Where’s Arthur???
Arthur Erickson. Vancouver’s most famous native architect is a mass of contradictions. The one-time prophet of a massive east-side freeway (don’t think of it as a road, he told doubters, think of it as a large building that just happens to have a road on top) doesn’t even drive himself. The life-long prophet of cities that were Larger! Taller! Denser! (10 million people is just the beginning, he once said of Vancouver) lived most of his life in a secluded little cottage in the far off reaches of Point Grey. Most confounding of all, the man commissioned in the early 70s to give Vancouver a new civic square - a place where the great mass of people could meet and gather - doesn’t much like the masses. “I wonder what it is about the middle-class I hate so much?” he wondered aloud to his one and only biographer.
The resultant civic space – Robson Square – shows all these contradictions. A green and elegant refuge in the heart of the city, Erickson’s garden and square are defended from the prying eyes of the bourgeoisie by a ditch and a high concrete wall. Access to the gardens and the adjacent sunken square is by a series of convoluted, confusing, forbidding and sometimes downright dangerous stairways, doors and walkways. Few among the common folk ever make it in. Indeed, Vancouver’s civic gathering place has been notably described as a spot where on a sunny day in the middle of the lunch-hour you could dance a jig naked while setting off rescue flares and smoking the world’s largest joint without anyone ever noticing, because no one is ever down there.
Perhaps the first and only time Robson Square saw crowds was on opening day in October of 1978, when the elite of civic and provincial politics gathered to declare the $160 million publicly funded project open. The only one missing was Arthur. He’d gotten a lift to the ceremony – Arthur riding shotgun and providing the directions. They made it down into the underground parking garage, but the multitude of levels and elevators and exits and stairways defeated even the designer himself. On his way to the grand opening of his great civic square, Arthur Erickson got lost.
