Arthur Erickson

Arthur Erickson, Canada's pre-eminent philosopher architect, was renowned internationally for his innovative approach to landscape, his genius for spatial composition, and his epic vision of architecture for people. Among his most celebrated large-scale works are three that helped to define Vancouver's urban landscape: Simon Fraser University, on Burnaby Mountain; the Robson Square complex at the heart of the city; and the exquisite Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. Travel was key to Erickson's creative process; floating high above the clouds on extended airline flights, he made preliminary drawings on vellum with his fine-point black felt-tip pen, designing influential works not only for other parts of Canada-including Toronto's widely admired Roy Thomson Hall--but for sites in the U.S., Britain, and the Middle and Far East. Erickson worked chiefly in concrete, which he called "the marble of our times," and wherever they appear, his buildings move the spirit with their poetic freshness and their mission to inspire. But he was also a controversial figure, more than once attracting the ire of his fellow architects, and his professional achievements were tarnished by the excesses of a complicated personal life that resulted in a series of tawdry bankruptcies. In a fall from grace that recalls a Greek tragedy, Canada's great architect-a handsome, elegant man who lived like a millionaire and counted among his close friends Pierre Trudeau and Elizabeth Taylor-eventually became homeless and penniless. This first full biography of Erickson, who died in 2009 at the age of eighty-four, traces the architect's life from its modest origins to his emergence on the world stage. Author David Stouck, acclaimed for his earlier biographies of Ethel Wilson and Sinclair Ross, demonstrates here once again why his work has been praised as imaginative, incisive and compelling. Grounded in interviews with Erickson and his family, friends and clients, as well as the resources of extensive public archives, TITLE is both an intimate portrait of the man and a stirring account of how Erickson made his buildings work. Beautifully written and superbly researched, it is also a provocative look at the phenomenon of cultural heroes and the nature of what we call "genius."

Arthur Erickson was one of the 20th century's premier architects, but little has been written about the man who designed the interiors of Erickson's award-winning buildings, whom everyone in the business simply called "Francisco". A decade before his death, Erickson wrote this manuscript to pay tribute to Kripacz and to tell the world of the importance of Francisco's creations. With stunning images from some of greatest photographers of the day, such as Yousuf Karsh, this book looks at Erickson's key projects and the crucial contributions made by Kripacz to their feel and glamour. It includes Erickson's extended commentary on some of his most famous architectural projects from the 1970's through the 1990s, including Roy Thomson Hall, the Eppich Houses, Napp Laboratories, and the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C., all of which had stunning interior designs and furniture by Kripacz. As this book goes to press, the Erickson and Kripacz-designed furniture line, the Erickson Design Collection, is being brought into manufacture, with many items becoming available for the first time. Francisco Kripacz: Interior Design is a beautiful legacy to the working partnership of a charismatic and passionate artistic duo -- a last testament from a remarkable architect to the man who shared in his greatest achievements.

Eppich House 2 tells the story, through gorgeous images and Arthur Erickson?s own words, of how a unique collaboration with 'dream clients' resulted in his most striking residence.One glimpse of the cascading steel beams mirrored in the reflecting pond and it's clear that the Hugo and Brigitte Eppich house is a singular achievement, a daring experiment that embodies Erickson's West Coast modernist ideas about site, material, and form.Erickson's first steel residence explores both the structural and aesthetic possibilities of the material, with curved beams, dyed cladding, and milled furnishings designed by Francisco Kripacz-all features that would have been near impossible on a regular commission. But after seeing the first Eppich House, built for Hugo's twin brother Helmut, Hugo entrusted Erickson with creating and furnishing the entire house, inside and out-another first for Erickson-and made available the Eppic brothers' steel fabricating plants, which built virtually every component of the home.Architecture expert Greg Bellerby weaves into his essay extensive interviews with Erickson, Eppich, and architect Nick Milkovich, as well as contributions from Cornelia Oberlander, the home's landscape designer, to tell the fascinating story of an uncommon vision, realized in steel and glass

Her handsomely illustrated book. . . is a hymn of praise to the most discussed Canadian architect of our time. -Robert Fulford, Saturday Night

Arthur Erickson Layered Landscapes - Drawings from the Canadian Architectural Archives is the inaugural publication of our Canadian Modern series. It presents and expands upon the content of the traveling exhibition, curated by Canadian Architectural Archives chief curator and archivist Linda Fraser with architectural historian Geoffrey Simmins. The act of layering has both practical and metaphoric connotations: it refers to Erickson's design process, in which he added layers of experience and inhabitation, enclosure and vistas onto a landscape, privileging the horizontal over the vertical. For Erickson, "line tells everything," and these drawings of some of his most inventive buildings remind us of the value of hand sketches in the architectural design process. Canadian Modern is a peer-reviewed series focused on the cultural and architectural history of twentieth-century Canada, published by Dalhousie Architectural Press. The series promotes scholarship on the architecture, built environment, and landscape of Canada. Focused on publications grounded in archival materials, this collection aims to enhance existing research and stimulate future investigations while positioning Canadian debates and practices within a broad international framework. Book jacket.

Whether he was designing buildings and spaces for universities, museums, performing arts, or libraries, Arthur Erickson was preoccupied with intersections - of people, of cultures, and of ideas. Arthur Erickson on Learning Systems collects writings by an architect advocating for interdisciplinary approaches to education and the methods for sharing knowledge. In pieces on one of his mid-1960s masterpieces, the Simon Fraser University campus, Erickson explains how he intended to avoid compartmentalization between academic disciplines by thinking of a campus as akin to a "biological system" capable of adaptation. He outlines how his design placed a "spine" through the campus to circulate people - and communication between them - while making space for additional buildings as they became needed. These writings also show Erickson reflecting on whether his original vision was maintained by future development on the site and considering how university education changed in the decades that followed. An introduction by Melanie O'Brian nuances Erickson's big-picture thinking, draws parallels between curatorial practices and his approach to learning spaces, and discusses the experiences of campus users following university expansion and increased specialization among academic disciplines. This title is a collaboration between Concordia University Press and the Canadian Centre for Architecture and is part of the "Building Arguments" series.

Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (RAIC) President's Medal Award (multi-media representation of architecture). Canada's most distinguished architectural critics and scholars offer fresh insights into the country's unique modern and contemporary architecture. Beginning with the nation's centennial and Expo 67 in Montreal, this fifty-year retrospective covers the defining of national institutions and movements: • How Canadian architects interpreted major external trends • Regional and indigenous architectural tendencies • The influence of architects in Canada's three largest cities: Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver Co-published with Canadian Architect, this comprehensive reference book is extensively illustrated and includes fifteen specially commissioned essays.

Over the course of his distinguished career, architect Arthur Erickson (1924-2009) designed numerous houses, each an exercise in transforming the needs of his clients into tangible form in the context of site and place. Artists Gordon Smith (1919-) and Marion Smith (1918-2009) of Vancouver were the only Erickson clients to commission him to design two homes. The first (1955) was a straightforward exercise in post-World War II modernism that represented the transplantation of prevailing North American design thinking to the mountainous rain forests of coastal Vancouver. The second house (1966) - Smith House II as it came to be known - likewise situated in a forest but with the added benefit of ocean and island vistas, was simultaneously a deft reworking of the stylistic and spatial culture of the first house and a remarkable, path-breaking study in cultural transposition, interpretation and adaptation. Emphasizing its disavowal of conventional demarcations of space and the movement within and through it, it translated the material and aesthetic sensibilities of 17th century Japanese domestic architecture to the circumstances of mid-20th century North America (and the northerly Pacific coast).