By Trevor Boddy
Patkau Architects
Introduction: Kenneth Frampton
New Photography: James Dow
The Monacelli Press, New York, 2006
248 pages, $65
Richard Henriquez: Selected Works 1964-2005
Essays: Howard Shubert, Geoffrey Smedley and Robert Enright
288 pages, $75
Arthur Erickson: Critical Works
Editors: Nicholas Olsberg and Ricardo Castro
Essays: Laurent Stalder, Georges Teyssot and Edward Dimendberg
New Photography: Ricardo Castro
Douglas & McIntyre and Vancouver Art Gallery, 2006
208 pages, $75
For a century and more, Vancouver’s best architects have created the buildings that define us. With his Georgia Street courthouse (now Vancouver Art Gallery), Francis Mawson Rattenbury reminds us of the imperial pomp and circumstance that is our colonial legacy. The confident spire that is the Marine Building—easily Canada’s finest Art Deco tower—was shaped by McCarter and Nairne, an architectural partnership no one knew outside of Vancouver. Bert and Jessie Binning built their sharp studio-home and garden into the forest primaeval of West Vancouver, bringing clear-eyed, no-doubts Modernism to our shores. Another flat-topped house with an architect-designed garden—the Copp residence out near UBC—showed Ron Thom not just assimilating lessons from the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, but transcending them.
All of these architects were fearless, learned, practical, and in love with the fecund sites and dramatic vistas found on our blessed patch of the planet. Three lavish new books about our top current architects demonstrate that these qualities are still to be found in Vancouver’s architectural culture. Sufficiently weighty and ambitious that it will set you back more than $250 (with taxes) to buy all three, the new monographs are collective proof that Vancouver is still home to Canada’s finest architects.
Just don’t try to find their recent works downtown. The designers that are the subjects of the current embarrassment of richly illustrated architecture books—John and Patricia Patkau, Arthur Erickson and Richard Henriquez—all live here, but new works from the first two of these firms have become conspicuous by their absence on our much a-building downtown peninsula, and on lists of architects doing public buildings. By a long shot, the Patkaus are Vancouver’s most internationally renowned contemporary designers, but they have never built downtown. Erickson, after galvanizing downtown Vancouver with his visionary Plan 56, followed by epochal buildings for MacMillan Bloedel, the Provincial Law Courts and Robson Square, has been shut out of downtown Vancouver since designing VAG’s renovation in 1981—half the entire career of the man who put our city on world architecture’s map. Like the editors of the new Erickson book (who do not even mention the building), I am discounting Granville Street’s Dance Centre completed with the firm Architectura, but look forward two years to the opening of his eponymous Concord Pacific condo tower, designed with longtime associate Nick Milkovitch.
Save for a handful of towers from James Cheng, Bing Thom and Henriquez, our downtown peninsula has been given over to Vancouver’s least innovative, most compliant, penny-wise but pound-foolish architects. Noting welcome exceptions from these three, there is no mystery about the banality of the condo towers that have re-made our downtown into a high-rent resort. From the 1986 election of former developer Gordon Campbell as a city councillor onwards, downtown has become the last place in the Lower Mainland to find innovative architecture. City of Vancouver urban planners and civic politicians have traded aspirations to an architecture of excellence for rigid conformity to what architects call a “typology”—the mandated format of skinny residential towers on townhouse bases. Crank that handle, trade extra tower height for sometimes questionable “public benefits” (A mini-park usable only by your own residents—sure! A display of your Dale Chihuly plate collection—why not? Ship that social housing allotment to the Downtown Eastside—no one will notice!), and a development permit is yours. Along the way, architecture has suffered.
I cannot imagine a future in which a lavish monograph is produced about the downtown Vancouver works of Foad Raffi, who is responsible for the vault-and-volute-encrusted painted concrete of the bizarrely-named “Mondrian” at Nelson and Richards—bizarre because his design could hardly resemble the abstract geometric works of the Dutch painter less. Raffi is also responsible for the hulking gruffness of a slab-like condo tower containing the new Paramount cinemas at Smithe and Burrard. This new complex overshadows the adjacent glass-topped Law Courts, helping doom both Cornelia Oberlander’s landscape plan and Erickson’s passive solar-heating strategy for a building that was published around the world in the 1970s.
