​Arthur Erickson   Architecture
 

 
 
Veery: Architecture and social, political concerns, does one have business with the other?
Arthur Erickson: I’ve been criticized for saying that I don’t think they have anything to do with one another. I don’t believe in politics; I guess that’s a strange thing to say, but I guess we’re surrounded by politics, but I have an antagonism against the whole thing of power, and that’s what politics is about.
 
Veery: Of your architecture, what is your favorite?
Arthur Erickson: One of my favorites was one of the most rewarding because it taught me the most, which was the Museum of Anthropology up here in Vancouver because I had never understood or appreciated the native art until I started doing that building, and I made the effort to look in to the early villages and everything else to see what was behind it, and it was a kind of revelation that I was able to then incorporate into the building working with the art; I mean it was a wonderful thing to do because you were really providing a background for their fairly very richly carved totemic figures, and it was great art; it was extraordinary art, and also because I felt that I had an insight into their art in different ways: one of the things that interested me is that we usually lump all of Northwest indigenous art into one field of art, and we don’t realize that the styles differed from, say, this area here, the Vancouver Seattle area, up to the Northern part of Alaska as widely as the style of, say, the Renaissance or Gothic did from Italy to Sweden and Norway, Scandinavia, or from Spain, better still, from Spain to Scandinavia. And a lot of the reasons for those differences in style is the climate, the kind of light that the art was made in, and made for, and I wanted to show that in the museum because I thought it was very important for people to understand that this wasn’t just a broad category of art that everyone did on the Northwest coast, but that it was a very distinctive style and changed as you went from the south to the north, and that was largely because of the climate.
 
When I visit some works, I am sort of amazed that I got away with it. I think the same with the courthouse. I think the courthouse was one of the most important buildings I did – the whole courthouse complex, Robson Square, and the courthouse – and that was quite by accident. I didn’t know what to do about a courthouse, and I was very, very frustrated because I didn’t like courthouses. I didn’t like the idea of them and the whole judgmental aspect of them, and I remember going to the chief justice, who was a friend of mine, and asking him, “Now, what would you do, what do you think a courthouse should be?” And he said, “As far as I’m concerned, justice was last carried out in the streets of London in the fifteenth century.” And I said, “You mean public hangings?” And he said, “Yes, by Jove.” So that was a revelation because what it said to me was the courts should be more public, that somehow, instead of being passive to Neoclassical forms and Neoclassical ideas, dignity, pomposity, they should be places that people enjoy going in to and visit with pleasure. And only when they come in to the courts themselves, the courtrooms, should it be serious but not outside them. People will learn and appreciate the law more if they can approach it as a more friendly part of their culture, and a more necessary part of their culture. So that’s what induced me to open the courts entirely and to make the main space of it a public zone where all kinds of activity takes place: it’s used for parties, it’s used for lectures, it’s used for music, and also for the ceremony of the “calling to the bar,” but that’s only once a year, so the rest of the time it becomes a public space that is enjoyed by everybody in Vancouver.
 
Veery: Did you have any tough years of trying to make it all work, money, prestige?
Arthur Erickson: Right from the beginning. Right from now. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. It’s plagued me all my life. Yes.
 
Right at the very beginning. I was fired from every office in Vancouver. Something always happened that somehow or other I managed to get out of that situation, finding another channel that I could work in.
 
I mean after I had been fired by every office and I didn’t know what to do, then somebody came and said, “Look, can you design me a house?” So, that’s what I did; I worked on that with my partner at that time, and that kept me going for a couple of years, and then I think that ran out, and then a doctor friend had bought a house that was almost finished, and he asked me to help him finish it, so I did that, and then we decided to form a construction company, and somebody else asked us to design a house – a very flamboyant artist who wanted an enormous studio – until we built this thing and bankrupted our company, so I was out on the street again.
 
And then just at that point, a friend who had been a fellow student at McGill called me and said, “Look, how about coming down to Oregon and helping me teach? It’s a very mysterious place with a very mysterious curriculum, and you might understand it, you might help me understand it.” So I went down there, which was wonderful because I had applied at UBC, University of British Columbia, and they didn’t want me, and so I taught at the University of Oregon for a year, and that gave me the credentials for when I came back that I could teach at UBC, which I did for seven years.
 
