Architect Arthur Erickson Dies at 84

Canadian architect Arthur Erickson—best known for designing Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Vancouver’s Robson Square, and Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto&#8212died Wednesday in Vancouver at the age of 84. Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne sums up the contradictions that characterized Erickson’s five-decade career: “He was a dedicated, widely traveled scholar of architectural history who found himself strangely out of step with the post-modern movement of the 1970s and ’80s, which sought to reassert the value of historic styles,” writes Hawthorne in today’s LAT obituary of the Vancouver-born architect. “He was a fierce critic of the dehumanizing effects of what we now call globalization whose biggest projects&#8212the sleek, mirrored-glass California Plaza certainly among them&#8212can be faceless and alienating.” And then there was his predilection for adding concrete to a part of the world where gray was already in abundance. Adds Hawthorne, “he was a Vancouver architect whose buildings tend to look terrible in the rain.”

In memory of Erickson, we invite you to read a snippet of a speech he delivered at McGill University’s School of Architecture in 2000. Here, he addresses the “sad caper” of 1980′s historicism-cum-post-modernism and warns of the creeping dangers of a public easily entranced by antique references. We suggest reading it in the character of The Music Man‘s Harold Hill addressing the citizens of River City (We’ve got trouble!).

So it was no surprise that the reaction to the bareness of ill conceived modernist buildings was to revert in the 80′s to a revival of historicism in the guise of “post-modernism”….That Dark Age is thankfully over but cultural insecurity is always there, hidden in the basement of our psyches&#8212ready to spring out whenever brave confidence falters. It lingers in the gated communities where make-believe has become an adult panacea. It lingers with the developers who promote kitsch because it sells. It lingers with the newly rich and the establishment who need to consolidate social standing with class accepted standards. It lingers in every shopping centre, multiplex, restaurant, Vegas casino where illusion is needed to disguise the emptiness within.

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