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

IJCS/RIÉCthe abstract modernism of the Anthropology Museum and the indigenousvernacular of its artifacts. They are synchronic tensions that reveal coexistent,multiple meanings in an architecture that responds to peculiarities of cultureand place within a tectonically sophisticated rhetoric of design. Erickson'sbuildings possess the accumulated knowledge of a career that has spannedmore than three decades, from the singular modernism of the 1950s throughthe pluralistic postmodernism of the 1980s. It embodies ways of knowingplace, space and technology that are experientially inclusive, knowledge andtechniques that cannot be eliminated from collective memory or professionalcodes by a critically prescribed declaration of cultural rupture alone.Modernity was conceived as the project of the heroic architect, both masterbuilder and foresighted theorist preoccupied with how things ought to be, anauthoritarian position widely implied in the advocacy of modernism andinfluentially practiced by its figureheads Mies van der Rohe, LeCorbusier andFrank Lloyd Wright. 11 Erickson came of age in this intellectual climate.However, his work always suggested a concern for the mediation of howthings were and how things are—a postmodern cultural construct, but one thatproved, for Erickson, unavoidable in the Canadian Northwest wheredifference and diversity are operative cultural facts of life. There is little socialhierarchy in Canada's decentered, multi-cultural experience that “links upneatly” (Collins, 1989, p. 114). The master-narrative of modernism simplycould not accommodate such heterogeneity; neither could any traditionallyconceivedideology of national identity in Canadian art and architecture.If there is a uniquely Canadian edge to the reassessment of Erickson's“modern” architecture, it may well lie in postmodern culture's realization thatcontemporary civilization is fragmented and conflicted. Cultural negotiation,involving a continual decentering and recentering of dominant andmarginalized cultures rather than a simple struggle for dominance, figuressignificantly in postmodern theory (see especially Gramsci, 1971; Collins,1989). This describes the Canadian situation; there is no discrete architecturalexpression that is properly or holistically “Canadian.” 12 Erickson'sarchitecture neither seeks to representationally revive a lost vernacular nor toteleologically idealize progress. In the architect's own words, his work is “acontemporary evocation of the spirit of past experience, involving a merger ofutility, culture, and beauty of place” (Erickson, 1988, p. 184). It underscoresthat architectural meaning is not defined by formal constructs alone. As such, itis beyond period style. It simply becomes one way of coming to terms withtraditions of the past, uniqueness of place, and the conflicts they engender inthe present.Notes1. A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the 1991 Annual Meeting of theUniversities Art Association of Canada in a session entitled “Modernism in CanadianArchitecture.”40