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 with 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).

The post Homecoming: Arthur Erickson Centenary celebrations are underway in Vancouver and across the country appeared first on Canadian Architect.

On June 13, 2024, Arthur Erickson’s beloved Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia reopened after 18 months of closure. During this time, its iconic Great Hall was entirely rebuilt from the ground up. The epic reconstruction was steered by Vancouver architect Nick Milkovich, whom Erickson first hired in 1968 and who worked on the original building.

Here’s Milkovich’s account of the project, drawn from an interview with Adele Weder.

Since the Museum of Anthropology was built, the knowledge of earthquake impact has changed; the building was about 25 per cent of what it should be for current codes. The building was already showing signs of deterioration: the plastic skylights leaked like hell, steel reinforcements in the concrete were starting to show, things like that. The Great Hall was the worst off.

We started out by scanning the building components. That’s when we discovered that the concrete columns were actually hollow. Fifty years ago, the lifting capacity of the construction equipment was more limited; it would have been difficult or impossible to raise the largest column, which was 50 feet high. So that’s probably why they were thinned out and hollowed. The engineering consultant had said that it would come down fast in an earthquake—and that’s before we found out that the columns were hollow!

When we found out that it was that bad, we thought it would be really difficult to reinforce it without showing a lot of steel, but doing it that way would have changed the whole character of the building.

The key to the seismic upgrade is what’s called base isolation, so the building can move in an earthquake. The old structure was slab-on-grade concrete, resting directly on the ground. We rebuilt it with precast concrete, with a crawl space under the building and a huge beam under the columns that helps supports it.

And underneath every column, we incorporated rubber-and-steel tips called base isolators. They’ll act like shock absorbers in an earthquake. Our projection is that the building will be able to move up to one foot two inches, in two or three seconds. That was the big move.

The existing walls were tempered glass, which wouldn’t break into deadly shards—but in an earthquake, all that glass would all
instantly shatter and pile up on the ground at the foot of the building. We replaced that glass with laminated sheets of glass, which are stronger and still safe.

Before, the glass plates were pinned to the columns and hung from the beams. Now, long plates of glass are cantilevered over the columns a bit, meeting at the vertical glass plates at a right angle, caulked together with a steel rod in the middle of the caulking, and that
allows for a bit of movement in an earthquake.

I hesitated for about a week before I took on the job. I’m not a huge political animal; I’m just a guy who likes to make things. I had to decide if I could handle the politics of it all. But I knew I could handle the architecture part, and I knew the building well.

And I realized too there was an obligation—a moral obligation, in a way.

The post Museum of Anthropology renewal, Vancouver, BC appeared first on Canadian Architect.

Vancouver’s historic MacMillan Bloedel Buiding will officially be renamed Arthur Erickson Place.

Arthur Erickson designed the Modernist landmark at 1075 West Georgia Street with partner Geoffrey Massey for the forestry giant MacMillan Bloedel during a corporate building boom in the 1960s. The structure, made of reinforced bare concrete, rises above a spacious public plaza with reflecting pools that span the building’s length. The 27-storey building was the tallest in Vancouver when it was completed in 1968,  and earned national heritage landmark status for its construction technique of cast-in-place concrete, subtly tapered walls and deeply recessed windows. The building won the esteemed 1970 Massey Medal for Architecture, among many other awards.

Now 53 years old, the concrete building has continued to be called MacBlo even though the company ceased to exist 22 years ago. Two years ago, Kingsett Capital, Crestpoint Real Estate Investments, and Reliance Properties jointly bought the building with a plan to re-establish it as the premier corporate office location in downtown Vancouver.

“With its heritage distinction, central downtown location, and strong visual identity, Arthur Erickson Place will continue to be the address with cachet,” said Jon Stovell, president & CEO of Reliance Properties.

“It is rare for an architect to be honoured in this way, and I know that Arthur would be very proud to have the building carry his name, as it encapsulates all he strove to achieve architecturally,” said Erickson’s nephew, Christopher Erickson. “The building’s classic beauty and clarity of structure expresses the ruggedness of our land and majesty of our forests with a powerful cadence that tapers into infinity as it rises from its roots.”

The post MacBlo Building to be renamed Arthur Erickson Place appeared first on Canadian Architect.

