Arthur Erickson (1925-2009)

With apologies to my wife, one of my most vivid memories of our honeymoon in 1996 -- we travelled by rail across the Canadian Rockies -- was the discovery of a couple of intriguing buildings in Vancouver, where our rail trip began.

Knowing nothing about the structure or its design, we stumbled into a building known as the Law Courts, designed by Arthur Erickson. I did not learn until my return home that Erickson was perhaps Canada's most famous contemporary architect. I just knew this was like no court house I had ever seen. It consists of terraced banks of courtrooms, all arrayed under a great glass canopy.

Henry Cobb's federal courthouse on the fan pier in Boston owes something to Erickson's triumph in Vancouver. Coincidentally, we spent the first night of our honeymoon at a Boston hotel that overlooked what was then the construction site of Cobb's building. Erickson's is more earthbound and lush -- greenery was everywhere -- both, alas, consign the courtrooms themselves to windowlessness but at both buildings the terraces are a splendid alternative to the neoclassical bombast of so many buildings associated with the law.

Erickson died earlier this month. It is sad that most Americans, who cannot name five U.S. architects, much less any Canadian ones, know nothing of Erickson's work. One prominent example of it that many Americans have seen is the Canadian Embassy, which is on Pennsylvania Avenue just a couple of blocks from the Capitol. Here Erickson is neoclassical, but playfully so, as befits a Canadian incursion into the heart of our neoclassical federal precinct. (A picture I took in January appears at the beginning of this post.)

As it turns out, Erickson had some pointed -- and, in some circles, quite famous -- words about incursions into other people's contries, at least when conducted by tourists whether on their honeymoons or otherwise.

"Though we may be beginning to restrain the exploitation of nature, we are yet to have a conscience at all about the exploitation of human cultures," Erickson said in a speech to a group of Canadian bankers way back in 1972.

"We are expanding across the world: the race for air routes laces a network over the globe, leaving hardly an island large enough for a jet strip without the threat of one. And tied into landing rights, are hotel rights, and each jet strip is accompanied by burgeoning caravanseries to house the voracious tourist, as hungry and as indiscriminate as a plague of locusts.

"Worldwide tourism looms on the horizon as the gravest threat to human cultures - a threat because its ultimate result will be to destroy the very reason for its existence - the variety and interest of the world at large.

"The tourist, far from being a sensitive explorer, transports his own values and demands to his destinations and implants them like an infectious disease decimating whatever values existed before. It will be an enormous investment down the drain in short order unless precautions are taken now, and on a global scale, to soften this impact."

Wow! Them's fightin' words, particularly from an architect. I don't think my wife and I did any harm in Vancouver as we admired Erickson's law courts, but Canadia is not Tahiti or Tanzania, the two examples Erickson gave in his speech.

"I have come to plead for conservation, not of the environment, but of human culture, which is much more fragile than nature herself," Erickson said to the bankers by way of conclusion. "We needn't destroy other cultures with the force of our own and destroy, at the same time, the chance to renew ourselves by our experience of them. For our view of the universe is necessarily limited and we need other viewpoints to gain perspective."

And he added a few words that are well worth reading by bankers in today's greed-induced financial morass:

"I have come to plead, also, for the comprehensive approach as the most urgent issue facing us today. We can no longer afford the short term and limited view of things because of the broad impact of the consequences of our decisions. You, as bankers, cannot afford to be concerned with only the economic aspects of projects that you finance. There may be serious implications on the natural environment, on the urban environment, on human culture, which at some future time may even be considered crimes against mankind."

An architect willing to speak that kind of truth to that kind of power was probably courageous enough to design some intriguing buildings. Erickson definitely did.