I blame developers less for Vancouver’s increasingly dumb architecture than the civic and provincial bureaucrats and politicians who have set the rules for the land, construction and building-commissioning game they play. In the hunt for those who are incapable of understanding the best architecture, it is just as easy to find provincial suspects as municipal ones. Under senior manager Jane Bird, the Millennium SkyTrain Line created award-winning stations by Peter Busby and Hotson Bakker that lighten the days of commuters. Under senior manager Jane Bird, Canada Line designs released to date make the Expo Line’s Sapperton SkyTrain station look like one of the palatial salons in the Moscow subway. Given these different outcomes, blame should not go primarily to local managers like her, but to prime contractor SNC-Lavalin of Montreal and its provincial overseers, the politicians who demanded the public-private modality for the contract. With station architecture almost totally bereft of ambition or accomplishment, the Canada Line’s “P3” rubric will doubtless come to be known as “Permanently Putrid Platforms,” or “Preventing Pleasant Places.”
There’s more. Ours will be the first Olympic Games in decades without a design competition for even one of its sites, and the chance for a Green showpiece in Southeast False Creek’s Olympic Village has been traded for quick profits and a lumpen plan. When it comes to architectural competition, the only 2010 contest was one where our dullest corporate design firms raced to be the first to bend the ears of VANOC’s board with self-serving but effective passive-aggressive arguments: “Jeez, ya know that Arthur Erickson (or Patkaus/Henriquez/Cheng/Thom, et al.) sure is a great artist, but you sure don’t wanna have them design anything.” Take a look at the 2010 Olympics or Canada Line designs, then bless your stars we still have architects like the Patkaus, Erickson and Henriquez, even though they all have been shunned from these mega-projects. Investment in design is a reliable indicator of business innovation in other spheres and places, and Vancouver may have developed the most anti-design management culture on the continent. As Presbyterian as it is foolish, lack of interest in design is one reason why we are the only Canadian city with a dropping total of head-office jobs, down one third so far this decade, according to a Statistics Canada study released in August (the same study finds Calgary’s total head office jobs up by 64 percent over the same period). The wheels may have fallen off our corporate economy, but our executives and deputy ministers still get greased regularly by our least talented designers. But now, some work from our best.
JOHN AND PATRICIA PATKAU
Published by New York’s Monacelli Press, Patkau Architects is the most quietly effective architectural monograph ever produced on a Canadian firm, documenting a string of serene houses, schools for Saanich and Agassiz, libraries for Surrey and Montreal, a Waterloo crafts gallery, and a quartet of ambitious plans for universities here and in Houston, Philadelphia and Winnipeg (all unbuilt). Vancouverites will be surprised that their highest-profile Vancouver building is not included in the book: Emily Carr Institute’s south wing. The Patkaus have also excised their entire Alberta career, and provide us with no biographical or bibliographical information whatsoever. This kind of de-authoring can be read as an act of egotism, and I wish they had instead cut back some of the 10 pages allocated to a spread on a never-constructed University of Pennsylvania student residence to make room for some much-needed background and an index to match the thoroughness of the rest of the book.
The book’s focus—an almost obsessive focus—is on the final architecture alone, not on the Patkaus as creators, what others have written, or how their buildings were commissioned, designed or even constructed. A key source of the book’s success is its images of buildings and scale models, every one of them by Edmonton’s James Dow, one of the world’s best architectural photographers. His documentation of their entire career—which started in the same city—has shaped all public appreciation of their work. These dramatic, expertly composed, and technically near-perfect photographs have ideal companions in the short texts the architects have written for each building. These chiselled writings outline site and space requirements, then explain the particular layouts, structural forms and building textures that were chosen for each. These important descriptive texts amplify the pleasure of the photographs, demonstrating that architecture is more than improvised sculpture-making, but shaped by place, technology and a critical take on institutions.
