By Frank Moher
Arthur Erickson, the great architect who died in Vancouver yesterday at age 84, was an artist who became great by remaining where he was. This was in marked contrast to many other western Canadian artists and thinkers, who achieved fame and success by moving away — or at least thought they needed to. 
It probably never occurred to Marshall McLuhan, born Winnipeg, raised in Edmonton, not to try to leave. Atom Egoyan ditto. But Erickson made a choice early on to remain in his community, — though there was, as per McLuhan and Egoyan, an element of careerism to his decision. “I intend to stay,” he told an interviewer in 1964, “because the potential is fantastic and because there are so few places left in the world with this emergent aspect.”
His bet paid off. At the time of that interview, Erickson was finishing his work on Simon Fraser University, the design, executed on a mountaintop in the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby, that would make him famous. Other of his finest works, such as the Law Courts in Vancouver or the Glass Museum in Tacoma, Washington, rest in their surroundings and play with light and water in a way that more conspicuous commissions — Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto, the (unfortunate) Canadian Embassy in Washington — simply cannot. Erickson’s genius lay not only in his understanding of the landscape but of the climate into which he was born. It was an aesthetic exquisitely rooted in absence. “An architect always imagines his buildings in sunlight and casting shadows,” he told that same interviewer, “but here there aren’t strong shadows, no highlights. In a sunny climate you are dealing with a white ground and a dark sky. It is the reverse here. You have a dark ground and a white sky. This means you see things in silhouette, without highlight, and psychologically it can be unpleasant. One is in a dark area and the light is above as at sunset — a melancholy feeling. This is the situation we live in most of the time.”
Read more in “Arthur Erickson: The Lost interview.” And below, we offer the best tribute we can to his work:
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