And then I won a competition from Simon Fraser University, and that really started my career. So everything . . . you know, there’s always a peak, and then always, what can I say, an underground, fault, in that peak that would bring me down to earth. I know when Simon Fraser opened, it was really a triumphant opening because we brought the whole thing in on time, given two years to design the whole thing and build it at the same time, and it was a trial by fire, but we made it, and then we were called in to the board of governors, and my partner and I assumed to be congratulated on what we had accomplished. Instead, we had a terrible dressing down by the board, and we were just so defeated that we said, “What should we do, jump off a cliff now or somehow persist?” And we did. And gradually, more things came to us, and that was the beginning. And it was always up and then down and then up and down.
Veery: With the firings, was it just working for other people or was it about the jobs themselves, the buildings?
Arthur Erickson: It was a combination, I think. I wasn’t very good working for other people because I had what you might call visionary ideas that were very impractical, and you’re never really useful. I can understand: I would never have hired somebody like myself because I didn’t have the mechanical proficiency. I couldn’t turn out drawings fast: I was too philosophic about them, thinking about them too much; I couldn’t have earned anyone any money, and I’ve never earned myself any.
 
Veery: What do you look for in an engineer?
Arthur Erickson: I look for him to be an artist in his field, and therefore to not build what I’m conceiving necessarily but to challenge. I find that through that challenge, as I cited with the museum and with Bogue Babicki, we had a better building.
 
Veery: Is architecture better in the sunlight or night?
Arthur Erickson: I think it’s something to be explored twice. I always used to try and arrive in a city when I was bumming through Europe and around the Mediterranean at night so that I would explore twice, so it would have a double reality to me. At night, it would be very mysterious, and I would have to explore it and get a sense of it, and in the daytime, it would be something else. So if you saw it in the daytime first, you’d know what it is at night, in terms of its organization, its street patterns because you would have the colors and the textures and everything else that you read in the day that you could read into it in the night.
Veery: So you want the mystery first.
Arthur Erickson: And exploration. Because it was not obvious.
Veery: And still, when you are experiencing new buildings, do you like to experience them first at night?
Arthur Erickson: Yes.
Veery: And with your own buildings that you’ve done, when you come back to them?
Arthur Erickson: I’d rather see them at night because I don’t like to see the changes that have been made.
 
Veery: Before you got into architecture, what was on your mind as architecture is on your mind today?
Arthur Erickson: Yes, oh yes, the painter, that was it, I went through a period in my teens of sort of extraordinary visual designs certainly influenced by what I had seen at that time, what I had been exposed to, but nevertheless it was a way of organizing the world, the visual world, in to a pattern that brought everything in to a kind of unity. I was considered a bit of a prodigy at that time; I had my work exhibited at the art gallery when I was fifteen, so that was the course I wanted to go on. Everybody discouraged me because it wasn’t a very practical course (it didn’t seem to be), and they said look, consider that to be a hobby, take up something else. Then I was in the army; and my father was anxious that I would not be in the infantry as he had been.
 
My father, having lost his legs in the war, really persuaded me to take an army engineering course at the university which I went in to and didn’t enjoy very much until somebody came around looking for volunteers to go in to a Japanese language course. I jumped at that because I’d always been interested in Japanese art and because I’ve always been exposed to it here. So I was in that for a year.
 
And then I was sent overseas attached to the British army, given a commission even though I hadn’t gone through basic training, and put in Force 136 which was this secret force that nobody knew about; nobody knew what it was all about, and nobody knew who it was working for. So I went in to this very glamorous life of a sort of 007 in India. And it was India of the Raj at that time. So as an officer in the British army you had extraordinary privileges. And it was the India with Ghandi challenging everything. It was a wonderful experience. I had the best time of my life.
 
And we were on the landing force into Malaysia when the Bomb was dropped. I ended up being program director of Radio Kuala Lumpur for a year and then came back home.
 
And I was at loose ends except that I decided what I really wanted to do was to go in to the foreign service because what I really enjoyed was travel and learning about other cultures. These two strains, I think, have continued through my life: that of cultural anthropology and the artistic or creative sides in the visual field.
 
I was about to sign up at UBC and get the courses that I needed in economics and history to go in to the external affairs, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s desert house was published in Fortune. This was a month before registration at the university. Somebody brought it to my parents’s house, and I saw it, and I said, “If an architect can do that, I want to be an architect.” And I cabled all the universities that I had ever heard of in North America, and the only one that replied was McGill in Montreal. So I went down to McGill and never turned back. I loved it the minute I got involved; I dropped my painting, I never drew, sketched, painted, after that, and all of those energies went into design in the architectural field.
 
