WASHINGTON — Arthur Erickson, one of Canada’s most prominent architects whose controversial design of the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C., drew both plaudits and scorn, died Wednesday in a nursing home in Vancouver, B.C. He was 84 and had Alzheimer’s disease.
Erickson, who won many of the top honors of his profession, capped his career with the embassy, which Washington Post architecture critic Benjamin Forgey called “a mighty battleship of a building.”
In the words of architect Philip Johnson, the urbane, sometimes egotistical Erickson was “by far the greatest architect in Canada, and may be the greatest on this continent.”
But his 1982 selection to design the Canadian Embassy stirred up a controversy that never completely went away. Even though Erickson was not among the four finalists chosen by a selection committee, he was picked for the job by Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, a longtime friend. Trudeau’s political opponents called the choice a sham and demanded an investigation, which Trudeau rebuffed.
Erickson, who was previously known as a strict modernist in the tradition of Mies van der Rohe, adopted a new style for the embassy with a conscious blend of the neoclassical and modern. Its colonnade and rotunda saluted the Capitol several blocks away, while its sharp sculptural angles echoed I.M. Pei’s East Building of the National Gallery of Art directly across Pennsylvania Avenue.
“It shows we can stand up in Washington with the best,” Erickson said of his building. “I hope it will elicit pride about our presence in the United States.”
When the embassy, near Pennsylvania and Constitution avenues, finally opened in 1989, it was greeted in some quarters as a masterwork and in others as a lost architectural opportunity.
“All too frequently, Erickson’s big moves terminate in miscalculations,” a critic for the Toronto Globe and Mail wrote. “Condominiums have nicer lobbies.”
An article on Forbes.com in 2002 named the embassy one of the world’s “10 ugliest buildings.”
“Erickson has given us a powerful building in a place that calls for one, and there is as well a certain entrancing, poetic quality in its forceful contradictions,” Forgey wrote in The Post in 1988. “His building is an edgy, flawed masterpiece … but a masterpiece.”
Behind the success of his embassy design, Erickson’s career was near collapse. In 1989, when the embassy (technically a chancery because it is not the ambassador’s residence) was about to open, Erickson narrowly avoided an auction of the contents of his office to pay creditors.
In 1992, more than $10 million in debt, he was forced to declare bankruptcy. He even owed $4.6 million to the Canadian government for cost overruns on the embassy in Washington. His only asset was an 850-square-foot house in his home town of Vancouver, to which he later returned as a renter. At 68, Erickson began to rebuild his career from its foundation.
“Frank Lloyd Wright did his best work between 65 and 90,” he said in 1992, “and I am in very good health, knock wood.”
Arthur Charles Erickson was born June 14, 1924, in Vancouver and was a commando with the Canadian army during World War II. He was a student at the University of British Columbia when he saw photographs of Wright’s house and workshop in Arizona, Taliesin West.
“Suddenly, it was clear to me,” Erickson wrote in his 1988 autobiography. “If such a magical realm was the province of an architect, I would become one.”
After graduating in 1950 from McGill University in Montreal, Erickson spent almost three years touring great architectural sites of the world. He was fired from two early jobs but became known for his forward-thinking house designs. In 1963, he and colleague Geoffrey Massey won a contest to build a new campus for Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. The innovative design linked all the structures in a single unit that blended into the mountainous landscape.
Soon, Erickson was building banks, religious temples, museums and offices around the world, using his signature elements of horizontal lines, unusual angles, concrete, skylights and reflecting pools. He designed San Diego’s convention center, the city hall of Fresno, Calif., and Toronto’s landmark Roy Thomson Hall, a circular concert hall. He once worked on a large water garden in Baghdad for Saddam Hussein but abandoned the project when Iraq went to war with Iran.
Erickson objected to any attempts to alter his buildings, even when they sprang leaks or had other structural problems.
“My projects are being destroyed,” he said in 2002. “It is very difficult to see your children wasted.”
He had no immediate survivors.
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