Arthur Erickson: An Architect’s Life by David Stouck (review)

In February 1992, in one of the most difficult moments of his long and storied career, amid a crush of reporters, sixty-eight-year-old architect Arthur Erickson filed for personal bankruptcy at the Vancouver courthouse, with debts of at least $10.5 million. In a bitter irony, the venue was Robson Square, one of his own designs – one in which, like that of Simon Fraser University, Erickson had tried to rethink the whole genre of the building and its societal function. The light-filled law courts of Robson Square were intended to reflect the “transparency” of the law, whereas his concept for Simon Fraser University had at its heart a mall running the length of its campus so as to maximize the communal nature of learning and to facilitate student gatherings. Even in the latter conceptualizing, there were ironies, as the mall design was blamed by some for abetting subsequent student unrest on campus in the 1960s by encouraging collective gatherings.

David Stouck’s fascinating biography of Erickson (1924–2009) captures the essence of the life, design philosophy, and work of the cerebral yet jet-setting modernist Canadian architect, trained at McGill just after the Second World War, who was arguably the country’s first “starchitect.” Stouck, emeritus professor of English at Simon Fraser, demonstrates that in many ways, like painter Emily Carr, Erickson’s genius was inescapably rooted in the West Coast. In designs like the masterly Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University on Burnaby Mountain, and the Helmut and Hugo Eppich houses in Vancouver, as well as the Filberg house in Comox, which first brought him wide attention, the scenic West Coast topography of the sites, often rocky, steep, and challenging, became “an indispensable part of the building complex.”

Born in Vancouver, Erickson grew up with the encouragement of two artistic parents (especially his flamboyant, creative mother). In adolescence, when he thought of becoming a painter, he was influenced by mentors like artists Jessie Faunt (who loved modern painting), Lawren Harris, and B.C. Binning, who built one of Vancouver’s first modernist houses. Harris’s theosophy eased Erickson’s transition from the optimism of his mother’s Christian Science to the lure of the “more subtle and spiritual” religions of the East.

Stouck makes it clear that Erickson early developed a sense of destiny and an original and conceptual mind with a drive toward imaginative expression that found an outlet in architecture, producing works like the core University of Lethbridge campus, the San Diego Convention Centre, Roy Thomson Hall, and the Canadian Chancery in Washington. Erickson had a daring hand with glass, concrete, and/or steel. His travels early in his career, to the Middle East and the Far East (Japan in particular), gave him a love for horizontal elements, terracing, and the use of water and light that marks much of his oeuvre. Ominously, however, his two weakest subjects as a student were mathematics and economics. Many of his projects (not unlike those of Frank Lloyd Wright, whom he admired) were plagued by huge cost overruns ($4.6 million for the Washington Chancery), construction problems and delays, and leakage and drainage issues (for example, the mall roof at Simon Fraser University), particularly after the end of Erickson’s partnership with architect Geoffrey Massey in 1972.

Stouck’s biography admirably dissects Erickson’s strengths and weaknesses as a man and an architect. Of particular interest are his chapters on the building of Simon Fraser and of Lethbridge University and his account of Erickson’s important friendship from 1968 with Pierre Trudeau, including their travels in China, Tibet, and Saudi Arabia. Trudeau – like Erickson, cool, cerebral, and arrogant – overruled a competition to award Erickson the design for the Canadian Chancery in Washington, a somewhat Faustian gift: the design received a mixed reception and contributed to a cooling of Erickson’s reputation as he came to be viewed as a peripatetic architect for whom, as he himself put it, “[b]usiness was...