Arthur Erickson 1924-2009

“Anyone can build classrooms; we want to build a community.” –Arthur Erickson

The death of Arthur Erickson has occasioned numerous evaluations of his architectural career. At SFU we might ask, What was so radical about the design of this university that made it North America’s most famous new university in the 1960s?

When the architectural competition was announced in 1963, Erickson, still in his thirties, was brimming with ideas. His thesis at McGill had been on university architecture and included a survey of great universities – Al-Azhar, Bologna, Paris, Oxford, Cambridge – and the one thing they had in common, he noted, was a philosophy of all knowledge being related and all scholars being members of one community. This was the opposite of North America where a university was a site for many specialized areas of knowledge, with disciplines and faculty isolated from each other in far-flung, mutually hostile buildings. To Erickson’s way of seeing things, such physical separation served bureaucratic convenience rather than educational goals, echoing Newton’s mechanistic view of knowledge rather than Einstein’s theory of everything being connected. Of his own experiences as a student he said, “McGill was charming, but it was just a factory that turned out architects. UBC was appalling. It was no place for students.” The only point on campus they could meet was in a basement cafeteria – “a sordid place” (Arthur Erickson interviewed by Ruth Sandwell, SFU Archives, F 223/1/7/1/15).

For Erickson the central question was how to create in one building complex the educational spaces that were so vital to the older universities. How to encourage the kind of encounters outside the classroom where knowledge was transferred among all members of the university community – the mealtime discussion, the stroll in the garden, the argument on a bench or in a lounge?

So Erickson and his team designed a campus around four areas where there would be the widest interaction possible among students. The first of these was the mall – the gathering place and crossroads where all activities merged in a “town square,” consisting of library, theatre, bookstore, and student services, one amply supplied with notice boards, a speaker’s lectern, benches, etc. Given the rainy climate it was to be covered so that it could be used year round, and the covering was to be glass to admit as much light as was available. But it was to remain open air, a galleria in which pedestrians mingled and flowed and large public groups convened.

In counterbalance, the second space, on a higher elevation, was the quadrangle enclosing a garden – a tranquil space where one could stroll, talk, and think. The serenity of this space was to be enhanced by the rhythmic repetition of its surrounding structures – the monotonous pattern of pillars and windows and “fins”; its mountaintop view was to uplift, ennoble.

The third space, west of the mall, would allow for raucous student activity – a sports complex, student union and co-op, a café, perhaps a cinema. The fourth space, adjacent and furthest west, would be residential. Even though SFU was launched as a commuter campus, Erickson believed strongly that dormitory life was essential to all great universities, and so he made its inclusion part of the overall plan. All the major spaces then were designed for students. The administration building and president’s residence were at the east end of the campus.

The other important aspect to the design was its relationship to Burnaby Mountain. There were to be no high-rise buildings, no university towers; rather the buildings were horizontal, contoured to the lay of the land. From his travels in the Far East, Erickson had learned that a building cut into a mountainside could become part of that mountain and share its imposing presence, whereas a tall vertical building perched on top would be dwarfed by it and look foolish. With the landscape of Bali in mind, he proposed terracing all elements of the university – buildings and playing fields, parking lots and improved areas – so that all structures and landscaping, like the Balinese rice terraces, would be part of one sculptured composition and part of the mountain, not just pieces stuck onto it.

What drew so much attention to SFU in the 1960s was its embodiment of an academic idea: the conviction that expanding boundaries of knowledge cannot be contained, that a campus must be physically hospitable to the overlapping and merging of various disciplines, and that it must create spaces, both enormous and intimate, for student experiences outside the classroom. It was also praised more than 40 years ago for its sensitivity to the environment.
Now, we might ask, how well does Erickson’s vision serve us today? And how far has SFU kept faith with the architect’s vision?

