Inside Vancouver
King Arthur - continued
By Michael Harris published Sep 1, 2006
Like his best buildings, Arthur Erickson was an elusive blend of style and substance, past and present, inner and outer. He died, at 84, in the spring of 2009. This profile originally ran in September, 2006.
Erickson was born into a liberal, cultivated family in Vancouver on June 14, 1924. His father’s double-amputee status lends a particular weight to the romantic idea of the artist being shaped as a young man: from birth, Erickson was privy to an underscored appreciation of function, mobility, access and form. The ideal incubator for an architect’s mind.
While Oscar was a member of the Church of England, Erickson’s mother, Myrtle, subscribed to Christian Science and raised young Arthur in that religion. At Sunday school, a woman (“who always wore silly hats”) told Arthur his father’s legs would return to him, if he only believed. “I came running home and shouted, ‘Daddy, you can walk!’”
He stopped attending Sunday school after that (he was 12 or 13) and remains unclaimed by any one faith to this day. “I prefer the glamour and strangeness of Oriental religions anyway. They’re also more sensible than the Western view—their whole view of life is one of examining things very carefully.”
It was his early artistic efforts that garnered Erickson the attention of the man who introduced him to Eastern philosophy—Group of Seven guru Lawren Harris, who saw the 16-year-old’s work at a VAG exhibit. The totemic painter lived in Vancouver at the time, and gave Erickson his first taste of the highest echelons of what we now call “the creative class.” “I was looking for answers to everything,” he says. “And Harris was tied into the mysticism of existence. You almost don’t have an alternative, if you’re an artist—when you’re facing the landscape.” On Saturday evenings, Erickson would visit Harris’ home where 20 to 40 people gathered to listen to classical music. “I was in awe, silent, listening. It was the kind of thing that in Paris took place in restaurants.”
After studies in the arts at UBC and his stint in the military, Erickson enrolled in the architecture school at McGill University, which he attended with another bright young thing from Vancouver, Douglas Shadbolt. Before his final year, in 1950, Erickson traveled to Taliesin West, in Arizona, to visit visionary architect Frank Lloyd Wright (maybe that issue of Fortune stuck with him after all), and was invited to stay for the year. But Erickson had somewhere to be. Upon graduation, he took a travelling scholarship to Europe, where he surveyed monuments of architectural history and met with more luminaries in the field for nearly three years.
Returning to the West Coast, he held a brief posting as instructor at the University of Oregon before accepting a job at UBC in 1957. “The basic idea behind my teaching,” he says, “was to un-teach.” He fought to shake the weight of expectation off his pupils. A typical lesson plan: “If we were designing furniture, the word ‘furniture’ was never mentioned.” Dance and music exercises would be employed to divert his students from design preconceptions. “Once it was done, when they realized it was furniture they had made, they also realized it had never been seen before.”
He taught at UBC for seven years. Mind you, to imagine Erickson ever had the stability that a day-job implies would be a laughable mistake. After meeting his long-time companion and interior design partner Francisco Kripacz in the 1960s the two quickly became known as a jet set couple. “They were very extravagant,” says Gordon Smith. “And it enriched his art, you know.”
“It was a wonderful relationship,” says Erickson. “Francisco wasn’t lured aside by convention, and I learned that from him.”
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Discussed
Prior to this profile in Vancouver Magazine, Arthur Erickson had never
publicly acknowledged his late companion, Francisco Kripacz. When asked why
not, he would explain that he feared his clients' reactions to news of his
sexual orientation. That Erickson ultimately overcame this fear is a
tribute not only to him but to his late spouse, who, as Erickson fondly put
it in 2006, "wasn't lured aside by convention." Apparently - hearteningly -
neither was Erickson towards the end of his life.
