Vancouver's Dazzling Center

Arthur Erickson designs an airy, elegant masterpiece

North Americans have built handsome cities and grown tired of them, as children grow tired of their presents after Christmas. Few architects are as aware of such urban waste as Canada's Arthur Erickson, 54, and few have done more to restore vitality to the inner city. His latest and most ambitious undertaking is a combination of function and fantasy in the heart of his native Vancouver. Formally opened in September, the downtown complex has already put new fizz in the life of a provincial city.

Erickson's oeuvre in Canada's largest West Coast city is a multilevel, three-block megastructure that blends greenery, glass, pools and waterfalls, ramps, steps and terraces, domes, blossoms and trees.

It unites a large suntan piazza, a luxurious office building for the British Columbia government and a seven-story courthouse covered with a shimmering glass roof that is one of the biggest (53,000 sq. ft.) of its kind in the world.

In patios and mini-parks, the three blocks encompass the most extensive urban planting of trees, shrubs, vines and ground covers of any North American city: more than 50,000 indigenous maples, dogwoods, pines, brooms, junipers, sword ferns, rhododendrons, yews and creeping roses. In some green areas, traffic cannot be seen--or heard over the splashing of waterfalls. To some, the sloping, low-rise structure resembles an Inca temple reflecting the spectacular beauty of the Pacific rim on which it sits.

The greatest public attraction is the piazza named Robson Square, after 19th century British Columbia Premier John Robson. A summer mecca for alfresco lunchers and outdoor shows by dance and theater groups, the square has two indoor theaters, three restaurants, a cosmopolitan food fair, an exhibition hall and an outdoor ice-or roller-skating rink. From the eastern end of the square, zigzagging tiers of steps lead through a sylvan setting to the government office building, which has rooftop pools and waterfalls tumbling over large picture windows. The building's 127,000 sq. ft. of open office space (for only 900 workers) is separated according to function by low dividers and jungles of greenery.

Across a bridge and a pond is Erickson's most controversial creation: the courthouse, an airy, elegant edifice that opens the murky moil of the law to the light and the public gaze. (It replaces a 67-year-old neoclassical structure that, on the architect's insistence, was left standing; it will eventually house the Vancouver Art Gallery.) While planning the structure, Erickson and his staff consulted judges, lawyers and police and studied new courthouse designs around the world. The result is a daring structure of steel, glass, and concrete that was mixed so that it turns a warm rose-buff color in Vancouver's frequent rains. Erickson calls concrete "the marble of our time." The building's major functional departure is a system of security "envelopes" that effectively separate the judiciary, administrative staff, prisoners and the public, in contrast to the standard courthouse hurlyburly. In addition to 35 highly visible courtrooms (some can even be seen from the street), the building has accommodations for 62 judges, with a 30,000-volume law library and a room in which student groups and the public will be instructed in the workings of the law by closed-circuit TV. Its most striking feature is its great hall, which rises seven stories to the glass roof. From floor to floor, a profusion of trailing vines and shrubs creates the illusion of a Babylonian hanging garden. The hall and many planted patios, with opulent purple sofas and rich carpeting, make a public attraction of what is usually among the most forbidding kinds of building on earth.

The new courthouse, explains Erickson, "takes the traditional courthouse and turns it inside out. It is a building completely open to the street. It embodies the concept that justice not only must be done but must be seen to be done. Anything that is part of the street becomes part of the culture, and--God knows--our culture needs more justice."

Doing justice to the taxpayers, the architect completed the complex for $139 million, $21 million less than the final estimate. The buildings moreover are fuel-thrifty, with a computerized climate control system and an energy storage tank that is cooled or heated in off-peak hours, when natural gas rates are lowest. Erickson's acres of greenery are watered by computer.

While Robson Square has already become the city's foremost meeting and strolling place, not all Vancouverites are entranced with the buildings. A letter to the Vancouver Sun protested that the complex "comprises an unembellished series of stark, cold (especially during Vancouver's somber rainy season), dank and lifeless concrete blockhouses that from a distance resemble giant caskets." The courthouse has been criticized by court stenographers, who complain that their basement quarters are like a medieval dungeon.

Such objections are not new to Erickson, whom the architectural world generally regards as one of its most thoughtful and innovative builders. He has been designing houses, corporate complexes and public works (two enchanting Toronto subway stations, the striking Simon Fraser University outside Vancouver) since 1963. He first attracted wide international acclaim with the stunning Canadian Pavilion at Montreal's Expo '67, and his teasing, mirror-sheathed pavilion at Japan's Expo '70 won the top architectural award among 1,000 buildings from 78 countries.

An outwardly gregarious but intensely speculative, ascetic man, Erickson always sets out, as in the Vancouver courthouse, to build imaginatively around the activities of the people who will inhabit the building. Says he: "We must think of our cities as places to live in and enjoy rather than places to work in and get out of." He is a master of scale and placement and insists on a "dialogue between space and setting," in which site determines form. A handsome, blue-eyed bachelor, he is of Swedish-Irish descent, and both dour and mischievous strains can be detected in his designs.

Erickson has immersed himself in European and Japanese architecture, spending almost half his adult life abroad. He is currently putting up a new building for Saudi Arabia's ministry of foreign affairs and a whole new city in Kuwait, and he hopes to build in China a tourist hotel that will incorporate not merely Western technology but native talents, tastes and materials as well. Indeed, China's drab and joyless metropolitan centers may even be ready for a Great Wall of Erickson.

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