Central focus: now near completion, this mixed-use building boldly combines three very disparate elements, shopping mall, university and office tower, to try to create an urban and social centre in the middle of sprawling suburbs.

One of the strangest contemporary conjunctions of urban uses today is to be found in the City of Surrey, where Bing Thom has designed an office tower on top of a university, which itself is set over an existing shopping mall. Surrey is the second largest city in British Columbia, some 40 minutes' drive from Vancouver and, though it received its city charter in 1993, it remains part of the Greater Vancouver Regional District. Its population of over a third of a million is growing faster than almost any other city in Canada and houses a quarter of the thriving region's workforce--yet it provides only four per cent of its jobs.

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Unless you are very well-informed, you wouldn't know any of this as you drive south from Vancouver towards the nearby US border. Surrey is seamlessly knitted to the bigger city's suburbs, and you have to keep your eyes open to realize you are in another municipality. It is truly one of those north American destinations where, on arrival you find, as Gertrude Stein remarked (of her home-town, Oakland), that 'there's no there there'. The mixed-use Central City development is intended, as Thom asserts, to 'kick-start the city centre'.

He decided to build on what was already in place: a 650 000sq ft (60 400[m.sup.2]) regional shopping mall (though failing), a recreation centre, excellent car access and a convenient location between the last two stations on the Skytrain line, greater Vancouver's rapid transit system (AR April 2003). A million square feet (93 000[m.sup.2]) of new uses, including the university and the tower, have been added to existing functions. Thom hopes the different uses will reinforce each other, for instance, that the university will use the existing recreation centre and the mall's cafes, restaurants and bars, so avoiding the need for separate facilities for such functions. He expects shoppers will use student parking at Christmas-time, when the mall is at its busiest, and, perhaps, that the businesses in the tower will draw on university resources for research, training and recruitment.

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The new development is hoped to be the first phase of the new city centre. It has four major formal elements: the tower, a podium, an atrium, and what Thom calls a 'galleria'. The complex curves around a new pedestrian piazza which forms the focus of the whole. In future, the piazza (the only proper outdoor pedestrian space in Surrey) is to grow as further phases of the complex are completed, but it is already possible to extend it at festival and ceremonial times by temporarily closing the road.

A long glass and timber wall inclined, like those of airport control towers, to reduce reflections, separates piazza from atrium, so depending on your angle of observation and that of the sun, external and internal spaces flow together visually. The atrium's entrance hall is accessed through porches that penetrate the transparent wall; each is lit in a different colour at night to emphasize the variety of uses within, but anyone can use any porch. One of the key aims of the design is to ensure that all users should use the atrium to try to achieve social interaction and notions of community.

The atrium itself is a grand, multi-level space covered by a space-frame roof that is stiffened by a dramatic king post truss made of turned fir logs held together with steel tension rods and connectors. In the space frame, struts are made of peeler cores--the thin cylinders of heartwood remaining on the lathes after their long blades peel off plywood veneers from logs. Peeler cores usually have little value, but here they are connected by specially made ductile iron nodes to make a dramatic element of the volume. Round the edges of the atrium, tree-like columns with timber branches spreading from concrete trunks provide edge support for the space frame. Wood also forms the structure of the inclined glass wall, in which the panes are hung from the roof by steel cables, with horizontal wind loads being carried by short struts back to the round composite timber columns, which are tapered at each end to express bending stresses and reduce their visual impact (a very large lathe had to be specially built to make them). Extensive use of timber has two purposes: both to make the big space more touchable and approachable, and to celebrate the ethos of a technological university that should have a formative effect on British Columbia's main industry.

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The other big public space opens to the left of the atrium. Toplit, the galleria is fundamentally part of the mall with its roof taken off and built up with layers of university to form a much more noble space than the drearily functional and rather dark volume there before. One of the problems of creating this part of the complex was that the shopping centre had to remain open throughout the building operations. To allow for that, and to provide enough support for the new upper floors, the new work is almost entirely carried on seven massive cruciform columns. Light pours down into the central street-like space from a roof made of glass, laminated timber compression members, and steel cable ties with ductile iron connections. From below, the whole thing looks a bit like a fish skeleton, a form not unknown in contemporary western Canadian architecture. Ideally, the whole tall volume will act together, with the lives of the students on their open galleries and those of the shoppers below reinforcing and animating each other.

The university takes up three floors, connecting tower, podium and galleria. They are given identity with a metal cladding system into which windows are punched through a mixture of panels of titanium zinc, chemically treated stainless steel and raw titanium-a mixture that is used on some of the public parts of the interior, there combined with wood, white panels and glass. As the sun moves round the building, the mixture changes; in direct sunlight, titanium panels seem to be darker than zinc ones; the reverse is true when a face is in shadow. In counterpoint, stainless-steel panels incorporate permanent changes in colour from red to green to blue and black, depending on the length of time each piece of metal spent in the pickling bath.

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On top of everything else is the office tower, with an elongated curved plan, conventional apart from the fact that the services and vertical circulation core is offset to allow daylight into the lift lobbies and lavatories. Cladding is apparently pretty straightforward curtain walling over a gridded window pattern. In fact, the wall is a little more subtle, with fritted spandrel panels in front of aluminium-foil-covered insulation. When the sun shines, the spandrels become radiant, and in the shade, they are more or less opaque white so the tower, like the podium, changes with time and weather.

The wrapped effect is emphasized by twisting the glass wall at the north end of the plan to form what the architects call 'a warped prow' that reaches out over the street. Thom's intention in making the tower convex is, in a sense, to make it a counterpart of the concave curve of the piazza below. But the tower's shape is, of course, also intended to make it a landmark in the relentless low-level, low-density cityscape.

For me, the prow's twist is a gesture too far, though from certain angles, it does indeed draw attention to the place. Yet, though it is easy to have reservations about individual details, Central City deserves respect. It is undoubtedly a daring attempt to generate a real sense of urbanity and human focus in the spiritual desert of the amorphous North American suburb. And, unlike many attempts to create civic sense, it has been achieved largely by working within the constraints of commercial development. All architects must hope that it succeeds, for if it does, it will show that our profession has far more to offer than the role of exterior decorator to which it is so often reduced by the North American development industry. P. D.

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