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Visions of the Future...

Victoria has usually made the news in not quite such a respectable way. But the paper has appeared with our future in perspective; our present dwarfed by the towering of buildings; our hopes concretified into six storied buildings and our wildest dreams all depicted in seried rows crowding the skyline from Salamanca Road almost to Aro Street.

Wellington's future appears to lie the under the shadow of Victoria. Her Western Skyline, if the paper is correct, will be jagged with institutions of higher learning, to which the citizen in the street, going on his daily round to the office or the shop, will look up in awe and admiration. Overseas visitors will round the harbour to see the city dominated by its university. Over the commercial and political centre of New Zealand will brood, like an architectural form of Rodin's "The Thinker"—Victoria University College.

It is a pleasant thought.

Victoria got here in the first place for reasons none of which had much to do with disinterested planning for the future. The clay of our foundations has never settled into a respectable and dignified soil; like the university itself, the foundations drew attention to the fact that there was a newness about it all. And the site, supreme though it may be over the city, while enjoying the advantages of closeness to the centre of things (for those inevitable part-time students who were so long-sightedly seen to be destined to take such a part in its life, this was its biggest advantage) was an awkward one which demanded that every advance and expansion should be hewn out of the ground as hardily as every advance of the college's name was hewn out of the distrustful minds of the commercial community. The site was not only inconvenient—it was laden with gorse, prickly and hard to get rid of; a plant with a sad habit of pricking hardest the most comfortable and of becoming firmly fixed in the most dangerous of grounds.

All in all, there was much in the site and its accompaniments which was shortly echoed in the spirit of the place: the emphasis on utility rather than looks; the uncomfortable habit of making hard the paths of the self righteous; the removal from the ways of the city.

But this, it seems is to go. Victoria looks rather as though it will become domesticated. Not only will it be up and above the city, but the city is going to look up to it. Not only will the site be subdued by the irresistible advance of mechanisation, but it is altogether to become something of which the city will be proud—a sort of refined form of the Lane's Emulsion advertisement at the entrance to Lyttelton Harbour. Victoria will become something which will demonstrate without doubt the striving of its community after higher learning.

The new Victoria, campus and all, looks as though it will have little in common with the rough and rude brashness of the present college.

Somewhere on this magnificent campus, we hope, there will be room for a little gorse and a few bare and uncovered clay banks. Then the students wafting aloft by lift to his lecture on the fifth floor, will look down at the gorse and remember that once Victoria was at bit like that—wilder and less relished by the community, but pricking hard the most solid citizens when they strayed from the narrow paths.