News and Features
Battle Royal
By Frances Bula published May 1, 2010
Arthur Erickson’s death last May triggered a messy fight over his estate and his legacy—just the sort of drama the celebrated architect was
always leaving in his wake
URBAN FIX
For days, Arthur Erickson had been growing weaker. Finally, on a Wednesday afternoon last May, he managed one last, rasping breath. Three people were beside him in the Finnish care facility he’d come to call home. One was Lois Milsom, Erickson’s elegantly beautiful friend of 50 years. She’d met him when he was just beginning to develop his reputation as an architect and a renegade, a gorgeous young Frank Lloyd Wright for the West Coast. His niece, Emily Erickson McCullum, was there, too, as was her husband, David.
Missing from the scene was Cheryl Cooper. For almost a decade, Cooper had decided which invitations Erickson would accept, flown with him to deliver speeches and receive awards, and been at his side with such physicality that people not knowing he was gay might have mistaken her for a wife or daughter. In the events following his death three weeks short of his 85th birthday, her absence was easily overlooked. As the days passed, a wave of warm appraisals washed across the country for this distinctive Canadian figure, the man revered by architects around the world for the way his buildings emerge out of the landscape. Many laid claim to him in media stories and memorials—
Erickson had had a life both solitary and crowded with all who sustained him.
When it came time to organize these public remembrances, Cooper was back. Erickson’s family scheduled a service, and she threw herself into helping plan the perfect event. Afterward, Erickson’s family—his brother, Don, as well as Don’s kids, Emily, Chris, and Geoff—all signed a card expressing their appreciation. “Hello Cheryl,” one of them wrote. “We would like to thank you for your help and co-operation during the planning of Arthur’s Memorial Service and Reception and moreover, for your ongoing dedication to the preservation of his legacy.”
Their next correspondence would not be so cordial. In January 2010, the family launched a spectacularly ugly lawsuit: “Cheryl Cooper approached Mr. Erickson at a time when he was aged, ill, and vulnerable, and pursued a relationship with him for her own personal and monetary gain,” the nine-page statement charged in one of its most scathing sections. “The dominant purpose of Cheryl Cooper’s relationship with Mr. Erickson was to use his name, reputation, and body of work for her own personal and monetary gain. At a time when she knew or ought to have known Mr. Erickson’s mental abilities were impaired or incapacitated, Cheryl Cooper took Personal Items from Mr. Erickson, when he was incapable of providing her with consent to do so…. Since the incorporation of the AEC [Arthur Erickson Conservancy], and despite repeated demands by the Executor, Cheryl Cooper has acted in an on-going highhanded and oppressive manner in continuing to hold events based on Arthur Erickson, and has further refused to return some or all of the Personal Items. And the actions of Cheryl Cooper are reprehensible and deserving of rebuke by this Honourable Court.”
A simple tale of manipulation—except for all the confounding factors, such as allegations of “personal gain.” Even Erickson seemed barely able to make a living from Arthur Erickson. He went bankrupt in 1992 after years of lavish living on several continents with his partner, Francisco Kripacz. In his last years, friends and colleagues had to chip in to pay for his personal aide and the care home.
Then there’s the Arthur Erickson Conservancy, referred to several times in the suit as a kind of accessory to the crime. But its board members—industrialist Hugo Eppich, prominent architects James Cheng and Erickson’s business partner Nick Milkovich, and well-known heritage consultant Don Luxton—were hardly going to get richer either. Or more famous.
As for his illness, Erickson was sending letters long before he started showing signs of memory problems or dementia, saying that he supported the idea of a conservancy and that he was appointing Cooper as his liaison. The “Personal Items” she took? Luxton says all of those boxes of materials were turned over to the family two months before the lawsuit was launched. (The family declined to be interviewed for this story.)
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Arthur Erickson was a mediocre architect at best. Blind adulation turned self-serving manipulation does not change that.
None of this work dealt with the autochthonous condition: which was, his supposed mentor's, base approach.
Vancouver, nay, Canada needed a hero back then and, bland, derivative Arthur's stuff was it. We do not need him now!
That the banal, Ritz-Carlton cliché twist came out of a real estate mind set does not surprise. Arthur's legacy would have been better served has Rennie kept his meddling face out of it!
To go back . . .
Essentially Milkovich's smooth, non-committal, ghost like drawings of a Ronald Coleman type delusion on the top of Burnaby Mountain set Arthur on course: I'm talking his SFU winning design. SFU downtown campus remedied that.
But before that Arthur was able to beguile a gullible architectural community with his ridiculous Arabian-cum-Edward D. Stone type sun-screen he attached to his Filberg House in Comox.
I was a VAG trustee at the time and persuaded the board to accept his back yard entrance. After that it was down hill.
The Vancouver Courthouse is an absolute urban disaster: surrounded by relentless, blank, cold concrete walls, it was at the time dubbed as Wacky Bennett's tower laid on its side: it still is. The westward sloping skylight is a boring unrelieved skyline over a roof top garden that no one is aware of.
His Canadian embassy in Washington DC is a joke. What is that round of columns at the entrance? Is it supposed to replicate the Jefferson monument? If, indeed, it is then it is far too weak!
I visited his home on W14 and with him at his office on the Fairview slopes. As for his person, bland like his building, I was not impressed.
Nor am I surprised to hear of a squabbling coterie of hangers clinging to his reflected glory: all the usual suspects! That merely illuminates the hunger of a local obsequious glitterati doesn't it?
It's time for Canada to stop this indiscriminate hero worship and start generating some good urbanism and forget childish heroes who only make our cities worse! Vancouver architect s are not the worst in the world but . . .
May Arthur Erickson rest in peace despite the objectionable clique of little hangers on, apparently, intent upon making hay out of an obviously second rate personality.
