Working the Dead Beat

by Sandra Martin

  The result was a modernist architecture that combined classical Eastern elements and First Nations influences in signature buildings made out of contemporary materials, especially glass, wood, and his beloved concrete. Many architects are technically accomplished and build from the inside out, according to the principle of form following function. Erickson was the opposite. A visionary, he created from the outside in, invariably reminding you of the natural world on the other side of the glass wall, in buildings that weren’t always waterproof but rarely failed to inspire. Phyllis Lambert, founder of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, commented after Erickson’s death in 2009: “He created architecture of the earth and out of the earth and he has done it with extraordinary humanity.”

  ARTHUR CHARLES ERICKSON was born in Vancouver on June 14, 1924, the elder son of Oscar Erickson and his wife, Myrtle (née Chatterton). His parents had met in Winnipeg and became engaged before his father went overseas with the 78th Winnipeg Grenadiers in the First World War. The relationship nearly died on the battlefield. A shell burst between Erickson’s knees at Amiens and he was left for dead until a nurse recognized him and arranged for him to be taken to a field hospital. After surgeons amputated what remained of his legs, everybody — including the patient — thought the marriage was off. His fiancée disagreed. As she said later, “I’d rather marry a man with wooden legs than a wooden head.”

  In a series of interviews with Edith Iglauer for the New Yorker (which later became the basis for her book Seven Stones), Erickson remembered his father as a conservative both socially and politically, but a kind and humble man who behaved as though he didn’t have a disability. His mother was gregarious, an innovative cook, an aficionado of Canadian art, and an expansive hostess who kept the house teeming with visitors.

  Erickson began painting when he was about thirteen, using the bedroom walls as canvases for a rich jumble of plants, fish, and animals. At sixteen he won an honourable mention for two of his abstract pastels in a show at the Vancouver Art Gallery and attracted the attention of Group of Seven artist Lawren Harris, who became a family friend. Beset with career suggestions and torn between a fascination with biology and a creative passion for painting, Erickson asked Harris what path he should follow and received the curt but excellent advice “it’s your life, not mine,” and, therefore, “it is your decision.” Forever after, when aspiring acolytes asked Erickson the same question, he repeated Harris’s mantra.

  Erickson entered an engineering program at the University of British Columbia in September 1942, nine months after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Like so many other young men, he joined the Canadian Officers’ Training Corps. Within a year he had taken intensive instruction at a Japanese-language school and had received a commission in the Intelligence Corps of the army. He was stationed in India as a commando in a field broadcasting unit waiting for deployment behind enemy lines in Malaya — a precarious proposition — when Japan finally surrendered. He was demobilized with the rank of captain.

  Back in Vancouver in 1946, he began studying economics, history, and Japanese with a view to a diplomatic career or perhaps anthropology or archaeology. Then, by chance, he saw colour photographs of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West in Fortune magazine. “If you can do as imaginative and creative a thing as that in architecture, I want to be an architect,” he remembered thinking. As a Westerner, he was curious about the East, and although it was barely a month before the academic year began, he wired a slew of universities, including Harvard, MIT, and the University of Toronto. McGill was the only one that replied, so that is where he headed.

  Four years later he graduated first in his class with an honours degree in architecture. “I didn’t listen to my teachers much, but I had three people who influenced me — all keenly observant, original spirits,” he told Iglauer. The first and the strongest was his unconventional mother, then Lawren Harris, and finally Gordon Webber, a design professor at McGill. “He was very vague, never explained anything clearly, which forced you to see for yourself. I don’t think I would be as receptive to everything as I am had it not been for Gordon Webber.”

  Surprisingly, he didn’t mention Frank Lloyd Wright. The summer before his final year at McGill, he went to visit Wright at Taliesin East, in Wisconsin, which he later described as “an absolutely beautiful blending of building and landscape.” When Wright invited him to spend the year at Taliesin, he gladly accepted and raced back to Montreal to pack. But he changed his mind when he learned that he was likely to win the travelling scholarship awarded to McGill’s top graduating student in architecture.

