The Architects of our City

Arthur Erickson was born in 1924 in Vancouver where he grew up and developed an interest and talent for painting.  He attended the University of British Columbia, intending a career in the diplomatic service.  During World War II, he was assigned to the intelligence-gathering unit of the Canadian Army where he learned Japanese and served in India, Ceylon and Malaysia.  It was here that he became interested in Oriental art and philosophy.

A chance encounter with an article on Frank Lloyd Wright and his studio at Taliesin West deeply impressed him and induced him to study architecture.  After graduating from the School of Architecture at McGill University in 1950, he traveled extensively in the Mediterranean, the Middle East and Japan before turning to teaching architecture, first at the University of Oregon and then at the University of British Columbia.  Recognized for his early, award winning domestic architecture, he achieved national prominence with the competition winning design for Simon Fraser University completed with his partner Geoffrey Massey in 1963.  Many notable commissions followed, including the second Gordon Smith House, the Macmillan-Bloedel office building, the Canadian Pavilion at Osaka Worlds Fair, the Sikh Temple in Vancouver, the B.C. Provincial Law Courts and Government Offices in downtown Vancouver, Roy Thomson Concert Hall in Toronto, the Museum of Anthropology at U.B.C., the Canadian Chancery in Washington D.C., and the Museum of Glass in Tacoma among many others around the world.  His projects display a particular sensitivity to site, careful handling of light, and incorporation of landscape elements, often including water.

All of these are demonstrated in the unique design of his own house and garden.  Acknowledgement of the value of his work has included six Massey medals, three Governor General's Awards, the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada Gold Medal, the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal, the French Academy of Architecture Gold Medal, and the Order of Canada.  The garden and the house in which he has lived and kept his studio for over 45 years have been at the centre of his enormously creative and productive life which has established him as Canada's pre-eminent architect.  As such, it has become a significant cultural property in the history of Canadian and World architecture.

The Robert McLaughlin Gallery was built in 1969 and expanded in 1987 using an Arthur Erickson design.  Erickson uses welcoming fluid steps in many of his works to draw us in.  The steps of the Gallery are very sculptural, they seem to spill out of the building.  The cylindrical shapes lead our movement and provide light.  The vaulted skylight is like the spine of the building, holding it together, the organizing principal that leads us off into other spaces.  Erickson takes mundane materials (concrete, glass, and steel) and makes them into more than the sum of their parts.  He curves the glass, he bends the steel, and he uses bands of thick and thin blocks of concrete in this exceptional Gallery.