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PHOTO ESSAY
Concrete Poet
The bold lines of architect Arthur Erickson
By Greg Buium
May 2006
 Photo by Ricardo L. Castro, 2005. Courtesy of the Vancouver Art Gallery. |
Bagley Wright house (1979)
Bainbridge Island, Wash.
What would it be like to live in an Erickson home? Huddled in British Columbia and Washington state, Erickson’s residential projects epitomize his attention to site: pools that reflect water upward, harnessing the light of the region’s typically grey, overcast days; and undecorated concrete, a material that, as Arnold observes, becomes remarkably warm in this context. “[The concrete is] not pretending to be something else,” he says. “It is what it is, but it’s also quite beautiful.”
The Bagley Wright house near Seattle is, to Olsberg’s mind, among Erickson’s finest works. “If you pushed Arthur against the wall and said you could keep one building, that would be the one he’d keep,” the curator suggests, pointing out how the repeated H-form gives the house its resounding strength.
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