Arthur Erickson's buildings?  

I'm not familiar in the...
I'm not familiar in the least with Erickson's work, but I'll take a chance, based on something you state in your post, and bet that most people in the know will confirm his talent. What I'm latching on to more than anything is that you say the building 'feels wonderfully right'. Not that other factors aren't extremely important and even critical, but it is my sincere belief, that for any designer to be truly talented she/he must consistently be able to engage the user, to impart, for lack of a better term, 'right feeling' into their work. Sometimes, folks more able than I, can point specifically to how one is able to do this, and that might be the case for Erickson, or maybe it will be more nebulous than that. Or maybe you will be told he's a nob. I don't know, but as a buddy of mine who generally is pretty certain he doesn't know what he's talking about yet is decidely glad to share his thoughts anyway, is fond of adding at the end of his assertions, ...but I could be right.

dc, just want to thank you...
dc, just want to thank you for turning me to Erickson, someone I've been needing to see for some time. Others here I think might do well to read his 'Speech to McGill University' in its entirety, one of the more eloquent works I have seen in quite some time with regard to design.
I've suggested some other reading recently in another post, and worried that it might be considered off-topic, but I just want to say here, finally, that I believe good writing has a connectedness to design that is undeniable.
I'll quote now just a portion of the Erickson speech.
'So it was no surprise that the reaction of ill conceived modernist buildings was to revert in the 80's to a revival of historicism in the guise of "post modernism". That sad caper influenced nearly everyone in the building trade because it appealed to the public taste for antique references. That Dark Age is thankfully over but cultural insecurity is always there, hidden in the basement of our psyches - ready to spring out whenever brave confidence falters. It lingers in the gated communities where make-believe has become an adult panacea'.
There does not seem to be much interest in a certain type of discussion of late in this forum that I thought initially I would find, giving way now to designer blurbs, etc., but I have to say, regardless, it has been a very worthwhile venture for me here, and at times a great deal of fun being a small part of this wonderful community on its way wherever it is going. Like old Huck Finn, or the rolling bridge, I think it's about time to set out for the territory ahead. Good luck and all best.

Apart from my love for the...
link box (this time for Arthur Erikson's Mc Gill conference) there are a few things I would like to add. In spite of some dramatic and unfortunate financial up and downs, Arthur Erikson has always stood tall in the world of architecture. He is a great and visionary talent and if there are weaknesses in some of his buildings it was never the weakness of being faithful to the architectural ethics and the believe that architecture is first and formost a cultural expression and not a "provider of space". What makes it difficult to discuss topics like the reasons behind his quality, the expression of strength and weakness etc. so difficult on this forum is that these are very complex issues and in spite of being able to link to numerous other sites and thus to visual and other documents, nobody has the same background information. there are never simple answers to complex questions. When we find simple answers like E=MC2, it is not because the question was complex, but because the procedure to get there was a very complex one. But the simplicity of the solution was always there. In architecture or design, there are no simple formulas and discussing them on a trans-cultural forum where everybody accepts to use a common language no matter how difficult it is to use it adequatly gives it so many extra dimensions. So I think that I understand what hudsonhonu points out...although...I am not that sure. It's one of the reasons why I loved James Collins' table exercise.
http://www.arthurerickson.com/sp_mcgill.html

Good lord,
Its a great speech.

Guess I'll be stopping in...
Guess I'll be stopping in Fresno next trip to Yosemite.

Koen...
I've never heard you shy away from a design subject, because you were concerned about misunderstandings due to linguistic and cultural diversity. No doubt there will be misunderstandings, but then there are misunderstandings among our greatest and most learned professionals in the same field speaking the same language. I would be interested to read your thoughts about this Fresno government office building. If ever there were a building that deserved the term uncompromising, I reckon this would be it. I think this building embodies much of what he opined about aesthetics, particularly beauty's hardness and irregularities in the link you provided. But I also sense some menace in this remarkable structure. It is huge--an all encompassing umbrella and yet very, very HARD! It leads out in every direction and yet all paths lead in rather sacrificial procession toward it. Like the modern state itself?

