'This Place Is a Pit': The Brutalist Charm of Fauteux Hall
By Devon Lamont
When I asked him for his thoughts on our humble law school in the north, he scoffed a simple reply: “This place is a pit!” I laughed and immediately agreed.
The stark, monolithic sarcophagus we call our law school—where dreams of changing the world one case at a time are buried in six-hundred-page Supreme Court readings and Red Bull-fuelled midnight grinds at the Brian Dickson Library—was hardly everyone’s first choice for a law building. It’s austere. It’s weirdly hot on some floors and freezing on others. And worst of all, foot traffic coming from all wings seems to inconveniently converge in the atrium right before your class, forcing you to throw hands just to make it through the front entrance (never mind up the main staircase, where bodies are packed more densely than the New York City Subway).
Leaving the library late one night down the southeast stairwell—which feels more like an emergency stairwell than the primary route to any library—I had a brief but memorable conversation with my good friend Uday Bahal. Uday had completed his graduate studies at Cornell University and was consequently well acquainted with the architectural marvels of an Ivy League university. When I asked him for his thoughts on our humble law school in the north, he scoffed a simple reply: “This place is a pit!” I laughed and immediately agreed.
While it may seem unfair to compare our modest building to the stately Collegiate Gothic law schools adorning the great Ivy League campuses, Fauteux Hall seems underwhelming even when juxtaposed with the other faculty buildings at the University of Ottawa. Take the Social Sciences Building, for example. A modern glass tower ascending boldly above the campus, manifesting the thinly veiled pretension that is so common among social science majors (I poke fun at them because I was a political science major in that very building). Or what about Tabaret Hall? Its Greek Neoclassical elegance bespeaks a scholarly prestige that Fauteux Hall could only dream of. The comparison is depressing, and it begs the question: why did our law school get stuck with the dreariest design on campus?
It may surprise many that Fauteux Hall was a highly acclaimed addition to campus when its construction was completed in 1973. Commenting on the faculty’s relocation from the fourth floor of the Arts building (now Simard Hall) to its current home, Bruce Carr-Harris, a former law professor and University of Ottawa alumnus, noted that “it was like walking out of a phone booth into the Taj Mahal!” My friend Uday would likely take issue with such a laudatory review, but the praise was understandable given that the scarcity of space in the Arts building had once prompted the storage of library books in the women’s washroom.
The short conversation I had with Uday had me thinking about our collegiate environment and how it shapes and defines us; how it conditions us for the rigorous profession we seek to join. The profession of law is, unfortunately, often viewed as a cutthroat field of study and practice. A field for the bold and the ruthless. A dispassionate profession that favours sharp practice and frowns upon camaraderie—at least that’s the picture we glean from television series like Suits. Given these popular beliefs, it is fitting to see aspiring lawyers studying in a cold, cement block of a building, devoid of the starry-eyed sanguinity with which many of us first embarked on our academic journey. But that dour depiction of law, I have found, does not even remotely reflect the people who study here.
Our student body consists of the kindest, most affable people I could ever hope to meet. They are understanding, accommodative, and always willing to lend a hand. Have to take a sick day (i.e. go see a concert)? No problem, Allison has notes for you the very next day. Buried in readings and tearing out what little hair you had left after 1L? Take it easy! Uday has a flawless summary of the entire course you can have free of charge. There is never a shortage of collegiality in this faculty.
As hackneyed as it sounds, we are the proverbial daisies pushing through the sidewalk cracks. We are not defined by the dismal, Jersey wall-looking building in which we study; we persist in spite of it. We find inspiration in the most uninspiring places, and we pervade them with optimism, imagination, and amity. Having reached the wise, old age of twenty-five, I’ve unearthed certain truths—the most edifying of which being that people show you who they are in the hardest of times. The superficial jump ship at the first sight of danger, but good people shine brightest in the bleakest of places (and sometimes it takes living in a pit to realize that). Thus, as banal and unsightly as it may be, I’m proud to have called this pit my home for the past two and a half years, and I sincerely hope that the next generation of law students can appreciate the brutalist charm I have discovered in this ugly building.