downtown westside:: the sexy sixties [episode two]

 You may not see the rigid concrete forest for the trees, but the impenetrably dense massing of reinforced concrete soars upwards as high as the old growth in the lush forests that MacMillan Bloedel had been sawing through for decades...
The late venerable Arthur Erickson [1924-2009] designed this raw concrete tapering tower back in the still freshly brewed essence of modernistic grinding through the 1960's - and steeped in his immersion of Japanese aesthetics, he applied the dictate of material integrity to his Emily Carr-inspired vision of gargantuan nature dominating the west coast landscape...

the offset halves of the west side facade with slim ribbons of glazing running down like rivulets of rain water...

27 storeys of deeply recessed windows with 7 foot square panes of glass create vertical waffled pools of watery reflections...

the offset halves of the east side facade ascend as tapering trunks of denuded giant firs...

around back, the brutalist effect of a medieval fortification is tempered by the elegant grey smoothness of sandblasted concrete and the bush-hammered texture of a solid elevation...

despite the thickset gridding and massive heaviness of concrete, there is a repetitive grace and a certain meditative quality to the geometrical formation that is the main facade of this stripped down monolith to a once ruthless clearcutter of tall trees in ancient forests...

"I don't think concrete is beautiful per se, but I think if one accepts it as the building stone of our century one find beautiful qualities in it - its earthiness, its mass, its traces of how it's made - I really do like it."
[Arthur Erickson from Seven Stones, a Portrait of Arthur Erickson by Edith IGLAUER]

MacMillan Bloedel Building
1075 West Georgia Street
Arthur Erickson and Geoffrey Massey, 1968-69

MOA outside

Perhaps the most sensitive and intuitive of Arthur Erickson's many prominent creations, the much vaunted Museum of Anthropology rising from the edge of the University of British Columbia campus remains a lyrical and distinguished contemporary depository for the collected and preserved art and ritual objects of indigenous cultures from the Northwest coast and all the continents...
I began my studies at UBC a couple of years after it was completed in 1976 and took a class in archaeology in my second year that enabled frequent access to the museum - thereby spending many fascinated hours exploring the collections in the crowded glass cases and countless drawers...
I have returned sporadically over the years but have never photographed the exterior [except during a totem pole-raising ceremony well over 20 years ago, the photographs from which may still be in a box somewhere!], and on this bright summer's day I am entranced once more by the visual poetry of the raw concrete edifice - Erickson's elegantly minimal interpretation of traditional Northwest coast post and beam structures - and the powerful play of light and shadow on the strong basic forms that are as solid as the ephemeral lives that created them are not...

"At this stage in our history when most forces at work in society are dispersing our energies, fracturing our society, disrupting the ecology of our planet, dismembering our cities, the architect has the opportunity - and I believe the duty, though he seldom seizes it - of being a cohesive force, of providing wholes, "integrities" as Buckminster Fuller would put it in a different sense.  As the mechanization of life and man proceeds on its relentless course, we need to reaffirm that which the machines would atrophy in us - the human spirit."

ARTHUR ERICKSON [1924 -2009]