We are saddened to mark the passing of Geoffrey Massey, age 96, on December 1, 2020.

Massey worked in partnership with architect Arthur Erickson from 1963 to 1972. The duo created projects including the Simon Fraser University campus, the MacMillan Bloedel Building, and the University of Lethbridge’s University Hall, along with an initial plan for Robson Square.

Geoffrey Massey’s father, Raymond, was an academy award-nominated actor. His uncle, Vincent, was Governor General of Canada, and headed a royal commission on the arts that resulted in the influential Massey Report. Geoffrey was a fourth-generation member of the family that founded farm equipment manufacturing company Massey-Harris, later Massey-Ferguson.

Geoffrey Massey was born on October 29, 1924 in London, England, to Raymond Massey and Peggy Freemantle. His parents divorced in 1929, and Geoffrey was raised by his father and second wife, Adrienne Allen. The family moved to the United States in 1939, and Geoffrey joined the Canadian army in 1942, becoming a paratrooper. He subsequently studied architecture at Harvard, while Walter Gropius was director of the school. After graduation in 1952, Massey worked briefly in Montreal before moving to Vancouver.

In Vancouver, he worked with Sharp & Thompson, Berwick and Pratt, and became friends with Arthur Erickson, who had also worked there. They were housemates in a small place on Chilco Street, where they lived rent-free in exchange for designing a six-storey apartment that would eventually replace the house. They were known for throwing parties whose guests included young artists and architects such as Jack Shadbolt, Ron Thom, Barry Downs, and Takao Tanabe. They later rented a house together on Bachelor Bay in West Vancouver.

Eager to work on their own, Massey and Erickson worked on a series of houses for acquaintances, including a house for artists Gordon and Marion Smith. In 1955, it won the first Massey Medal in the category of residential houses under $15,000.  (A decade later, Erickson would design another, much larger, house for the Smiths .)

Erickson and Massey also designed a house for artist Ruth Killam, a childhood friend of Erickson’s. Massey and Killam fell in love during the project, and later married, living together at the house, which overlooked Howe Sound. Over the years, Massey created a number of additions to the Whytecliffe property, including a studio that, tragically, was lost in a fire, along with many of Massey’s original drawings.

“I always felt their pavilion-like West Vancouver home designed originally for Ruth Killam was the coolest house anywhere, perfectly integrated into the most spectacular waterfront site in Canada, and adorned with Ruth’s wonderful artistic creations inside and out. It was always a treat to visit—by land or sea,” recalls Geoffrey Erickson, Arthur Erickson’s nephew, who visited often with the Masseys as he was growing up.

Killam-Massey House. Photo courtesy the Erickson Estate Collection.

In 1963, Massey and Erickson’s business partnership formally started when they teamed up to bid on the design for the new Simon Fraser University, atop Burnaby Mountain on the outskirts of Vancouver. Their bold masterplan won the design competition, and they worked with associate architects Zoltan Kiss, Rhone & Iredale, Robert Harrison and McNab Lee & Logan towards completing and opening the university two years later.  Erickson and Massey held complementary roles: Erickson led the design, while Geoffrey provided the administrative oversight essential to realizing a project of this breadth and complexity.

Massey received an honorary Doctor of Laws, honoris causa, from Simon Fraser University in 2016. SFU President Joy Johnson says: “Among the giants of West Coast modernism, Massey and Arthur Erickson’s visionary design for Burnaby campus shaped SFU’s educational philosophy by tearing down walls between faculties, removing silos and creating common areas where disciplines merge and ideas flourish.”

Lethbridge University, designed in 1968 and opened in 1972, displayed a continuation of architectural thinking inspired by ideas of “megastructure,” or buildings constructed at the scale of their natural landscape settings. The plan conceived of a university complex that interwove instructional spaces and informal living areas.

“Geoff was the anchor,” says Bo Helliwell, who worked with Erickson and Massey from 1968 to 1972, a period when Erickson was frequently traveling. Helliwell says that Massey also had a role as a “rainmaker for the firm”—due to his family connections, as well as his physical presence. “He was tall, ridiculously good looking, had a radio announcer’s voice—he had a big presence and hearty laugh.”

