RetroSpector🇨🇦 #flashbackfriday — Coast Modern made here || Arthur Erickson, Canada’s first “household name”, architect, (among a handful whose name would garner a blink of recognition outside architecture). • Photos of Erickson from Vancouver Sun & UBC Archives, show a proud but fatigued young architect with model of UBC’s “Museum of Man”, aka Museum of Anthropology (MOA). His unprecedented design & configuration for a museum was maverick & pioneering —> changing the way collections were archived/ stored & displayed • His modernist sensibility was nurtured by his sensitivity to environmental context with programmatic nature of the project & its setting — in this case, dealing with indigenous/aboriginal cultural artifacts & art worldwide (yet focused on local Coast Salish First Nations). Erickson understood the vital yet fragile nature of this complex situation. Like a ballet dancer, his presentations/results always so fresh, effortless, graceful & simple, often belied the effort behind the scenes. MOA, one of his first nonresidential, educational-institutional-cultural projects since his Simon Fraser Univ.(SFU) campus proposal atop Burnaby Mtn. His kind of modern was intricately interwoven in a site’s landscape, & always built as if they “grew out of the ground organically”. • More artist/sculptor than architect, this jet setting, globetrotting design influencer, whose commissioned work took him to every corner, from Far East, the MidEast, back East (🇨🇦), East-coast 🇺🇸 (Washington, DC). After graduating from McGill U’s (School of Architecture), his very first client was his mother — a modest commission, with a modest budget. The resultant carport was anything but modest, nor garishly out-of-place. The budget didn’t stop a bold strikingly modern extension to the WestVan family home to manifest. Somehow, this little addition, so carefully designed, presented & built, wound up featured in The New York Times’ design editorial with rave reviews. The rest, they say, is HIS-story! #retrospectorcanada • #RetroSpector • #arthurerickson • #vancouverarchitecture • #vancouverhistory • #heritagevancouver • #smallstudiodesign • (at Museum of Anthropology) https://www.instagram.com/p/CGtG_wzBz2W/?igshid=mtklthbpyyfc
