Arthur Erickson: An Architect's Life by David Stouck

Arthur Erickson, Canada's pre-eminent thinker architect, was once popular across the world for his cutting edge method of panorama, his genius for spatial composition, and his epic imaginative and prescient of structure for individuals. between his such a lot celebrated large-scale works are 3 that helped to outline Vancouver's city panorama: Simon Fraser collage, on Burnaby Mountain; the Robson sq. advanced on the middle of the town; and the beautiful Museum of Anthropology on the collage of British Columbia. commute was once key to Erickson's inventive technique; floating excessive above the clouds on prolonged airline flights, he made initial drawings on vellum along with his fine-point black felt-tip pen, designing influential works not just for different elements of Canada-including Toronto's generally prominent Roy Thomson Hall--but for websites within the united states, Britain, and the center and much East. Erickson labored mainly in concrete, which he known as "the marble of our times," and at any place they seem, his constructions movement the spirit with their poetic freshness and their venture to motivate. yet he used to be additionally a debatable determine, greater than as soon as attracting the ire of his fellow architects, and his specialist achievements have been tarnished by way of the excesses of a sophisticated own lifestyles that led to a sequence of tawdry bankruptcies. In a fall from grace that recollects a Greek tragedy, Canada's nice architect-a good-looking, dependent guy who lived like a millionaire and counted between his shut neighbors Pierre Trudeau and Elizabeth Taylor-eventually grew to become homeless and penniless.

This first complete biography of Erickson, who died in 2009 on the age of eighty-four, strains the architect's lifestyles from its modest origins to his emergence at the global degree. writer David Stouck, acclaimed for his prior biographies of Ethel Wilson and Sinclair Ross, demonstrates right here once more why his paintings has been praised as ingenious, incisive and compelling. Grounded in interviews with Erickson and his relatives, pals and consumers, in addition to the assets of in depth public information, name is either an intimate portrait of the guy and a stirring account of ways Erickson made his structures paintings. superbly written and beautifully researched, it's also a provocative examine the phenomenon of cultural heroes and the character of what we name "genius."