  Why would he give up a chance to study with Frank Lloyd Wright in favour of travelling to as many architectural sites as the $1,500 stipend would allow? “He was turning out little toy soldiers and I wanted to find my own way,” Erickson replied in an interview in 2008. Intuitively, he knew he had to escape Wright’s shadow and see the world with his own eyes. He eked out his funds over three years before returning to Vancouver and the workaday world of Canadian architecture in the mid-1950s.

  Several firms hired him and a couple fired him before he began teaching at UBC in 1957 and hooked up with Geoffrey Massey, the architect son of actor Raymond Massey. Together they designed houses for friends and did solo projects such as Erickson’s Filberg house in Comox, on Vancouver Island. He quit teaching in 1963, the same year that he and Massey scored their huge architectural coup to design Simon Fraser University in nearby Burnaby. Having ignored most of the competition specifics, they attended the award announcement only out of curiosity about the winning design and were stunned to hear their names announced.

  The Erickson-Massey proposal combined visions of the Acropolis in Athens with the clusters of terraced houses clinging to the hillsides of Italy. It emphasized the horizontal rather than the vertical, as though the mountain itself was part of the design, and knitted the “learning elements” of the university together rather than separating them into isolated units or colleges, as in the Oxbridge tradition. Construction began in 1964 and the almost “instant university” opened eighteen months later, on September 9, 1965.

  The success of Simon Fraser meant the duo was in demand for innovative, statement-making buildings, including the University of Lethbridge. As with SFU, the Lethbridge design linked the disparate studying and living parts of the university. As always, the site influenced the design. Instead of perching atop a mountain, the University of Lethbridge is nestled into the tawny ravines of the headlands of the Oldman River Valley. The roofline remains a constant flat plane, barely rising above the horizon, while the building plunges into the crevices created by the barren, undulating landscape.

  After the Erickson-Massey partnership dissolved, Erickson formed his own practice in 1972 and embarked on even bigger projects, such as the breathtaking post-and-beam construction of the Museum of Anthropology at UBC and the massive concrete headquarters of forestry giant MacMillan Bloedel in downtown Vancouver. The strong horizontals evoke Haida longhouses built out of mammoth cedar logs and planks.

  The Robson Square redevelopment was a series of structures, built out of concrete, glass, and wood, that turned the twentieth-century skyscraper on its side and opened normally sequestered law courts to the gaze of the public. Nicholas Olsberg, author of Arthur Erickson: Critical Works, says that with this building Erickson “re-introduced a spiritual dimension to architecture.”

  Like his friend and intellectual soulmate Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Erickson was an iconoclast who railed against authority and regimentation. As prime minister, Trudeau overrode his own bureaucrats in the early 1980s and personally appointed Erickson to design the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C., on a prime site between the Capitol and the White House.

  Confronted with a lengthy list of neoclassical design requirements to make the building conform to existing structures, Erickson sent up the process in his cheeky creation of de rigueur columns supporting a “Rotunda of the
Provinces” at the southeast corner of the embassy. The twelve columns — one for each province and territory — are made from aluminum, so they are too lightweight to support anything. Instead of making visitors walk through the columns to enter the embassy, he created a tiny entrance off to the side, all to poke a little fun and to create a disparity between the appearance and the reality of the building. He even toyed with the idea of installing an empty chair in the rotunda facing the Capitol, as an ironic reference to the Lincoln Memorial, but thought better of the notion.

  The more famous Erickson became, the more projects he took on. Eventually he opened offices in several locations around the world — at one point he was operating five concurrently — stretching his financial reach far beyond the management abilities of a single architect, especially one who was more interested in design than administration. Thinking, creating, and envisaging were his strengths; the humdrum business of budgets and accounts receivable he left to others. As he said to Iglauer in 1981, with what in retrospect seems like astonishing insouciance, “I don’t want to go to meetings . . . I hardly know who works for me. It is a great disadvantage to a client, I suppose, that I’m not running the office . . . [but] I’m involved in all the design. That’s what I enjoy . . . That’s why I’m hired.”