Dear dc.
...ask and you will recieve...Before getting to Arthur Erikson, a short note on the main cause of my distress today: The vatican just abolished my favorite place: limbo.
Let me start with saying that in spite of the metaphor of Fresno's geography, the valley in the shaddow of the Sierra Nevada, I am not as impressed by Fresno's city hall as by Arthur Erikson's earlier works (Simon Fraser University, Museum of Anthropology of the U.B.C., The University of Lethbridge, Robson Square in vancouver etc.)This being said, I like the way the three different paths reach three different levels of the same cetral entrance. Although very geometrical it has a nature inspired structure. Wether the almost ceremonial symetry is appropriate depends very much on ones vision of civil authority. If we see it as an authority and the expression of a hierarchy that wants to distance itself from the citizens than it is probably seen as agressive and authoritarian. If we see civil authority as the expression of a self imposed democratic authority and it's main building as an expression of the community that it serves, than it might be seen as a strong symbol of that community. In both cases the weak point are the corners. The oblong depressions in the corner supports are complitely un-consistant with any other part of the bulding and the whole structure would have gained by continuing the slanted corner pillar (maybe even slightly higher than the roof) instead of the roof-line. I would have to see it really to develop an opinion, rather than "imprssions".

I too like some of Erickson's earlier buildings better...
but that is because they are both more graceful in conceit and less menacing in appearance.
To me, the Fresno building bears a more potent social message than any other building of his that I have seen pictured.
You may be right that some maybe reassured by the cold, hard forcefulness of the state that this building embodies, or alternatively menaced. But no matter whether one has learned to embrace the awesomeness of Rome, as Olivier's Marcus Crassus did in Spartacus, or rebel against its cold, impersonal and brutal exploitation, as Douglas' Spartacus did, one cannot doubt I think that we are all witness in this building to an imposing, daunting order--a giant, ever vigilant steel spider with almost digital innards poised in its concrete web, ignoring some prey, while ensnaring others and so on with the metaphor.
There is also something ur-digital about this structure. If early Modernists were interested in building buildings that were machines for living or working inside, I would say that this Erickson building is a computer for working in. Put another way, if the 19th and 20th Century state evolved from the paper bureaucracy facilitated by Guttenberg's printing press and its mechanistic descendants, it seems to me Erickson is embodying at at least one level that by the late 20th Century the state had evolved into a digital electronic bureaucracy.
So we have both robo-spyder and the computer operating along with this abstract mountainscape that you note.
And we have the above ominous and majestic embodiment at a time when the post modernists are fleeing this knowledge of what society has become and escaping into, as Erickson says, historical surfaces and Disney like entertainment.
This building is important to me, because it starkly demarkates (is that a word?) the divergence that occurred in architecture around this time and a decade or so before.

I have to admid dc, that I only know...
the building from pictures and mostly from pictures that are more of less taken from the same angle as the one on this thread. To me, a building is too large to see it as an object, so I see it as a unrolling story that you discouver while walking toward and in it. The best analogy is probably music. By playing the first note you destroy what was there before: silence. The rest of the piece is trying to harmonize that breaking of the silence. when through themes and variatings you have reached the point where you can make a final accord you can return to the state of silence again. In architecture that silence is space. By putting a trace of human presence in an landscape, you produce an un-balance and the rest is a matter of articulating that un-balance untill you reach the point where althing is back to some kind of order egain....a final accord.

I must have been falling asleep on the keyboard...
...a more than unusual number of mistakes and unclear thoughts is a good indication...
I guess the point I was trying to make with the musical analogy is that a building , much like a piece of music needs a structure that concious of the fact that it starts as a change of the existing environment, at the end harmonizes with it. But you also raised the ideological point of what a building stands for or could stand for, and that is an interesting aspect. In spite of the fact that many works of art have been inspired by ideologies, religions or politics, the quality of the art has only rarely a direct connection to the ideology. Nazi Germany,fascist Italy and communist Russia produced (with a few italian exceptions) some of the worst architecture of the XXth century, but early communist architecture was quite good. Catholic churches exist in both ends of the quality spectrum and so do a lot of public buildings. As we know it, Van Beethoven wrote his 3th symphony, the one in E flat major (known as the Eroica) to honor Napoleon and his republican vision...and subsequently scrathed the name Bonaparte off the titel page when he knew that Napoleon had crowned himself emperor... but he did not change a note of his music. The ideological background for any piece of art is no guarantee that it is good. But your point is that no matter what the ideological intentions of the architect are, at the end the building projects an image that will be interpreted or can be interpreted as ideological. I agree, but I also think that this interpretation is a moving target in as much that it changes all the time. There is no question about the fact that the gothic architects and their public of these days considered the cathedrals as futuristic, high tech structures of a lightness that had never been made and seen before with large back lit images, made by "the" high tech industry of the time, in the window openings ( the first patent was on a glass in lead window) Of course this is hardly how we see them today.