At a special ceremony on March 12 of this year at the Kitsilano home of Robin Blaser, SFU consummately did the right thing in conferring an honorary doctorate on the renowned poet, scholar and teacher, Order of Canada inductee, and Griffin Poetry Prize recipient who had enriched the lives of all who knew him, learned from him – and loved him, because to know Robin was to love him.

“Something a contemporary can speak to is the aliveness of a man, his power to invest the air with forms.” So wrote Hugh Kenner, the great critic and chronicler of modernism, speaking of the major poets of an earlier generation that he had made pilgrimage to, and so can any of us say who packed Robin’s classrooms to learn from his passionate wisdom during his 20 years of teaching in the English Department at SFU, or gathered to listen to his stunning poetry at countless readings during his more than 40-year sojourn in Vancouver. And then there were some of us, more fortunate yet – former students, colleagues, poets, artists, friends – who got to drop by those fabulous attic rooms in Kitsilano to imbibe his counsel, his erudition, his warmth, his humour, and his unparalleled martinis.

The special ceremony was convened because of Robin’s rapidly failing health and the unlikelihood that he would be able to be present at June’s convocation ceremony. He died on May 7 of a brain tumour, just shy of his 84th birthday. He was immensely moved by the ceremony and by President Michael Stevenson’s wonderful address honouring his achievements, and despite his frailty, he looked marvellously distinguished and handsome in his regalia.

Blaser’s reputation had risen dramatically in recent years, but he had been known and respected and influential both in Canada and the U.S. for decades. At the 2008 Griffin Prize ceremony, National Book Award-winner and former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass had this to say about Robin’s achievement: “If there is a single figure in whom North American poetry – poetry from Canada and the United States – flows together, it’s been in the work, as a teacher as well as a poet and essayist, of Robin Blaser.” Fortunately, and thanks to the unstinting efforts of Miriam Nichols, a revised and expanded edition of Robin’s lifelong serial poem, The Holy Forest, was published in 2007 as was The Fire, Nichols’s edited collection of Robin’s essays. With the release of these books, Robin lived to see his life’s work handsomely published and justly celebrated.

It is difficult to think of a contemporary Canadian poet who has not been influenced by Robin, some profoundly. The list includes Canada’s first poet laureate George Bowering as well as award-winning and established writers such as Roy Miki, Michael Ondaatje, bpNichol, Erin Moure, Daphne Marlatt, Steve McCaffery, Stan Persky, Sharon Thesen, Lisa Robertson, and Brian Fawcett, to name just a few. Born in 1925 in Denver Colorado, Robin studied at the University of California at Berkeley, where together with his close associates Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer, he was a central figure in the post-war “San Francisco Renaissance” of the 1950s and early 1960s. He also had close ties with the Black Mountain poets, including Charles Olson and Robert Creeley. In 1966, thanks to the offer (and keen judgment) of Ronald Baker, then head of SFU’s English Department and the university’s chief academic planner, he immigrated to Canada to accept a position at SFU.

SFU alumni such as me, who had the good fortune to learn from Robin during his tenure here, will not forget him. Never did a man carry more books into a lecture – in his bag, on his back, in his arms and hands; never did a man put more work, more care, more erudition, more joy into his lectures; never did a man look so good at a lectern; never did a man inhabit a more aesthetically pleasing office; never did a man smile with more charm, laugh with more gusto, smoke with more grace.

Last November the SFU English Department convened a celebration for Robin – nothing so grand as “The Recovery of the Public World” tribute conference for him in 1995, which gathered large crowds and an international showing of poets and scholars. Ours was a modest tribute held in the Contemporary Literature Collection room in the SFU Library (Robin had donated his papers to the collection and the English Department had initiated an endowment to honour him). It was a packed house, and Robin – he was 83 years old and dying of a brain tumour – read passionately for almost an hour from his wonderful “Dante” sequence, his remarkable voice still strong.

We who work in English departments teach students to read and write. It is really that simple. But when this is done with the love, solicitude, delight, and wisdom that Robin brought to his teaching, those present for the instruction are the beneficiaries of a life skill beyond gratitude. aq

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