New PDF release: Arthur Erickson: An Architect's Life

Arthur Erickson, Canada's pre-eminent thinker architect, was once well known 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 college, on Burnaby Mountain; the Robson sq. advanced on the middle of town; and the beautiful Museum of Anthropology on the collage of British Columbia. go back and forth was once key to Erickson's artistic procedure; floating excessive above the clouds on prolonged airline flights, he made initial drawings on vellum together with his fine-point black felt-tip pen, designing influential works not just for different elements of Canada-including Toronto's broadly widespread Roy Thomson Hall--but for websites within the united states, Britain, and the center and much East. Erickson labored mainly in concrete, which he referred to as "the marble of our times," and anyplace they seem, his structures movement the spirit with their poetic freshness and their project to encourage. yet he was once 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 existence that ended in a chain of tawdry bankruptcies. In a fall from grace that remembers a Greek tragedy, Canada's nice architect-a good-looking, based guy who lived like a millionaire and counted between his shut buddies 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 existence from its modest origins to his emergence at the global level. writer David Stouck, acclaimed for his previous biographies of Ethel Wilson and Sinclair Ross, demonstrates right here once more why his paintings has been praised as resourceful, incisive and compelling. Grounded in interviews with Erickson and his kin, pals and consumers, in addition to the assets of in depth public files, name is either an intimate portrait of the guy and a stirring account of ways Erickson made his constructions 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."