  Not surprisingly, the firm became lumbered with debt in the recession of the late 1980s. After closing his Toronto and Los Angeles offices, he formed a new company, Arthur Erickson Architectural Corporation, in 1991, the year before he declared personal bankruptcy, listing more than $10.5 million in liabilities. The only asset he reported was his six-hundred-square-foot home and garden in the Point Grey district of Vancouver.

  Supporters formed a group called the Arthur Erickson House and Garden Foundation, which became the registered owner of his house, allowing Erickson to continue to live there at a modest rent. Sometime later he began sharing offices and working with architect Nick Milkovich, a former student and long-time colleague. The two men collaborated on a number of projects, including the Portland Hotel, a public housing project in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside; the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington; and the Waterfall Building in Vancouver.

  As he approached his eighties, Erickson’s health began to fail as he struggled with the combined effects of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. At the same time, some of his dearest friends and romantic partners were dying of HIV/AIDS and related diseases. Particularly hard was the suicide in April 2000 of his former lover and long-time collaborator, the interior designer Francisco Kripacz, whom he had known since the 1960s.

  At an interview early in 2008, in the offices he shared with Milkovich, Erickson was exquisitely groomed as always. Wearing a finely tailored blue suit, a matching striped shirt, and patterned blue tie, he looked almost dainty because of his medium height and slender build. He was magnetic and charming, but it quickly became apparent that his short-term memory was wobbly. He could talk in detail about dinner-table conversations with his parents when he was growing up in Vancouver, but larger queries about his career left him straining to remember. It was as though he understood the questions, and knew where he intended to go in answering them, but lost his way en route.

  On some points, though, he was very clear, such as why he chose concrete early on as a building material. “It was cheap and so it was very competitive in the market. And I think I just loved it because of its relationship to stone and to quarries.”

  When asked about the Graham house in Vancouver, which had been demolished, and Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto, which was modified to improve the acoustics, he grew philosophical about how he coped with the demands of clients and the way they might later use and abuse his vision. “You have to walk away,” he said, “but you never leave it entirely. It is like mud being thrown in your face and you just have to put up with it.”

  The effort of being interviewed must have been exhausting for him, but he was so patient with himself and my questions that I was humbled by his grace, even as I was touched by his fragility. Once so opinionated and confident as a world traveller, teacher, and visionary architect, he now seemed as fragile as a wilting flower.

  Although he loved living in his home and garden in Point Grey, he had reached the point where he needed more care and eventually moved into a nursing home. He died in Vancouver of complications from dementia on May 20, 2009, at age eighty-four.

  Oscar Peterson

  Jazz Pianist and Composer

  August 15, 1925 – December 23, 2007

  A GIANT OF a man stretching to more than six feet in height and weighing in excess of two hundred pounds, Oscar Peterson could caress the keys with gentleness, make them swing with abandon, and boogie as though tomorrow were an abstract concept. His large hands gave him a reach that allowed him to roam across the keyboard like a hereditary ruler inspecting his domain. Duke Ellington called him the maharajah of the keyboard; Count Basie said he “plays the best ivory box I’ve ever heard.”

  Art Tatum was Peterson’s idol, but most jazz fans think Peterson was right up there with the legendary player. He was blessed with perfect pitch, but it was his determination, his obsessive practising, recording, and touring, and his infectious delight in playing that made him a star. He grew up in a lower-middle-class family in the Little Burgundy neighbourhood of Montreal, the same area where former governor general Michaëlle Jean and her family would settle after their arrival from Haiti in 1968. Prejudice was ubiquitous and opportunities were scarce and low-level, but Peterson, the son of an immigrant railway porter, was raised in a stable home where discipline was rampant and mastering a musical instrument was as rigorously enforced as church attendance.