From sound to space...
I am grateful you took the time to clarify your thoughts. It helps me see your points.
A building can no doubt transform space from silence to light, as Kahn said. It can also have a processional aspect to its space program and arrangement of its decorative artifacts as Philip Johnson said and showed. It can fit organically with the site, as Wright said. Its beauty can be hard and unorthodox, as Erickson said. And its space can unfold as music does, as you said.
But it is also undeniable that a building looks like something. It is unavoidable. No matter how hard an architect tries to focus on shaping space, or creating procession, or giving the experience of transition from silence to light, etc., in the end the building looks like something.
m43.net/quartets/

Pt.2
The Empire State building looks like a fantastically gigantic obelisk. The World Trade Center towers looked like two bar graphs in downtown Manhattan, or two gigantic rectilinear columns. Falling Water looks like three rectilinear boxes laid one on top of the other and a river runs through them. The AT&T Tower looks like a high boy. The Guggenheim, no matter how pure the abstraction Wright aspired to, looks like a fortress for modern art. A cathedral looks like a giant cross laid on the ground. The Great Pyramids look like, well, great pyramids, whereas the Sphinx looks like a mythological figure. And on and on. You see where I'm proceeding. A building at the very least looks like the forms it is composed from and it can also, intentionally, or unintentionally, look like something other than the forms that comprise it; i.e., it can resemble something else.
Great genius can sometimes design a single reference with a dizzying array of aspects, or alternatively it can design an array of references, each with only a few aspects. Erickson has some genius and I think he has designed multiple referents into an irreducibly integrated whole.

Pt.3
I find no contradiction that he may have achieved this effect by thinking and working out the aesthetics and topology solely in terms of a form language, the way a musical composer might achieve an end of sounding like spring strictly through musical sound constructions. Mathematicians too sometimes arrive at recognizable topologies without intending to do so simply by rigorous pursuit of mathematical elegance via properties of symmetry, asymmetry, etc.
One of the reasons I am so excited about your concert hall project is that I am wondering if you might, in some startling, and perhaps unconscious way, converge, or synthesize the topologies of engineering mathematics and sound of music with the form language of architecture. How's that for challenging you? 🙂
It seems no coincidence to me that you are thinking in musical metaphors about the procession of space in a building, when you're designing a concert hall.
From sound to space...now there would be a remarkable synesthesic transformation for an architect of formidable and rigorous intellect to make concrete. I know of one who grew up in Antwerp, who might just pull it off.
For what little my thoughts are worth, remember that the processional aspects of the space program of a great cathedral ARE the space of sound, ornamented with alot of gargoyles. Chanting to the heavens and singing while walking forward were pivotal actions in the sacrament that lead one of your predecessors to the horizontal and vertical procession of sound through space in cathedrals.
You are on the right track, I sense. It does not surprise me that your head grows weary occassionally. This sort of activity taxes even a formidable mind such as yours, even if the surface exhaustion has to do with the hustle and bustle of a firm that resists entirely running itself.

Pt.4
One more thing, T. S. Eliot arranged The Four Quartets in a linguistic structural procession of chamber music pieces. I would be being quite presumptutous to suggest anything to a man of your gifts during the act of creation, but that is who I am. When you get bogged down occassionally in the rigor of the working out of the ins and outs of your project, you might read a little bit here and a little bit there of the the Four Quartets.
Somehow the opening of Burnt Norton, the first of the four, suggests its relevance to you as antithesis. Forgive me, for I know he is a bit too devout for your taste, but it goes like this:
"Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?"
Music moves through time and space.
And you are on your way through your procession through a space you are creating, for others to follow through, also. Of course designing such a building appealed to a man of your tendancies, preferences and capabilities. Let the procession from sound to space carry on.
I'm already saving my nickels and dimes to go to France and hear a tune or two there. And I will gladly follow you through the space you found your way through before me.