The partnership ended amicably in 1972. Massey told a reporter that their interests over the years had changed, and that he and Erickson thought that “it might be more satisfactory to go separate ways.”

Massey was elected a Vancouver City Councillor later in 1972, a position he held for two years. During that period, he played a part in the selection of the winning design for the rehabilitation of Granville Island, by Norm Hotson and Joost Bakker, who entered with the support of their employer, partner Richard Rabnett of Thompson, Berwick and Pratt.

Massey also was a supporter of Art Phillips, who was mayor of Vancouver from 1973 to 1977. Mayor Phillips championed livability and inclusivity, and under his leadership, Vancouver’s city planning came to address environmental and quality-of-life concerns.

Massey continued his own architectural practice over the following decades, working mostly on private homes. His work included a number of projects in Whistler, an area in which he was an early owner and developer.

“Geoff was a really decent person, a really nice guy,” recalls architect Paul Merrick, who worked with Thompson, Berwick and Pratt in the 1970s. “He was kind and gentle, and very easy to like—a big man with a strong presence.”

Throughout his career, Massey was a behind-the-scenes advocate for architectural culture in Canada. He convinced his uncle, Vincent Massey, to hold an invited competition for the design of Massey College at the University of Toronto. He advised on the selection of Arthur Erickson, Carmen Corneil, John B. Parkin and Ron Thom as the invited competitors.  Thom’s design won, resulting in one of the country’s finest works of architecture.

“I came to know [Geoffrey Massey] late in his life through book and advocacy projects that we worked on together,” recalls critic Adele Weder. “He was like a taciturn elder full of memories of an amazing period in Canadian architectural history, stories that he would mete out on rare and treasured occasions. I am so grateful for what he has shared with me and others.”

Geoffrey Erickson says that while Massey was “not a self-promoter,” both he and his wife Ruth were impressive in their abilities. “Ruth was part of the Yellow Door Studio painting group with my grandmother Myrtle Erickson, and became an accomplished painter. Fortunately, the Massey children—Raymond, Vincent, Nathaniel, and Eliza—all inherited their parents’ artistic sensibilities, which they now express in film, photography, and ceramics.”

Massey retired from architecture in 1991. His wife, Ruth Killam, died in 2011. He is survived by children Eliza, Raymond, Vincent and Nathaniel.

The post In Memoriam: Geoffrey Massey appeared first on Canadian Architect.

On March 21st from 5 to 7 pm, Vancouver’s Inform Interiors is hosting a book launch and presentation of Eppich House, The Story of An Arthur Erickson Masterwork II. The presentation will begin at approximately 6pm at the store’s 50 Water Street Showroom.

Eppich House II tells the story, through stunning images and Arthur Erickson’s own words, of how a unique collaboration with “dream clients” resulted in Erickson’s most striking residence. It’s a daring experiment that embodies Erickson’s West Coast modernist ideas about site, material, and form. His first steel residence explores both the structural and aesthetic possibilities of the material, with curved beams, dyed cladding, and milled furnishings designed with Francisco Kripacz—features that would normally be impossible to achieve in residential design. 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 Eppich brothers’ Ebco steel fabricating plants, which built virtually every component of the home. The book also expands on the interior design, landscaping, modern art by Egon Eppich, and extraordinary achievements of the Eppichs.

The house is described in the Foreword as “An episode in Pacific Northwest architectural glamour” by Michelangelo Sabatino (Dean of the College of Architecture of the Illinois Institute of Technology, and co-author with Rhodri Windsor Liscombe of Canada–Modern Architectures in History). Sabatino situates the house within Vancouver’s evolution, Erickson’s larger career, and developments in 20th-century residential architecture in general. Architecture expert Greg Bellerby weaves into his essay extensive interviews with Erickson, Eppich, and architect Nick Milkovich, as well as contributions from landscape architect Cornelia Oberlander.

Series editor and nephew of Arthur Erickson, Geoffrey Erickson, AOCA (Editor of Francisco Kripacz, Interior Design, by Arthur Erickson), will present this extraordinary achievement along with writer Greg Bellerby, and architect Nick Milkovich.

The event is free to attend, but registration is requested at this link.

The post Eppich House II book launches in Vancouver this Thursday appeared first on Canadian Architect.