The Adam Project | UBC Chemistry Building — where the father was only ever a professor

Louis Reed is not a villain and not a hero. He is a physicist with an office and a teaching load, and the film keeps putting him in front of buildings that look like ordinary academic life, because that is the point — the man who cracked time travel was, to his son, mostly someone who was late for dinner. The campus standing in for his university is the University of British Columbia, out on Point Grey.

The Chemistry Building is the one to find. It went up between 1914 and 1925, which makes it the oldest permanent structure on the campus, and it wears the collegiate Gothic that the university's first architects imported wholesale: buff brick, stone tracery, pointed arches over doors that lead to fume hoods. Construction stalled for years when wartime money dried up, and students marched on the provincial legislature in 1922 to get the campus finished. The building is a monument to that fight as much as to chemistry.

It sits on Main Mall, the long green spine that runs the length of the campus. Walk it south and you pass the Rose Garden lookout with the Strait of Georgia laid out below, the Museum of Anthropology's Haida house poles, and enough mid-century concrete to date every decade since. Term time gives you the crowd scenes; summer gives you the emptiness.

2036 Main Mall, Vancouver. The grounds are open to anyone; the bus from downtown takes about forty minutes.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons.