Homecoming: Arthur Erickson Centenary celebrations are underway in Vancouver and across the country

Fittingly for a shape-shifting city with a celluloid skin that has played countless other places in Hollywood movies, centenary celebrations for architect Arthur Erickson in his hometown kicked off with a film festival.

As I watched Erickson’s architecture—Simon Fraser University, Robson Square, the Macmillan Bloedel building—come to life on the screen, I realized how ubiquitous his buildings are. They are not only touchstones in my childhood memories of growing up here, but also integral to the very civic fabric of this place.

As film fest curator Trevor Boddy pointed out, “LA got Arthur before Vancouver did.” Buildings that were taken for granted (or even ridiculed) by Vancouverites were long celebrated in the City of Angels, where Erickson once had an office and friendships with the likes of Shirley MacLaine.

Indeed, when I first met Arthur in 1997 in Singapore, where his international reputation still preceded him, Canadian publications weren’t interested in features on his latest projects. Magazines in Europe wanted to publish his late career works, but a shadow from his bankruptcies still hung over his story here at home.

But now, with a cornucopia of events, lectures, and exhibitions celebrating Erickson’s life and work over the next 12 months, there is a sense that the celebrated architect’s hometown is finally honouring and appreciating his considerable legacy.

June 14—which would have been Erickson’s 100th birthday—was officially declared “Arthur Erickson Day” by the mayor of Vancouver’s office. A packed house at the Vancouver International Film Festival watched Richard Gere play a very Arthur-like architect in the 1994 film Intersection, gazing at a model of the Museum of Anthropology with Sharon Stone. The day before, the actual Museum of Anthropology had reopened: Nick Milkovich, a longtime Erickson associate, had taken on the formidable task of demolishing and rebuilding the museum’s Great Hall in a $40-million seismic upgrade. It was Nick who had also made the model shown in the film.

As art and life danced around each other in the darkened theatre, scenes of a pre-Vancouverism city seduced us with their gritty innocence, from a time before tower and podium prototypes competed with view corridors.

We are edging ever closer to Erickson’s visionary 1955 sketch of a tower-lined city by the sea, so watching the Hollywood remake of a French film about an architect who must choose between his wife and his mistress proved instructive. “Can we have our cake and eat it too?” I wondered as patrons licked crumbs of Erickson’s birthday gâteau served in the lobby. Can we bridge the gap between home and away, this city and the world, nativism and globalism? Erickson managed this in a series
of enlightened architectural maneuvers. Why can’t we?

As Iraqi architect Moafaq Al Taie, who worked with Erickson on his Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired floating Baghdad cultural centre on the Tigris (sadly foiled by the Iran/Iraq war), put it: “Erickson spoke in two languages, not only one.” Indeed, his work beautifully expressed both the regional and the international.

Two documentary films amply demonstrated this. In 2002’s Concrete Poetry, a septuagenarian Erickson and a younger version of myself walked up the Temple of Hatshepsut-inspired ramps at his Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington, next to its shimmering slanted cone, inspired by local industry. The other, the 2023 film Dyde House, showcases a recently rediscovered Erickson gem hidden in the Canadian woods.

But the ethos of being both international and local is best epitomized in Simon Fraser University, a place I literally grew up in during the early 1970s, when my parents were students there. This was the very time and setting for the last film in the series, a 1972 action flick called The Groundstar Conspiracy. It was a rare treat to see the Simon Fraser University of my childhood with unimpeded views—its architectural integrity still intact before unfortunate 90s additions, and the demolition of the married students’ residence, Louis Riel House, where my family lived.

Inspired by mountaintop Aztec cities, the Al Azhar Mosque and University in Cairo, Mogul architecture, and Greek hill towns—all witnessed by a young Erickson on a travelling scholarship—Simon Fraser University is also deeply embedded with a sense of its own place.

The academic quadrangle was lifted up from its foundations to reveal stunning views of West Coast mountains and forest. In precise, processional choreography, Erickson designed SFU as a descent from the eastern peak of Burnaby Mountain, sloping towards the west in the path of the sun. Conceived as a series of open terraces cascading down the mountainside, it was built as a singular vision, with a classical sense of scale and an inventive modernism that channelled ancient sites.

It was certainly a magical place to spend one’s childhood. I remember running away quite regularly from the hippie daycare (designed by Erickson associate Bruno Freschi, who also worked on SFU as a whole) and getting happily lost in the architecture. The central mall, conceived as an interdisciplinary meeting space, was often the site of public concerts, where daycare renegades could be found dancing in the sunlight. The fountain, announcing entry into the plaza, was a favourite spot for water play. The hollow slanted troughs on either side of the stairwell leading to the rotunda were the perfect hiding places for a three-year-old on the lam.

Fortunately, Freschi was on hand for a pre-film discussion about SFU. Erickson’s genius, he said, was to transmute the interdisciplinary idea of breaking down silos into an architecture that imagined the university as a city. “It was a physical, poetic interpretation of how to create a community of scholarship,” he told a rapt crowd.

It was also, he said, an example of the way Erickson created “spiritual space embodying a higher aesthetic statement and challenge.”

“Once you go into a building, you leave the building behind,” he said.

Watching The Groundstar Conspiracy in the presence of Erickson’s old colleagues was an exercise in nostalgia. Not just for my childhood, but for a time when a pre-digital world still imagined and made films about the evils of technology, and the loss of privacy and individuality. For a moment, the lobotomized protagonist struggling to remember his true identity became a symbol of mine and Arthur’s hometown, Vancouver, struggling to find its place in the world.

And yet, for me, Erickson’s architecture always made that struggle seem effortless: his buildings bridged worlds.

At the reopening of the Museum of Anthropology, I recalled the architect’s 80th birthday celebration at the same place, when he joined Haida dancers in shared ceremony. Leading a tour of Erickson’s 1976 masterwork after completing its major seismic upgrade, Nick Milkovich said, “If I did my job well, you won’t notice any difference.” Indeed, the changes are seamless, and subtle but radical.

The new architectural and curatorial vision—one that has added to the permanent exhibition 50 new artifacts and signage that contextualizes the objects on display in terms of cultural genocide and contemporary issues—are of a piece with the original. The landmark restoration aimed to address signs of deterioration, and to earthquake-proof the building, whose capacity to withstand quakes was at only 25 percent of current standards. To accomplish this, the Great Hall was demolished and rebuilt with precast columns and beams. The new structure sits on a new cast-in-place concrete slab, thickened under the columns, all of which rests on isolators within the crawl space.

The old tempered glass, which would have shattered instantly in an earthquake, has been replaced by stronger, laminated sheets with UV protection. Plates of glass are cantilevered from the concrete columns and are fixed to a steel roof suspended from the channel beam, allowing them to move in concert with the movement of the structure. Now, “they can dance with the building,” according to Milkovich.

Now, there is an even clearer sense of the building’s connection to the land—and, if one goes deeper, a clearer view of the settler/patron’s place in what artist Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun (who now has an iteration of his work An Indian Shooting the Indian Act displayed prominently at the museum) is fond of calling “the morgue.”

With its cleaner, brighter transparency and new concrete columns, there is a greater articulation of Erickson’s original intent. Like SFU, the Museum of Anthropology—part Shinto shrine, part cathedral, part longhouse—is a temple to learning, as well as a sacred space. Its design hopes to transcend the colonial context of the museum, moving from the darkened entranceway through to the great hall, a place birthing light. Views of water and mountains beckon us into a future of reconciliation. 

Already satiated by the centenary year’s first week, it’s hard to imagine that there’s more to the Ericksonian moveable feast—and yet there is. You may have missed the summer house and garden tours, and the West Vancouver Art Museum’s exhibition A Refuge: Arthur Erickson that recreates the living room of the architect’s beloved home in Point Grey, Vancouver, where he lived from 1957 to 2009, and presents photographs by Selwyn Pullan of Erickson in his converted garage-turned-haven. Or the West Vancouver Art Museum’s homes tour, featuring Erickson’s Eppich Houses 1 and 2. But there’s still time for other talks and film screenings, including the Arthur Erickson Centenary Lecture Series—a series of seven lectures to be given by architects, critics and theorists in cities across Canada this fall. It’s presented by the Arthur Erickson Foundation, with the support of Canadian Heritage, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, and the institutions hosting the lectures. There’s also an exhibition of correspondence between Erickson and artist Gordon Webber, opening soon at the CCA in Montreal. In November, Ericksonphiles can look forward to the première of a new documentary film at the Architecture and Design Film Festival, Vancouver, produced by Leah Mallen.

As I write this, I’m looking forward to the July 7^th centenary celebration at Robson Square, featuring Mexican music, Haida carving, opera singing and Taiko drumming. While hopefully offering more personal opportunities for eating cake and dancing about architecture, revisiting Erickson’s urban oasis in the heart of Vancouver with its cascading pools and gardens (designed by Cornelia Oberlander) will also offer further reflection on our hometown.

In the midst of a place still struggling to define itself, Robson Square—like so much of Erickson’s work—reminds us, both subtly and radically, to become less like a celluloid city, and more like ourselves.

I think with any work of art, once the persona is developed, it takes over. It may take a lot of wrestling to find out what it is—but there is that point when you recognize the persona, and then your business after that is whittling away at everything that is contradictory to that character, and letting the character develop and grow and assert itself even stronger. I think you often hear about the concept of simplicity, which is often misunderstood: that simplicity is not doing something that is ‘plain’—it’s only clearing away all the periphera, the things that are inconsequential to that central character and meaning, and it’s more clarity than simplicity. But something, to be clear, has to be very simple.

— Arthur Erickson, from a 1986 interview by Abraham Rogatnick, included in the film Dyde House

Hadani Ditmars is a writer, journalist, and photographer. She is the author of Wallpaper* City Guide Vancouver (Phaidon, 2020), now in its fourth edition, and Dancing in the No-Fly Zone: A Woman’s Journey Through Iraq (Interlink, 2005).

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