Arts and Literature in Canada:Views from Abroad, Les arts et la ...

The Architecture of Arthur Erickson: Redeeming ModernityPlacing Erickson in the Project of ModernityFor all intents and purposes, Erickson is an inheritor of the project ofmodernity, an enterprise dating to the 18th century. His professional training atMcGill University was cast in the then influential mode of the Bauhaus. Whenhe entered architectural practice in Vancouver in 1953, a mature modernism,the International Style, was emerging forcefully in North America. Of course,modernism is a self-conscious term, attaining meaning from how an era viewsitself in relation to its past. 4 Complicating the issue, modernism in architectureand the “Modern Movement” are readily conflated.Rooted in the Enlightenment, modernism postulated universal principles ofart, science and morality based upon the autonomous laws of their inner logic.As a larger enterprise, it has been manifested diversely in continually evolvingarchitectural expressions from Romantic Classicism to the high VictorianGothic, evident in Canada from British colonial classicism to the VictorianDominion Parliament Buildings. During the first decades of the 20th century,the project of modernity reached new extremes by exalting the present andrevolting against the normative functions of history. This spirit was embodiedin parallel, yet distinct, architectural expressions—the DeStijl, Futurist, andBauhaus styles in Europe, and the manner of Frank Lloyd Wright in NorthAmerica—which together constitute the so-called Modern Movement,culminating in the International Style.In their indictments of 20th-century modernism's utopian presumptions,indifference to context, and fetishizing of production, proponents ofpostmodernism have been notorious for presenting a monolithic picture of amodern architecture that was not merely hegemonic—the normative productof a dominant track of aesthetic and cultural theories, but absolutelyhomogenous. 5 Such a mythic modernism never existed, particularly not inNorth America where, as Huyssen (1986, p. 185) pointed out, the initialutopian visions of modernism were never in favor and the promotion of theInternational Style was the result of corporate and governmententrepreneurship. This is especially true of Canada, where modernism, whichattained its apex in the architecture of the 1960s, was late to triumph. Theinherent brutality and placelessness of modernism's machine aesthetic isapparent in such prominent works of Canadian architecture as the PlaceBonaventure by Afflect, Desbarats, Dimakpoulos, Lebensold, Sise (Montreal,1967), and through the seminal works of John Parkin in association with Miesvan der Rohe for the Toronto Dominion Bank (Toronto, 1964-72) and withViljo Revell for the Toronto City Hall (1965). The development of such awider framework is critical for positioning Erickson in the project ofmodernity, and the discourse that progressively challenged its authority.While Erickson appreciated the modern ideals of structural honesty and formalefficiency, an intuitive response to environmental context is evident in hisbuildings as early as the first Smith House (West Vancouver, B. C., 1953) and29