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

IJCS/RIÉCFigure 7.Canadian Chancery. Detail, courtyard colonnade of cast aluminum columns (author).In Erickson's urban works, contextual connections through implicit sense ofplace and recognizable imagery merge new structures with the heterogeneousfabric of the late 20th-century city. Contrary to modernism's ambivalence toplace, they create what urban geographer David Harvey (1989, p. 65) hascalled “structures of feeling.” In the Vancouver Law Courts, more evocative ofa fragmented urban village than a rationalist city, the traditionalmonumentality of the courthouse is conveyed abstractly in concrete terracesand space-framed spine (Figure 8). Visual continuity with the city is achievedby the transparency of the skin, and, moreover, through internal and externalvistas that lead one through purposefully sculpted interior and exteriorlandscapes into the Central Business District. The Canadian Chancery, whichconquers time and place in explicit textual references to the official classicismof surrounding icons on Pennsylvania Avenue—America's Main Street,presents a very different contextual response (Figure 9). Nevertheless,36