Alan Hodgson hardly seems old enough to have played a part in the grand vision of our city, but he began work with the B.C. Department of Public Works in 1952. We met last week to discuss the current show at The Legacy (Yates and View streets, 250381-7645, until Feb. 25) which is grandly titled The Emergence of Architectural Modernism 2: UVic and the Victoria Regional Aesthetic in the Late 1950s and 1960s.

The exhibit, curated by Martin Segger, is an extensive presentation of period photographs, architectural renderings, landscape designs and scale models which tells the tale of two crucial projects of urban imagining: Centennial Square and City Hall, and the University of Victoria. Only Francis Rattenbury's Inner Harbour rivals these in scope, and nothing on such a scale has been attempted since they were initiated. Hodgson was closely involved in both.

In the late 1950s the Social Credit government got to work planning government buildings, colleges and service buildings for the new highways. "We did all the courthouse programming for the province, and Essondale [psychiatric hospital in Coquitlam]" Hodgson recalled. "We also developed more jails at the time. Nothing had happened since the mid-1930s and the government realized it was time to rebuild the fabric."

In the late 1950s, Hodgson's colleague at Public Works, Wilfred Lougher-Goodey, acquired land for a legislative precinct area. "We had two schemes - one running east/west, the other lined up north/south," Hodgson explained. "The only part that actually got constructed was the museum and the curatorial tower."

By 1962 this precinct plan had ceased to be a government-desired program.

The centennial of Victoria's civic administration was 1962 and to mark the event the city planned a restoration of City Hall, the McPherson Theatre, the police station and new construction of council chambers, seniors' centre, family law courts, shopping arcade and parking garage. The ensemble was arranged within a landscape design with a dramatic circular motif. This plan, by Clive Justice, echoed the design for the new university campus with its ring road.

Centennial Square, overseen by the city's first planner, Rod Clack, was a key component of a much larger vision. It would be the northern focus, with Broad Street as the interconnecting pedestrian axis leading to the legislative precinct, ringed with parking garages around the periphery. A consortium of the best architects and designers was employed to create the components of Centennial Square.

When, late in the day, Thomas McPherson donated the theatre, Hodgson was given the task of creating a civic playhouse and theatre extension. "As you move from one space to another," he explained, "from the parking garage out onto Centennial Square, you can see the activity in the lobby of the theatre. You know you are going to join people. You are attracted to those people.

They are actually putting a on show, which you are going to join."

After you enter the theatre foyer, "you are gradually taken in and put in the seating. Then the activity is reversed, and you watch a show that takes place up on a stage." Following the performance, you emerge into the lobby with its huge windows, "something which opens out again. You end up again closer to the environment."

There is a period of transition. "You're not subjected to a sort of black-or-white, You don't pop through a hole, but now you find out what's going on. You can see if it's pouring rain or a beautiful evening outside. You walk out through it as you come out onto a nice square or plaza."

Lamentably, the city later sold a block of Broad Street to Cadillac Fairview for what is now the Bay Centre, severing what was intended to be the interconnection between the north and south of the city.

"That happened twice," Hodgson said. "With the Harbour Square project, Langley Street was supposed to extend through that building." What opportunities we have lost. "It's not impossible to reverse it," Hodgson chuckled.

The guiding principle of the university, as we learn from this exhibition, was the integration of the natural and the built environment - a "garden campus." Hodgson noted that "the early buildings were pretty classic and formal," built on "barren land, really barren." He worked with Lougher-Goodey acquiring that land. Eventually the overall plan was developed by a San Francisco firm, Wurster, Bernardi and Emmons, with contributions by many local architects.

"I feel the campus has a Southern California feel about the plan," Hodgson told me, "which is hardly what you'd really like to have found in Victoria, where you could have developed it for the West Coast. We're living in a climate which is quite different from California."

In particular he noted the amount of "walking which is done not under cover. It's nice to be able, after sitting in a lecture hall for two hours, to walk across for some fresh air," he granted, "but the climate here is so varied that you might prefer a choice, so you don't have to get soaking wet."

Hodgson is an architect who is interested in more than buildings. "I'm dealing with this philosophy of light all the time, also the change of atmosphere as you move from one space to another."

In our two hours together we barely scratched the surface of his contributions.

robertamos@telus.net