January 26, 2010 Opinions

(Con)struction

Enough with the digging already

by Clare Raspopow

A snapshot of perpetually under-construction de Maisonneuve Boulevard. PHOTO RILEY SPARKS

As the saying goes, “In this life nothing is certain but death and taxes.” We Concordians have the privilege of adding a third: construction.

This May will be the end of my third year at this school—that’s 24 months of wandering the Concordia ghetto, waiting for the shuttle bus. During my tenure at this school there has never been a period where some part or other of this campus wasn’t completely torn apart.

The bike paths on de Maisonneuve Boulevard, the EV building, Mackay Street, Norman Bethune Square, the MB building, the tunnel; no sooner is one construction project finished than another springs up in its place. Wooden security barriers disappear from one side of the street just to appear on the other.

I should probably be proud of all of this growth in the neighbourhood. We’ve got shiny new buildings and a safer place to ride our bikes. One day, I’m told, the Quartier Concordia will be a pleasant place for people to gather. But I’m never going to see it and so I find it hard to care.

As it stands, the tunnel is already four months behind schedule. Norman Bethune Square has an estimated completion date of 2011. Once our renovatory attention has been torn from the big pit in the ground, it will shift to the recladding—renovation of the exterior—of the GM building. This construction project isn’t due to some serious structural flaw—there’s nothing wrong with the GM! Concordia is just spending $11.6 million on a new exterior so that the GM building will look like the EV and the MB.

In their quest to make the Sir George Williams campus something we can boast about to the rest of Canada’s universities, the administration is making it positively uninhabitable for students. When’s the last time you could cross from the front door of the Hall building to the door of the Library building? We’re told that all of this work is being done so that Concordians will have a place of their own, but when exactly will we be able to take possession? Five? Ten? Fifteen years?

Sure, when it’s complete, a tunnel will be appreciated come the cold months of winter. New buildings give us a place to learn (or a place to house the newest level of our bureaucracy). But is making our buildings match really a priority? Our construction projects seem to be leaving the realm of the practical and moving into that of the vain.

Like an aging starlet who can’t stop going under the knife, our school can’t seem to leave well enough alone, and opt for construction for construction’s sake. We bring out the jackhammers every time our inferiority complex gets the better of us, and it’s the students who suffer.
If our university really wants to make Sir George Williams a pleasant place for students to be, they would do better to get rid of the construction and let students go about their academic lives unhindered. Take some of that construction money and put it towards, I don’t know, student health. But how likely is that? Getting rid of death or taxes would probably be easier.