Skip to main content

More than any other building type, schools define their communities. When schools close, as will happen increasingly with our aging society, it hurts all, regardless of age or stage on the family cycle. When a fine school opens to the public, it is a joyous occasion, like the arrival of a new child.

Vancouver's Jewish community celebrates its concrete-and-brick toddler, King David High School, most recently because the 2005 building has been awarded a Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia Architecture Award from the Architectural Institute of British Columbia.

AIBC's press release announcing the win by Vancouver's Acton Ostry Architects includes some heartfelt, if anonymous, comments from the jury that selected it for the Special Jury Award: "I like [its]simplicity and modesty," says one; "It's a clever use of simple gestures. This is a refined building," says another.

The "simple gestures" praised by the jury include the Lower Mainland's most finely detailed and light-filled school auditorium.

This room doubles as a Jewish community fundraising-event dining hall, and as a temple for worship when the artfully-detailed and -situated Lacewood doors of the mid-room Ark are opened to reveal the Torah stored within.

Design partner Russell Acton summarizes the "simplicity and modesty" in the school's design this way:

"Spare and durable architectural finishes were selected to convey mass and permanence: poured-in-place concrete, integrally coloured concrete block, Jerusalem stone, heavy glulam columns and beams, cedar siding, coloured glass panels, birch plywood, timber benches and anodized aluminum window frames."

It is not only this palette of materials but also the logical sequence of spaces and tight floor plans that makes King David the best school built in the province in several years.

The block-long private school flanks West 41st Avenue between Oakridge Centre and an architecturally undistinguished cluster of Jewish facilities (community, cultural, recreation and seniors' housing) near Oak Street.

The public gesture of a small plaza for students and area residents at King David's west-facing entrance leads to a vestibule, where visitors wait within two sets of locked glazed doorways while obtaining security clearance from the adjacent control desk.

Millwork for the desk is handsome, as are other wooden embellishments that warm an otherwise nearly all-concrete school building.

A two-metre-square patch of golden Jerusalem stone occupies a prominent place in the school's floor between the control desk and multipurpose auditorium space. (Acton Ostry makes similar strategic use of Jerusalem stone in its Congregation Har El synagogue design of 10 years ago, on the North Shore's Taylor Way.)

The high school's design makes the perfect foil, friend and frame to an adjacent miniature masterpiece of narrative-driven landscape architecture by Vancouver's Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, who has received global praise for her work with Arthur Erickson (Robson Square park design, for example) and Moshe Safdie (the Group of Seven-inspired Taiga Garden at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, which employs stones and native plants to echo the Canadian north).

Like Mr. Erickson, Ms. Oberlander is into her eighties and still actively designing and, like him, always fighting the good fight. (Currently, a campaign against a new fence and incompatible adjacent plantings imposed by Metro Vancouver officials around their previous design collaboration at UBC's Museum of Anthropology. The fence's three lapped rows of rough-hewn logs, reminiscent of Alberta dude ranches is, in the two designers' view, "an eyesore." Ms. Oberlander says, "They have made things worse by planting trees that will block all the distant views fundamental to Arthur's architecture." She and Mr. Erickson are absolutely right: the disfiguring plantings and cowboy fence should go.)

For King David High School, she was given an unlikely site for a "biblical garden" - along a back lane, with new townhouses from Mosaic Developments backing onto it.

But the spiritual is always immanent in the ordinary, and Ms. Oberlander has conceived a design that illustrates key plants and trees mentioned in the Torah. Linking to Genesis 30:37 ("And Jacob took with him rods of fresh poplar...") she planted poplars. The Song of Solomon inspired pomegranate and fig trees ("your cheeks are like halves of a pomegranate behind your veil"), and so on, through seven other Biblical references.

This lane-side garden, open to the public 24 hours a day, should become a pilgrimage point for Vancouver-area children and adults of all faiths.

All who wish to better understand Judaism through a world-renowned landscape artist's poetic interpretation are invited to view the garden, framed by fine architecture.

King David's $7-million budget compares with similarly sized Vancouver Public School system high schools, but its architectural ambitions and accomplishments are significantly higher than the norm for most places we park our adolescents.

Acton Ostry's winning design is deceptive because it is not about architectural flash, modishness, sculpture, or environmental earnestness (unlike many of the other winners of the Lieutenant-Governor awards). King David High School is a good, solid, community-minded building.

Interact with The Globe