Mountainside Housing: A Modular Counterpoint to Erickson's Mountaintop Campus

This thesis proposes a mountainside housing ensemble as counterpoint to the Erickson-designed monumental Simon Fraser University campus atop Burnaby Mountain. Simon Fraser's resolutely horizontal Brutalist architecture comprises a constructed landscape and an architecture of finality. Might the flanks of Burnaby Mountain welcome an architecture of un-finality, adjustability, and change, as balancing counterpoint to the formal campus? Availing itself of an armature and modular building system, Mountainside Housing imagines a student village that will evolve over time. Premised on the idea of a Gondola station to connect Burnaby Mountain with the Vancouver Lower Mainland, the settlement will provide flexible and affordable student housing. Inspired by the treehouse dwellings students have built in the woods on Burnaby Mountain and by Erickson and Jeffrey Lindsay's tensegrity structure at Convocation Mall, the architecture reconciles finality and ephemerality while constructing the space generated by the slope's falling ground plane, between ground and sky.