Veery: What is the most rewarding aspect of architecture?
Arthur Erickson: I think the transformation that occurs in, say, an ordinary project that makes it important to the people of the city or the owners or users, whomever the subject deals with.
Veery: What is it about the transformation?
Arthur Erickson: There are many things that are involved.
 
Our houses. (Everybody relates to a house, they know what a house is.) I think when we do a house, it gives the owner a completely new insight in to his living environment, the property involved, the surroundings. We give them a new world, and a new view on the world, from his site. I mean that sounds pretty ambitious but I don’t think it is, really, because each time we’ve done a building - they have raved about them. They’ve always said, “Look, we never even thought this property could look like that, that it had this potential.” So it’s not a simple setting out of the necessary rooms that everybody has in a house because that’s pretty standard, certainly in North America.
 
It is really showing the beauty of the site, and a certain harmony with the land that you are building on. That aspect of harmony is a very, very important one for me. I’m not an advocate of brash new forms and things like that necessarily, but of doing something that looks as if it absolutely belongs to where it is, and is, in a sense, at peace with the surroundings, bringing that tranquility into the lives of those who live in this particular building.
 
It becomes more complicated when you move from a house to an institution or a commercial building or something else, but you can still provide that aspect of transformation.
 
Veery: What do you look for in a piece of architecture?
Veery: What does it have to have for you to be impressed by it?
Arthur Erickson: Ah h’m. It has to have, what can I call it, a certain inner life. It’s like any work of art that goes beyond a static design and becomes a kind of creature in itself. I think great works of architecture that I’ve admired have that presence, of being almost a vital organism. You can say that about the works of some of the Renaissance architects, the Romanesque architects, the Roman architects, and the modern architects. You find that aspect of presence, but that varies too in different parts of the world.
 
For instance, in Japan, it’s almost the opposite of our view of presence, and that’s because I think we in the West have been reared on the aesthetics of the human body which does have vitality, and therefore physical presence is sort of a natural aspect of Western expression in painting, sculpture, and architecture. In Japan, the aesthetics are drawn from plant life, and plant life doesn’t have that aspect of vitality; it has the aspect of growth, flowering, blossoming, and that’s a very different aspect; and therefore, a piece of architecture in Japan might seem to be much more mysterious to us, not to have that vital presence, but to have a kind of mystery that reveals itself in a different way.
 
It’s like, say, a painting by Picasso or a sculpture by Michelangelo, to take extreme examples; it’s the energy and the perception of the creator himself that’s transferred to that art work. There are no rules that decide it. It’s purely the creative act that takes the vision and perception and energy and emotion, et cetera, of the person who has the vision and infuses the work with that vitality. So it’s not something you can measure.
Veery: It’s something that you can less measure but more feel?
Arthur Erickson: Yes, always, always. In fact, I’ve always told my students when I was teaching that the thing they must not do is think. Their response to anything must be felt but not thought because if it is thought, it becomes a sort of mechanistic thing; it may be logical, sensible, et cetera, but it lacks that - I hate to say emotion because it’s not really emotion, it is better said with the word feeling - feeling and insight. I would say that about any painting of Picasso or any sculpture of Michelangelo.
 
Insight is really something beyond the obvious, which is foresight but not foresight either. It’s seeing something that is not evident. It’s sort of like an inner revelation about something. And there’s no end to the depth to the profundity of insight that you can reach, but most often you don’t go that far. I think the more profound a creation, the more meaningful it is to the viewers, and most often, they don’t know why they find it important, why they go back to it again and again because it doesn’t reveal itself immediately. I think it is the inner presence that a work of art achieves.
 
I think the way I tackle these things is through experiment: there is a certain basic logic that you use in putting a building together: it does have to work, you’re given a budget, you have to be able to build it, but none of those things are really dominant. I always really start with a site, I start with a model of where it’s positioned, whether it’s in the city or out in the country or wherever, and then you begin to look at the parts of it, and this is why it’s like an organism. I mean a building has parts that are related to one another just as our arms and legs and head are related to one another, and they’re all of a certain proportion, a certain relationship, so you can easily, in a way, diagram, roughly, with very rough blocks, what this is, and then you experiment with it, and you may go in different avenues trying things, and there’s no logic for what you eliminate and what direction you go - it is a feeling about it.
 