A beautiful book, this monograph is sure to make Vancouverites regret that we have not granted the Patkaus more local commissions. It shows the stunning transformation of Winnipeg’s once bunker-like downtown library with an airy addition that opens up carrel spaces along a monumental stair to intense Prairie light. Grand indeed is Montreal’s Grande Bibliothèque du Quebec, this library showing us what might have happened if our 1995 Library Square had used forward-thinking new forms rather than backward-looking classical imagism from Montreal-trained Moshe Safdie. Almost the same size, the Quebec library demonstrates cultural confidence while Vancouver’s prompts the colossal embarrassment that comes with misquoting architectural history instead of making it. This comparison also shows that the top client shapes architectural commissions: sharply independent journalist-cum-intellectual Lise Bissonnette for Montreal versus credentializing developer-turned-mayor Gordon Campbell for Vancouver. Yet because the Patkaus emphasize solely the final, artfully shot artifact rather than any of the other ways architects use ideas and passion to shape innovative buildings, you would never know this from their book.
A critical dimension is added to Patkau Architects in two ways. The first is a unique form of auto-criticism, as the Patkaus prepare elaborate analytical scale models for some of their buildings after completing construction (those for Surrey’s Newton Library and others are shown in the book). Often sectional cutaways of a key connection or detail, the models are 3D essays in retroactive self-understanding. John Patkau describes them as a means of intellectually understanding the design principles they may have arrived at and built intuitively. A more conventional critical essay is provided by Columbia University’s Kenneth Frampton. His predilections towards the rhetoric and genealogy of construction converges wonderfully with the Vancouverites’ own architectural obsessions. Like the rest of the book and nearly all of the Patkaus’ built work, the essay is a flat-out tour-de-force. “Influenced by [Finnish Modernist] Alvar Aalto without producing work that is in any way Aalto-esque,” concludes Frampton, who also finds in the Patkaus’ work “a return to the rationalism of the Modern Movement in its prime, that is to say to the orthogonal, typological humanism favored by Le Corbusier.” Amen, Herr Professor.
RICHARD HENRIQUEZ
Richard Henriquez: Selected Works 1964-2005 is an impressive package, with buildings ranging from Water Street’s Gaslight Square to New Westminster’s Justice Institute of British Columbia to such quirky West End condo towers as the Eugenia and Presidio. While bearing the imprint of Douglas & McIntyre, much of the book’s design, layout and even the colour-balancing of its superior photographs for printing were done by Henriquez and his architectural staff. As is true for most of his buildings, the attention to detail here is exemplary. The design is more sumptuous than the crisp minimalism chosen by book designer George Vaitkunas for the Patkaus, but appropriate to Henriquez’s more allusive and symbol-driven buildings and artworks. The only design gaffe is the two-page spreads that introduce each project. Laying out a single photograph of a building like Granville Street’s Sinclair Centre across the spine of a book creates an effect like those TV SUV advertisements in which building façades are digitally folded and compressed. Smaller but un-split photographs would have worked better, especially since so many are crucial urban or aerial views that show designs in their entirety.
This is a very personal book, being about the work and persona of Richard Henriquez rather than his firm, Henriquez Partners. The distinction is important, as firm partner and son Gregory will publish a separate early-career monograph about his own work this fall (the youngest Vancouver architect ever to devote a book to his own first works). Accordingly, none of the projects where Gregory was principal designer—such as Krill Housing Co-op or the Woodward’s redevelopment—are included in his father’s book. The intensity of tight but competitive families is also a theme in Winnipeg arts journalist Robert Enright’s 1989 Border Crossings interview, reprinted here. Enright’s dialogue traces Henriquez’s roots to a Sephardic plantation family in Jamaica that fled centuries earlier from the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions. Inspired by an architect-uncle who stood in for the father he never knew—shot down in WWII combat over Poland—the Jamaican lad arrived in icy Winnipeg in 1957 to study architecture. At the University of Manitoba he got a thorough grounding in structural engineering and the poetics of construction, soon going off to complete a master’s in urban design at MIT.