  Racism in Canada during Peterson’s youth and early adulthood was not legalized or institutionalized, but it did exist as a nasty, unofficial blight directed sporadically at all those seen as alien to a primarily white-skinned Anglo-Saxon Canada; reviled groups included not just blacks but also Asians and First Nations. Skin colour wasn’t the only trigger for prejudice — anti-Semitism was rife, francophones were derided as priest-ridden rubes, and immigrants in general were suspect. The law might rule that all were equal, but custom dictated otherwise.

  Peterson’s soaring talent enabled him to surmount racial barriers that were more flexible in Canada than in countries with entrenched slave cultures such as the United States. As a teenager he played in the all-white Johnny Holmes Orchestra, the best swing band in Montreal, and he landed a solo radio show. In a career lasting more than sixty years, Peterson made jazz swing on both sides of the border, developed a musical community based in Canada that stretched around the world, and broke down racial barriers long before there was a Charter of Rights and Freedoms. He released more than two hundred recordings, won eight Grammy Awards, played thousands of live concerts, and composed pieces for piano, trio, quartet, and big band.

  He even sang, in a voice that echoed the light baritone of Nat King Cole, who first became a big name in the late 1930s as the piano-playing leader of a jazz trio. After Peterson recorded an album of vocals in the mid-1950s in which he accompanied himself on the piano, Cole, who by then was a celebrated singer, jokingly said: “I’ll make a deal with you, Oscar. You don’t sing and I won’t play the piano.” And that’s what happened, until Cole died in 1965 and Peterson released With Respect to Nat, a dozen tunes that Peterson sang in tribute to his mentor and friend.

  Among Peterson’s notable recordings are The Complete Young Oscar Peterson; Swinging Brass with the Oscar Peterson Trio; The Oscar Peterson Trio at the Stratford Shakespearean Festival; The Way I Really Play; Exclusively for My Friends; Oscar Peterson: London House Sessions; and Oscar Peterson: The Trio. His best-known compositions are “Hymn to Freedom,” inspired by the civil rights movement in the United States in the 1960s, which appears on his album Night Train, a bestselling record from its release in 1962, and Canadiana Suite, a tribute to this country and to the memory of his father’s work on the r
ailway in the way it moves thematically across the country from east to west.

  The intricacy and speed with which Peterson could stroke the keys was so daunting that some critics complained he was too much about technique and too little about interpretation. Peterson himself supplied the best rejoinder: “Technique is something you use to make your ideas listenable,” he said to jazz writer Len Lyons. “You learn to play the instrument so you have a musical vocabulary, and you practise to get your technique to the point you need to express yourself, depending on how heavy your ideas are.”

  His signature style, which incorporated swing and bop, was set early on, which prompted conclusions that he wasn’t innovative. True perhaps in the traditional sense of developing a new style of music, but Peterson’s genius lay in another area: he set the standard for the modern jazz combo. He excelled at playing with others, as a sensitive accompanist to singers such as Ella Fitzgerald and trumpeter Roy Eldridge, in duos with pianist Count Basie and guitarist Joe Pass, and especially in the trios he formed with bassist Ray Brown, guitarist Herb Ellis, and, after Ellis joined Alcoholics Anonymous and gave up touring, drummer Ed Thigpen.

  Instead of merely following Peterson’s lead, all the musicians, Peterson included, played with, and off, each other. As Peterson himself once explained, “You have to listen to find how a tune expands or contracts, and each performance has its own pulsation. And a performance needs dynamics, where a tune grows or falls away. You can’t perform a tune on one level.”

  Pianist Herbie Hancock, a jazz star from a younger generation, said in a tribute to Peterson that he “redefined swing for modern jazz pianists for the latter half of the twentieth century” and “mastered the balance between technique, hard blues grooving and tenderness.” An even younger jazz pianist, Canadian Diana Krall, said he was her inspiration as a high school student.