What feels right, and that’s exactly what happens I think with the painter: he plunges in to something and starts, and something begins to emerge which he didn’t know was there in the first place, and the same with the building: something begins to emerge and there’s a certain place in the whole process where the organization or the organism of the building takes over. Then you are no longer making any decisions about it except those that conform with what the organism is demanding in terms of legitimacy as an organism. I think any painter, any sculptor, any architect, whose work is determined really by his artistry, will tell you that there is a point when the building, or the subject of your art, takes over and establishes the organizing principle that you have to follow as the creator.
 
 
Veery: Do you picture yourself as part of any tradition?
Arthur Erickson: Yes, the modernist, but I also think of the modernist tradition in a slightly different way.
 
I think even when I was doing early buildings here, I didn’t seem to be part of the local modernist tradition. In fact, I was sort of doing something else, so I shouldn’t say modernist because we’re categorized by that term and because I didn’t follow many of the precepts of modernism, that is clarity and structure. I remember at McGill, the first things that we were taught was to put in a structural grid and then, you know, the partitions and everything else sort of floating around it, and that was very Meisian-Corbusier at that time, but I’ve never practiced that; I’ve always felt that the spaces were important, and you really worked those out, and then, afterwards, you try to find within those spaces a logical structure, so I was doing it backwards; and also even structurally, modernism demanded clear and efficient structure whereas mine has been more, I would say, for different reasons that I would almost call Expressionistic, not in the wild sense, in the sense that I feel a building is more mysterious if you can’t figure out how it’s built. A building is more rewarding when it’s not obvious in that way; it becomes rather boring when you know what the solution is, and when you can figure it out, and you can categorize it very easily. I think a building is much more rewarding if it takes work to figure it out.
 
As at the museum, I was going through a period when I developed a system of post and beam, which was very standard procedure at that time, whereby I cut the post and the beam out of the same wood section which is illogical in so far as a beam has to be deeper than the cross section of a post. But I found that if I took the beam and lumped the end off and used that end for the post, the structure became very quiet; it didn’t express the tension and the work that each of those members was doing. The structure almost became more abstract, and to me that was more satisfying, it felt better, it felt quieter. In the museum, I had a very good structural engineer, and I had insisted that the depth of the channels that spans between the columns would be the same depth as the width of the columns, even though some of them spanned only forty feet and the others were one hundred and twenty feet, and of course the engineer argued that with a hundred and twenty feet, it should vary between a four foot depth to a twelve foot depth, and I said, “No, they’ve got to all be the same,” and so he said, “Well, Arthur, find another engineer.” Then, a week later, he phoned me back and said, “I think I’ve got a solution.” And that was not to span between the columns but to span in the opposite direction which nobody sees or understands when they see the great hall in the museum, and I think that adds to its mystery.
Veery: Who was the engineer?
Arthur Erickson: It was Bogue Babicki.
 
Veery: What’s the best thing someone could say about your work?
Arthur Erickson: Well, I should say that I get it all the time, ha ha ha ha ha ha. Well, I think that they like it, that it’s something, for whatever reasons, that they get something from, and I think different people respond in different ways, but it’s very rewarding to have someone come up and say they’re very impressed by your work and it’s meant a lot to them, and especially amongst the users, the people that use it frequently, work in it, and that sort of thing, and whoever it is (whether it’s the head of the company, though it’s probably seldom the head of the company, it’s more like the secretary or someone like that) who comes and says, “I work in this every day, and it just gives me so much pleasure.”
 
Veery: Who are your favorite architecture critics or writers or theorists?
Arthur Erickson: I don’t think any of them. No, at one time, I thought Ada Louise Huxtable was a very good critic, and I think she got lost in the postmodern and in the recent period of deconstructionism.
 
Veery: Who are your favorite writers (novelists, poets) and why?
Arthur Erickson: It would be the Bloomsbury group. I haven’t reread them recently. I think primarily because they are very painterly writers.
 
Veery: What do you look for in an engineer?
Arthur Erickson: I look for him to be an artist in his field, and therefore to not build what I’m conceiving necessarily but to challenge. I find that through that challenge, as I cited with the museum and with Bogue Babicki, we had a better building.
 
Veery: Would you like to clarify any positions or misconceptions, through external sources, people, applied to your work, in a brief way?
Arthur Erickson: Ah, it doesn’t leak.


1997 - 1999

​On site June 14, 2026
 
 
 
 
 
 

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