Like the Patkau book, Richard Henriquez: Selected Works 1964-2005 discounts Prairie and early Vancouver work. More problematic is its shunting aside of the architecture’s constructional and urban successes to instead seemingly propose that Henriquez’s creations (including the sculptures, prints and photomontages he concocts on themes relating to his buildings, and the “fictional histories” he invents for Vancouver sites that are too new to tell tales of their own) be read solely as art and literature. His early contributions to the Mendel Gallery in Saskatoon (where he met wife and future Arts Umbrella founder, Carole), then his even more impressive shaping of installations at Peace River’s Bennett Dam and UBC’s Sedgewick Library (with Rhone Iredale architects), hardly rate a mention. John and Patricia Patkau are fellow Manitoba graduates from a decade later, but they are at peace with the builderly pragmatism they learned there, while Henriquez evidently feels that extra-architectural aestheticism is necessary to validate his buildings.
This take is evident in all the book’s writing. Howard Shubert’s essay “An Architecture of Listening” is less a fresh critical interpretation than an articulate, highly readable reiteration of Henriquez’s own view of his work. Montrealer Shubert’s main contributions stem from his training as an art historian, finding either convincing direct sources for the Vancouverite’s architecture (from his MIT but not Manitoba profs, or the early postmodern projects and writings of Robert Venturi), or less-convincing parallels in the work of such famous contemporaries as James Stirling, John Hejduk and Rem Koolhaas.
Prominent British-born sculptor and UBC professor emeritus Geoffrey Smedley’s essay continues along this same critical track, writing of Henriquez’s “mytho-poetic” method: “Understanding facts as plastic and mutable means that their significance derives from the narrative context rather than from some unexamined idea of objectivity. Poetically understood facts are at the root of Henriquez’s working method—one embracing his architecture and sculpture alike.” Smedley locates Henriquez’s method in a matrix of philosophical and literary contexts, then goes into welcome interpretive detail on two art-gallery installations: VAG’s 1994 Memory Theatre, and the even more ambitious, as-yet-incomplete Genome Project, a cultural history of his post-Diaspora family. For those of us who admire him deeply as the crafter of well-made buildings and as a public-minded urbanist, the artiness of the book’s texts and illustrations sometimes distracts from a truth that is latent on these pages yet apparent on our city’s streets—Richard Henriquez is one spellbinding architect. His real art is his architecture and his stewardship of our city, and perhaps a future book will set aside the gallery and postmodern literary conceits to concentrate analysis on the buildings themselves.
ARTHUR ERICKSON
With handsome publications like the Henriquez book, over the past quarter century Douglas & McIntyre has carved out a much-deserved reputation as Canada’s leading publisher of visual books. How tragic, then, that one of the few artists from this quadrant of the continent who will still interest scholars and the general public a century from now—architect Arthur Erickson—should be the subject of so shoddy a volume as Arthur Erickson: Critical Works, produced in association with the Vancouver Art Gallery exhibition of the same name. A mess from cover to cover, the colour photographs are muddied and the writing is muddled. Given the long lead times and restricted funding for architectural publishing, this is likely to be the last summary of Erickson’s brilliant career to come off the press while he lives, amplifying the folly of this visually ill-focused and textually too-distracted book.
The problems begin with the choice of title and works meriting feature treatment, as selected by exhibition co-curators and book co-editors Nicholas Olsberg and Ricardo Castro. Many of Erickson’s largest and best-known buildings are included, but are they really “critical,” in the sense of intellectually essential, or formative of his ideas? The working gestalt of the 12 buildings picked is that they are Erickson’s concrete works, but even this is implicit—only obliquely described—then confusingly applied. For example, a second or third-tier Erickson work, a multi-pavilion house in Washington State, gets full portfolio treatment even though its use of concrete is restricted to a garden folly and some stairs. Olsberg verbally describes but ill-illustrates two infinitely more important early works, the Comox Filberg residence and the West Vancouver Smith House II, while choosing to illustrate the Hugo Eppich house, a minor design whose structure is steel, not concrete.
