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

IJCS/RIÉCFigure 4.Arthur Erickson, Provincial Government Offices and Law Courts Complex, Robson Square,Vancouver, British Columbia, 1973. Entrance to the Law Courts (author).confronted the paradox of modern civilization set forth by Paul Ricoeur (1965,p. 276-277): “...to become modern and to return to sources; ...to revive an olddormant civilization and take part in universal civilization.”Sometime later, similar questions were posed by proponents ofpostmodernism, but Erickson failed to sense their resonance with his ownbeliefs. His critique of the movement was pointed: “Postmodernism wascasting us back into a world of eclecticism which itself reflected a sad culturalinsecurity in the infant North American situation” (Erickson, 1988, pp. 178-179). Erickson reacted to the lowest common denominators of the postmodernpolemic: literal historicism and burlesqued pastiche. 8 Neither dismemberedclassical elements nor scenographic facades that camouflaged modern spacesand systems would appeal to Erickson who extolled the vernacular andutilitarian traditions in North American architecture (see Erickson, 1986).However, there is a presence of the past in both the postmodern discourse andErickson's rhetoric, expressed through their parallel demands for anarchitecture whose meaning would emanate from close experience andtradition.It is an oversimplification to suggest, as Erickson did, that postmodernismmerely reacts against modernism. According to literary critic Jim Collins(1989, p. 27), “postmodernism depends on a juxtaposition of discourses thatare not only recognizable and discrete, but possessed of specific aesthetic32