Canada’s greatest architect, Arthur Erickson, was deeply connected to the land in a way that is particularly Canadian. As Pierre Trudeau famously said, “The land is strong.” Born in Vancouver in 1924, when the city was just 38 years old, Erickson’s culture lay in the vast forests of ancient firs and cedars, the rivers and ocean of the mountainous Pacific Northwest. This was the context that grounded him in the “profound communion between building and site.” ¹

After military service, Erickson plunged himself into architecture, inspired by F. L. Wright’s Taliesin West. On graduating from McGill University, rather than working in Wright’s office he accepted a travelling fellowship to study world cultures — always through the lens of his belief that there is no more poignant source of meaning in architecture “than the act of setting a structure in its environment.” ²

Erickson’s canonic works of the 1960s and 1970s integrate landscape and structure. The massive wooden beams of his early houses grow from and are symbolically of the earth. Near Vancouver, Simon Fraser University (1963) occupies the Burnaby mountaintop. Erickson translated a wholly new concept of the university into architecture, with academic departments interlinked around a vast greensward and living spaces embedded in the terraced landscape. His University of Lethbridge in Alberta (1968) is more extreme, with academic and living spaces contained in one powerful building.

Embracing Marshall McLuhan’s view that humans will return to the tribe, Erickson concluded in 1965 that individual buildings were things of the past: “We are already dealing with the building complex, where buildings are only important as contributors to the total experience of moving through a vast complex. It is both a step forward as well as a return to the total building of the medieval city: the streets of Orvieto, the facades of Florence, the squares of Venice.” ³

In Erickson’s Robson Square (1973), a low-profile, three-block-long complex in downtown Vancouver, government offices are submerged in a richly planted landscape designed with Cornelia Oberlander to be reminiscent of the terrain of the province. The adjacent Law Courts building marks a profound innovation in courthouse design, inducing an optimistic concept of justice while its great hall accommodates social and cultural activities. Visionary in the 1970s as an example of sustainable and humane concepts of government and urban planning, Robson Square continues to point the way for world cities.

Erickson’s Museum of Anthropology (1971) at the University of British Columbia is redolent of Kwakiutl construction. Totemic poles rise against a large pool, visually linked to the sea beyond Oberlander’s landscape. Erickson’s innovative open storage avails the public of artefacts and encourages autonomous learning about aboriginal cultures. Nearby, the enchanting wilderness that surrounds the Erickson House and Garden dissolves the boundaries of two ordinary suburban lots to create the illusion of infinite space.

Believing that no matter how ingenious or inventive culture may be, human habit is stronger, ⁴ Erickson’s projects for cities around the world differ in vocabulary and expression from those designed for Canada. Knowing the time it takes to “get underneath [the] superficial level” of world cultures, ⁵ he questioned the practice of building in other contexts without deep understanding.

Like James Stirling and Aldo Rossi, Erickson invented unsurpassed urban schemes as well as new building types that were well ahead of their time socially and environmentally, yet the dynamic evolution of his work still waits to be assessed. And like figures such as Jørn Utzon, Sverre Fehn, and Luis Barragán, the full extent of his body of work will be a real discovery.

Phyllis Lambert, June 2009

¹ Arthur Erickson, “The Design of a House,” Canadian Art (November 1960): 98.
² Arthur Erickson, “The Weight of Heaven,” The Canadian Architect 9:3 (March 1964): 50.
³ Arthur Erickson, Habitation: Space, Dilemma and Design, 1965 Canadian Housing Design Council Lecture (Ottawa: Canadian Housing Design Council, 1966), 3.
⁴ Erickson, Habitation: Space, Dilemma and Design, 13.
⁵ Stanley Collyer, interview with Arthur Erickson, Competitions 7:3 (Fall 1997): 55.