These same problems of focus are amplified by Olsberg’s meandering text, a series of half-hearted, episodic attempts to frame the work of an architect he clearly admires greatly. The exhibition’s airy section titles of “Infinity,” “Affinity” and “Compression” are a dead giveaway of the curators’ lack of success in synthesizing an argument about their subject. In the book, the last section has arbitrarily been changed to “Enclosure,” making all such categories seem even more the provisional guesses they really are.
Given Olsberg’s training in American history, his most convincing arguments adhere closely to timelines, notably his biographical sketch of Erickson’s Vancouver upbringing, wartime experiences, architectural training and world tours—the best such account in print. Olsberg is keen to include countless un-built minor projects, yet his essays slight the downtown Vancouver projects in particular. He dispatches the dramatic and unprecedented concrete frame of the McMillan Bloedel tower in two paragraphs, while the complex architecture and urbanism of world-famous Robson Square merits but three. Elsewhere in the book, half-page commentaries on these truly critical constructions, written by Ricardo Castro and David Theodore, are even more off-hand and dismissive.
In selecting the book’s photographers and essayists, former Canadian Centre for Architecture director Olsberg rounded up a number of Montreal colleagues and some former intern-scholars. None of them had worked on Erickson before, and almost none on any Canadian architect. This problem is not limited to the Erickson tome, as only one of the total of 10 verbal and photographic essayists in these three books investigating Vancouver’s key architects lives in BC. Toronto may be obsessed with having borrowed “starchitects” like Frank Gehry and Daniel Libeskind design its recent arts and academic buildings, but Vancouver now seems given over to a similar weakness for imported “starcritics.” Their interpretations are too often independent of knowledge of this city, or even of the built facts of the buildings themselves—inconceivable in books on Toronto, Montreal or even Los Angeles architecture.
But the biggest calamity is the book’s crucial “Portfolio” colour photographs by McGill architecture professor Ricardo Castro. Appalling is the only word to describe them. The prints in the VAG exhibition are only marginally better, while the previously shot black-and-white images largely supplied by Erickson’s own office for the book are superb. Two of Castro’s exterior views of the Helmut Eppich house are funereal, while an interior of a stair is so dark that it becomes an unwitting “What is it?” image. The views of Simon Fraser University seem to have been commissioned by the “I hate Erickson” campus club. The photographer’s defence is that he wanted to shoot Erickson in the rain; this can and has been done well, but not by Castro here. He possesses the technical skills, demonstrated by superb photographs in his fine monograph on architect Rogelio Salmona’s work in his hometown of Bogotá—a city that can be as grey and rainy as Vancouver. The magenta cast to images of the Knapp Labs in England and a Washington state house indicate that it was not just Castro, but Douglas & McIntyre’s production team that let us down here. The real question needing answering is this: How could senior managers at the Vancouver Art Gallery and the publishing company have signed off on so flawed a take on so important an artist, especially after delaying the exhibition and book by nearly two years?
There is nothing in essays by Zurich’s Laurent Stalder or Quebec City’s Georges Teyssot to indicate that they devoted more than a long weekend or two to visiting Erickson’s actual built works in Vancouver. Both make repeated reference to the small range of the architect’s own often-lyrical writings and the even smaller body of critical literature on his architecture, and their essays meander and equivocate, bereft of incidental insights and embodied glosses that inevitably arise when writers actually get to know buildings, as opposed to merely reading about them.
Almost unreadable, art historian Stalder’s tendentious ramble titled “Europe-America-Japan: In Search of a New Architectural Language” is clearly in search of language, and not just the English language, as the problems of his text cannot be ascribed to the workmanlike translation from the original French. The problem is much more fundamental: notably, a tendency to endless lists, pointless and unattributed quotes, scattershot thinking, and all-round faculty-common-rooming, corduroy-panted, name-dropping, middlebrowing, throat-clearing banality. Typical of the Erickson essayists, Stalder uses the academic default option of throwing out dozens of comparisons and precedents for the actual buildings, hoping that some of them stick. No architect’s career was more caught up in global dialogue than Erickson’s, but Stalder adds nothing to understanding just how.
