stripped, pickled and stuffed

 25 meter long blue whale skeleton hovers over puny humans in the atrium space

Millions of specimens of animals, plants and fossils are encased in glass, preserved in jars, pressed inside folders, stored in old shoe boxes, taxidermied and displayed in cabinets within the Beaty Biodiversity Museum on the campus of the University of British Columbia, all accessible now to the curious public and serious researchers alike...

The collection is massive and comprehensive, contributing to contemporary progressive studies into the incredibly complex biodiversity of our little planet...

On a rainy winter afternoon we roamed the long repository of darkened corridors inventoried with its enormous and carefully catalogued collections, stopping often to be awed by the specimens on view and being constantly reminded that we have the capability to be cognizant of such a superabundant and wondrous diversity of life forms that we are only a very very minuscule part of - and hopefully help to preserve for a while longer...

 ancient reindeer skull

ugandan giraffe skull

 malaysian long-nosed horned frog, marinated since 1963

 the older cabinets of traditional specimens display...

white swan, black swan... dance no more...

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]

MOA :: uncategorized objects outside

There may be thousands of obsequiously studied objects from myriad cultures the world over all very carefully housed in the Multiversity Galleries within the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, but outside around the grounds of this Arthur Erickson-designed concrete culture temple staggered above the waters of English Bay are some curious artifacts stumbled upon unobtrusively one hot summer's day...

these few silent and weather-born objects left still in an oblivious state of grace...