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

The Architecture of Arthur Erickson: Redeeming Modernityand the modern tectonics legitimate each other. What is most remarkable isErickson's ability to invoke this dialogue without literal quotation. Hisachievement speaks to a liberation from strictly constructed tenets ofmodernism that Robert A.M. Stern (1990. p. 173) identified as the ability “toenjoy recognizable imagery in abstract ways.”Figure 10.Arthur Erickson, Helmut Eppich House, Vancouver, British Columbia, 1973.Redeeming Modernity in PostmodernityThrough the course of this century, the cultural constructs of modernism andpostmodernism have cyclically established hegemonic norms, some dominantlogic against which progress, identity, and difference might be measured. AsFrederic Jameson (1991, p. 6) pointed out, this has not occurred withoutconsiderable overlapping and interrelationship. In literary critique,postmodernism has been characterized as “a simultaneous presence...withother pre-modernist, modernist, and non-modernist styles, all enjoyingsignificant degrees of popularity with different audiences and institutionswithin a specific culture...It incorporates the heterogeneity of those conflictingstyles rather than simply asserting itself as the newest and most radicalalternative” (Collins, 1989, p. 114). The same may be said of Erickson'sarchitecture. If Erickson's work resonates with postmodernity it is not in areaction against modernism, but through the establishment of a widerframework which modifies, but does not wholly redefine the architect'sgrammar and syntax of form and meaning. Tensions between conflicting typesof representation appear at several levels—extratextually in the comparison ofhis late-modern Law Courts and his postmodern Chancery, intertextually in39