Angeleno cultural historian Edward Dimendberg’s “The Man Who Wasn’t There” is much more interesting, with firm opinions about Erickson’s reputation: “Revered in Canada while scandalously underappreciated elsewhere...Erickson is the antithesis of the architectural star. ...It is almost as if the profusion of stylistic idioms in his work was intended to throw critics off the track.” Appropriately enough, Dimendberg gets off-track himself in an extended interpretation of the UBC Museum of Anthropology and Robson Square as “inverted totem poles.” More aptly, he calls Erickson a “critical relationist,” tying his thinking to texts by the father, the son and the holy ghost of Canadian technological discourse. “Erickson’s sensitivity to the prospects and dangers of life in industrial society, one shared by McLuhan and Frye, may well be where his national identity is at its strongest,” writes Dimendberg, proposing Erickson as the exemplification of “an indigenous tradition of Canadian technological criticism whose proponents sought to articulate their own sense of intellectual responsibility, [a legacy] well summarized by philosopher Arthur Kroker.”
Except for portions of Dimendberg’s essay, the best writing in Arthur Erickson: Critical Works is its many quotations of the architect’s own writings. The cumulative effect of this is to make a case for another book, which must be published as soon as possible: a collection of Erickson’s own writings, ideally with apt visual documentation, project by project. Erickson is also poking away at an autobiography (the sections written to date barely get him into the 1950s). While this is also an important project, putting together Erickson’s own thoughts next to images of his art will create a valuable record that will last long after this flawed volume and spotty exhibition are forgotten.
* * *
There are some shared patterns in contemporary Vancouver architecture not explored by the “starcritics.” The most obvious is a tendency, begun with the Simon Fraser and Lethbridge universities by Erickson, to conceive of our buildings as a form of landscape themselves—of built form become landform. This idea haunts the work of John Patkau, who worked for Erickson for less than a year. It is also found in such Richard Henriquez projects as the Capilano College and Trent University academic pavilions (though Henriquez never worked with Erickson). All three books make reference to the “Alpine” and “Glass Architecture” drawings and writings of Bruno Taut’s Berlin circle early in the 20th century, which inspired the alternate modernism later dismissed as “Expressionism.” This interest in landscape and landform as informative of architecture should have been further developed in each book, as it is as recurring theme for Vancouver’s architectural culture.
Similarly, there is a particularly Vancouverist a-historicity in the three books. Henriquez’s interest in history is personal and familial, the Erickson book discounts urban knowledge for tangential architectural history, while the Patkaus’ approach is gallerist rather than museological, showing their work as exquisite objects disconnected from precedent and social matrixes. Two good books, one bad—these three publications nevertheless establish architecture in its rightful place at the centre of Vancouver’s intellectual life. These collections of word and image will make it easier, and more rewarding, for all of us to discuss the works of even the least of our designers.
It is worth closing with a note on the choreography of the three books, as it is deeply revealing of the work and thinking of their architect-authors. The Patkaus’ architecture is a struggle between control—sometimes obsessive control—and a romantic will to plastic form. They all but obliterate their own identities and history, self-editing to ensure that their work will only be understood as what the Germans call Baukunst or “building art”: pragmatic problem-solving of enclosing structure and building program, where artistic and authorial effects are incidental. Henriquez could hardly be more different, wishing his work to be understood only as art, set within in the storytelling traditions of myth-tellers and novelists. At their best, Henriquez’s works have the universal resonance of fine literature, and at their weakest resemble the self-published memoirs of a too-eager stranger.
Arthur Erickson is the accidental poet, the aging but impish diplomat of place-making who trusted his legacy to a gallery and book team clearly not up to the task. Never mind; his buildings have set the datum for architecture and urbanism in Vancouver for a half-century, and one day there will be a book and an exhibition worthy of him. With Vancouver shifting from a condo boom to more diverse city-building, and about to embark on an ambitious downtown arts district, these three books are a cogent argument that in selecting the architects who will save our downtown, then our province, we should start looking very close to home. Let Toronto keep its flaky stable of borrowed starchitects and their ersatz creations—we have real architects here, and this is a real place, if a culturally insecure one.