Word: ericksons
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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North Americans have built handsome cities and grown tired of them, as children grow tired of their presents after Christmas. Few architects are as aware of such urban waste as Canada's Arthur Erickson, 54, and few have done more to restore vitality to the inner city. His latest and most ambitious undertaking is a combination of function and fantasy in the heart of his native Vancouver. Formally opened in September, the downtown complex has already put new fizz in the life of a provincial city...
...Erickson's oeuvre in Canada's largest West Coast city is a multilevel, three-block megastructure that blends greenery, glass, pools and waterfalls, ramps, steps and terraces, domes, blossoms and trees...
Such objections are not new to Erickson, whom the architectural world generally regards as one of its most thoughtful and innovative builders. He has been designing houses, corporate complexes and public works (two enchanting Toronto subway stations, the striking Simon Fraser University outside Vancouver) since 1963. He first attracted wide international acclaim with the stunning Canadian Pavilion at Montreal's Expo '67, and his teasing, mirror-sheathed pavilion at Japan's Expo '70 won the top architectural award among 1,000 buildings from 78 countries...
...outwardly gregarious but intensely speculative, ascetic man, Erickson always sets out, as in the Vancouver courthouse, to build imaginatively around the activities of the people who will inhabit the building. Says he: "We must think of our cities as places to live in and enjoy rather than places to work in and get out of." He is a master of scale and placement and insists on a "dialogue between space and setting," in which site determines form. A handsome, blue-eyed bachelor, he is of Swedish-Irish descent, and both dour and mischievous strains can be detected in his designs...
...Erickson has immersed himself in European and Japanese architecture, spending almost half his adult life abroad. He is currently putting up a new building for Saudi Arabia's ministry of foreign affairs and a whole new city in Kuwait, and he hopes to build in China a tourist hotel that will incorporate not merely Western technology but native talents, tastes and materials as well. Indeed, China's drab and joyless metropolitan centers may even be ready for a Great Wall of Erickson...