building actually has a LEED Silver rating).
Moreover, in all seasons, the glare from the sun would make reading in Torys most unpleasant. In addition to all of those problems, the sort of fenestration Mohtadi describes would be detrimental to the local bird population. As the ratio of glass to solid wall increases, so does the risk of bird collisions. It is estimated that 25 million birds die each year from window collisions in Canada (Machtans, Wedeles and Bayne, 2013). Many of those occur in Toronto, which is not only heavily developed, but lies within a major migration route.
Indeed, Mohtadi’s glass walls could be in contravention of section 14 of the Environmental Protection Act, which prohibits windows that reflect light as a contaminant―partly as a means of protecting birds, who could be injured by the glare. Mohtadi’s glass walls would also risk violating section 32 of the Species at Risk Act, if an endangered bird were to die from colliding with the glass. The 183 “square columns” are not merely ornamentation—they mitigate the above problems. The lines on the glass are also part of that scheme. The fact that their function eluded Mohtadi may be evidence of their effectiveness.
Yet, there were many legitimate criticisms that Mohtadi could have made. The Jackman building is fraught with design choices that compromise its functionality. The uneven heating is probably the most noticeable problem. While some spaces are comfortable, rooms like the Moot Court Room and the Torys Reading Room are frigid year-round. Torys is also plagued by the irritating whine of its HVAC system. There is also the extreme weight of the doors. Although the school should be commended for making its spaces accessible with automatic doors, the opening mechanisms make it challenging and slow to open a door manually. And then there is the infernal fire door which connects the atrium to Flavelle. Not only is that door too heavy, but it is absurdly narrow for such a high-traffic portal. The reason for its existence is unclear.
Mohtadi could also have noted the obvious design flaw that study room P336, in the library, is not soundproofed. Or, he could have commented on the bathrooms’ numerous shortcomings. I can only speak to my time in the too-small men’s rooms, which have too few urinals to accommodate the number of visitors at peak times. The sinks, particularly on the basement level, are too narrow, which leads to huge puddles around them.
Furthermore, having only one hand-dryer for every three facilities also fails to accommodate the number of visitors at peak times. Having hand-dryers at all is questionable, given their tendency to whip up an unfortunate potpourri of fecal spores. Finally, while I, unlike Mohtadi, generally appreciate the patina of a well-used concrete floor, the use of concrete in the washrooms is ill-conceived, given its porosity and its reactivity to acids.
Despite the above criticisms, I find the Jackman building serves its intended function well. The classrooms have enough seating to comfortably accommodate the students they host. The rooms’ acoustics are decent. They have good lighting and sufficient conveniently located outlets. I also appreciate the atrium’s lightness and openness. As someone who finds himself tethered to his reading for most of the day, looking down, I appreciate the opportunity to cast my gaze upwards and absorb some sunlight. The interior’s light, neutral palette is calming and uplifting. It helps to create a space in which I feel comfortable stopping to chat with my friends—an aspect of law school life which, I believe, may be as important as our academics.
According to Canadian Architect, the Jackman Law building was conceived as a means of unifying a formerly fragmented faculty so as to better foster a sense of community. It may be true that some classes are still taught in Falconer Hall, but Jackman remains the focal point of life at the law school.
Before I conclude, it is worth saying a word on the Jackman building’s aesthetics. Mohtadi is at pains to denounce the building’s formal qualities, but his insults betray his impatience. The Jackman building, much like the law, warrants a careful and nuanced reading. For one thing, the building’s design is not haphazard. As Canadian Architect observed, the main pavilion’s curvature and fenestration echo the Finance Building on the southeastern corner of Queen’s Park. While Jackman is a unique expression, it remains contextually sensitive. It is a mercifully humble addition to an architectural landscape that, I believe, could suffer at the hands of ego and brand-driven design.
Indeed, the law building is not unlike the best expressions of the common law, the study of which it fosters: it is an incremental change to its site’s character, respecting established principles while responding to novel circumstances. Again, the sun shades play a central role in that achievement. As one of the Jackman building’s distinctive features, it is unfortunate that Mohtadi afforded them so little consideration.
Even in material terms, the building’s exterior displays a sensible use of local materials. Canadian Architect put it well:
the crescent-shaped pavilion introduces an elemental palette of oversized glass panes punctuated by vertical nickel fins which sit upon a stone base of dry-laid Wiarton limestone—a material whose softly figured, dove-grey patina works beautifully with the gold-tinted silver hues of the nickel. The glass panels of the reskinned library pavilion sandwich a layer of brass mesh, giving it its own warm expression.
For Mohtadi, the Jackman building’s exterior begins and ends at its failure to match the formal potency of Flavelle’s pastiche portico.
Mohtadi’s article is meant to be satirical, but satire demands a studied appreciation of its subject. Without that, it succumbs to its own ridicule. While purporting to show the poverty of the building’s design, Mohtadi forgoes any substantive and informed criticism. Instead, he runs through an arbitrary assessment of aesthetics. I agree that the Jackman building is not perfect. Nevertheless, on the balance, I find that it serves its purpose well.
