Stouck lays out a narrative of Erickson as a brilliant, complex, flawed, but ultimately loving man. Tracing the ups and downs over eighty-five years, Stouck lays out a narrative of Erickson as a brilliant, complex, flawed, but ultimately loving man. Tracing the ups and downs over eighty-five years, Erickson emerges Icarus-like, driven and ambitious in his work, but ultimately weighed-down by visionary impulses that had few meaningful backstops (despite almost deus ex machina-level interventions from the curious likes of Pierre Trudeau and Conrad Black alike). Erickson is at times arrogant and preening, but a poet when the right project or moment takes him. Stock lovingly weaves in the many relationships of this strange, sometimes ascetic, sometimes flamboyant erudite internationalist, raised in the small, provincial backwater of 1930s Vancouver. I could not help but wish Erickson had maintained some of the more balancing influences and relationships, such as Geoff Massey, who, when melded with his genius, produced astounding results - the SFU Campus, the Vancouver Courthouse, the University of Lethbridge.
In the end, as the book notes, Erickson becomes something of a tragic figure. Humbled by mostly self-induced financial catastrophe in the late 1980s and 1990s, the wayward visionary returns home and continues to work on smaller projects until his death. I was struck by the many similarities to another great figure from the Canadian cultural past, the one-time director of the National Gallery of Canada, Alan Jarvis. There's a sense, whether intentional on Stouck's part or not, that great Canadian cultural figures like Erickson, Jarvis, even Trudeau, perhaps, lacked the practicality to ever fully realize the visions for society that they had. Most of the other figures, particularly architects, that Stouck covers end up feeling softer, more pragmatic, and therefore less remarkable than his core subject. The desire for any kind of synthesis, however, remains unfulfilled. Erickson's visions remain contested, flawed, or unrealised, signalling the dynamic, messy, never-finished nature of building itself. ...more
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