Halfway through a media tour of Arthur Erickson: Critical Works, a retrospective featuring 12 of the architect's landmark buildings that just opened at the Vancouver Art Gallery, a reporter asks guest curator Nicholas Olsberg why someone would want to attend the exhibit when they can experience most of the presented works in person. The former director of the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal is quick to answer. He suggests that the installation will appeal especially to people already familiar with Erickson's work. He's probably right. It may also prove to be a real eye-opener for anyone who has been blind to his legacy””to buildings like, for example, the one in which we're all standing. The art gallery used to be a courthouse, and was renovated as part of Erickson's overall design for Robson Square between 1973 and 1979.

His relationship with the VAG goes back to 1941, when one of the then–16-year-old's watercolours was selected for inclusion in an exhibit celebrating the gallery's 10th anniversary. Painting and poetry were Erickson's primary passions at the time. Heavily influenced by his friend and mentor, the Group of Seven's Lawren Harris, he anticipated a career as an artist, a vocation that offered even less security in the 1940s than it does today. His father prompted him to consider architecture but the young Erickson wasn't interested in studying engineering, which was the usual route to the drafting table. Fortuitously, a visit to Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West in Arizona, whose site-specific design featured materials lifted from the immediate surroundings, inspired him with architecture's creative possibilities.

“Instinct is as important as reason. Sometimes you just have to stop thinking,”  he explains, having briefly shown up to meet the press as we are ushered through the exhibit.

Erickson turns 82 in a few weeks, and the prospect of multiple interviews is understandably exhausting. You get the feeling that he'd rather let his work do the talking.

Playfulness, however subtle, is integral to all of Erickson's work. His public buildings and private residences set the stage for something to happen, whether premeditated or spontaneous. He considers architecture an art rather than a science, an approach that is reflected in his devotion to creating buildings that encourage human interaction while simultaneously articulating a balance between the natural and man-made worlds.

Erickson may design structures that fit into the landscape, but fitting in does not mean fading away. Some people think that there is a Pacific Northwest architectural “style” ””a word Erickson dislikes””in which structures supposedly disappear into the terrain. Erickson's favourite building material is concrete because it's the closest manufactured substance to stone. You can't set a block of rectangular concrete against undulating mountains and say that it's a part of the environment in the sense that it takes on the characteristics of the landscape.

Erickson hasn't got anything good to say about postmodernism, with its ironic dedication to surface and mismatched historical references. “Something can't be postmodern,”  he points out. “It's an anachronism.” 

Even though Critical Works is sponsored by the developer Concord Pacific, for whom Erickson has designed a new False Creek condo named, appropriately, The Erickson, the installation defies the flashy, status-conscious aesthetic behind Vancouver's increasingly postmodern cityscape of new homes, condos, and gated communities designed to look like buildings from somewhere else. Calmly, quietly spreading out into several rooms is a series of working models, photographs, enlarged architectural drawings, wall graphics, and time-lapse videos that evoke rather than explain the significance of the architect's accomplishments. Critical Works is, according to Olsberg, intended to reflect Erickson's vision as an urban poet rather than a polemicist, and to reaffirm his standing as an internationally influential architect.

“I think that the MacMillan Bloedel Building is one of the great 20th-century skyscrapers,”  says Olsberg, referring to the waffle-shaped concrete towers at Burrard and Georgia streets. “It was a radical, radical building [designed in 1965]. The reaction of the international architecture community was very enthusiastic. It contradicted what everyone else was doing. Yet it was something that had a certain serenity in a very chaotic, evolving urban landscape. People loved the idea that it stood below the street, and the way the towers sort of echoed the mountains.” 

In 1983, Erickson imbued Washington's Canadian Chancery (the embassy is another key work in the show) along Pennsylvania Avenue's processional route from the White House to the Capitol building with mischievous details that make fun of imperialism (he's altered column sizes and shapes to make a statement about the governing city's neo-Greek structures), and today the building's courtyard plaza is a popular hangout for young skateboarders from nearby poor neighbourhoods. At home, right next door to B.C.'s law courts, skateboarders and hip-hop artists have claimed the former Robson Square ice rink, while above them, by the steps leading into the VAG, you can count on seeing some kind of performance or protest almost every day. And the film-and-TV industry keeps on using Erickson's 1963-designed Simon Fraser University campus as a set, often for sci-fi features.

You can't refute the staying power of Erickson's creations. For anyone who came of age in Vancouver in the 1960s and '70s during the emergence of a suddenly hip and self-consciously sexy new Canada””Expo 67, Trudeau mania, rambunctious Vietnam and anti-nuclear protests””the MacMillan Bloedel Building, SFU campus, and Museum of Anthropology are like pencil marks on the kitchen door that benchmark a child's growth to maturity. The good news is that they've aged gracefully and grown into themselves. They're as much a part of our identity as the mountains, the forest, and the ocean.