Working the Dead Beat (12 page)

Diagnosed with
CUP
(cancer, unknown primary) in September 2003, she had surgery but declined aggressive treatment. When journalist Sylvia Fraser asked Callwood, the author of
Twelve Weeks in Spring
— an inspirational memoir about the care circle she had formed for Margaret Frazer, a friend who was dying of cancer — whether she could foresee a time when she might like home palliative care, Callwood made a “rude” noise and said: “Would you want your friends feeding you and emptying your bedpan?”

By then Callwood had confronted the unthinkable: the death of one of her own children. Casey “was a dandy,” she said in that 2006 interview, with a quiver in her voice. “I used to say to him, if anything happens to you, I will never get over it.” And she didn't. In April 1982, Casey, twenty, was riding his motorcycle back to Queen's University in Kingston when he was killed by a drunk driver going the wrong way on Highway 401.

Out of Casey's death and the palliative care experience with Frazer came the idea for establishing a residential hospice for people dying of
AIDS
. Callwood donated half the royalties from
Twelve Weeks in Spring
to help found Casey House hospice in 1988. It offers free services to more than one hundred clients and runs a thirteen-bed residential program in downtown Toronto.

For her eightieth birthday, in 2004, her family gave her a mahogany-coloured Mazda Miata, the latest in a string of small convertibles that she drove with the top down, especially on annual sojourns to Florida. Although the cancer was spreading, she seemed serene as she approached her inevitable death. She felt no fear and she admitted to very few regrets. “I'm a very healthy woman except for a lot of cancer tumours. They aren't scaring me, although I wish I could breathe better because it is hard to go up stairs and I can't walk very far.” She remained irredeemably cheerful, partly because every time she looked up her disease on the Internet, “I read my life expectancy and give myself a six-month extension.”

In her inimitable style she tried to organize her own departure, sending typewritten notes to friends and acquaintances — tidying up her desk, as it were — and then, on March 7, 2007, wearing a white shawl over a black trouser suit, she made a final public appearance at the Writers' Trust annual awards ceremony to accept a lifetime contribution award. Knowing full well that death had already claimed the award's two previous recipients, Pierre Berton and Bernard Ostry, she accepted a standing ovation with only a tinge of irony. And then she got down to business.

Never one to let a moment escape that could be turned to the advantage of others, Callwood reminded her admirers in a short speech that “If you see an injustice being committed, you aren't an observer — you are a participant.” That didn't mean you had to intervene, she explained, but you couldn't pretend that you weren't a part of what was happening in front of you. It was her ultimate chance to deliver her activist mantra and to sprinkle a little kindness on a well-intentioned audience. And then, breathing heavily because of cancer's inexorable devastation, she left the building, the devoted Frayne at her side.

Two weeks later she entered the palliative care unit of Princess Margaret Hospital, where she said farewell to friends and family, nibbled on chocolate, sipped ice water and the occasional sherry, and exuded a calm acceptance of the manner in which her life was ebbing — a model, as always, for those around her. She was ready, but her strong heart wasn't; it kept pumping until it finally stopped at four a.m. on the morning of April 14, 2007. She was eighty-two.

 

Arthur Erickson

Architect

June 14, 1924 – May 20, 2009

A
RTHUR ERICKSON GREW
up in the wet, lush climate of British Columbia, a land of grey skies, blue-green forests, towering mountains, crashing waves, ancient totem poles, and Haida longhouses. The scenery was rampant, the landscape was monumental, and both evoked a reverence and a wary respect for rigorous weather, and a desire to build shelters in harmony with their geography. Unlike so many architects, he absorbed the lessons of his environment and imagined buildings ensconced in their settings.

Erickson's innovative body of work changed the face and the structure of architecture in a legion of buildings that included the landscape-hugging University of Lethbridge; Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto; the Canadian pavilion at Expo 70 in Osaka, Japan; the Canadian Embassy in Washington; the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington; Napp Laboratories in Cambridge, England; the Kuwait Oil Sector Complex in Kuwait; and the Kunlun Apartment Hotel development in Beijing. But the largest and architecturally richest repository of Erickson's work is in his native province, beginning with the Filberg house in Comox and including Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, the Museum of Anthropology at
UBC
, and the Robson Square complex in downtown Vancouver.

Innately curious, openly gay, raised in a family that encouraged independent thinking, he also got outside his own environment by travelling the world at three pivotal points in his life. The army sent him to India and Malaya during the Second World War before he had decided on a career in architecture; he won a graduate travel grant in the early 1950s before he had sharpened his pencil and hung out his shingle as a practising professional; and he received another travel grant in the early 1960s about two years before he and Geoffrey Massey — to their surprise and most everybody else's — won the design competition for Simon Fraser University.

On those two later, self-directed odysseys through the history of architecture in Europe and the Far East, Erickson learned the boldness of ideas, how style is inseparable from climate and place, the significance of light and cadence, and the paramount importance of site. Those trips were as influential as any seminar or encounter with architectural titan Frank Lloyd Wright in forming Erickson's aesthetic. For him, as he wrote in
The Architecture of Arthur Erickson
, “the dialogue between building and setting” became the “essence.”

The result was a modernist architecture that combined classical Eastern elements and First Nations influences in signature buildings made out of contemporary materials, especially glass, wood, and his beloved concrete. Many architects are technically accomplished and build from the inside out, according to the principle of form following function. Erickson was the opposite. A visionary, he created from the outside in, invariably reminding you of the natural world on the other side of the glass wall, in buildings that weren't always waterproof but rarely failed to inspire. Phyllis Lambert, founder of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, commented after Erickson's death in 2009: “He created architecture of the earth and out of the earth and he has done it with extraordinary humanity.”

ARTHUR CHARLES ERICKSON
was born in Vancouver on June 14, 1924, the elder son of Oscar Erickson and his wife, Myrtle (née Chatterton). His parents had met in Winnipeg and became engaged before his father went overseas with the 78th Winnipeg Grenadiers in the First World War. The relationship nearly died on the battlefield. A shell burst between Erickson's knees at Amiens and he was left for dead until a nurse recognized him and arranged for him to be taken to a field hospital. After surgeons amputated what remained of his legs, everybody — including the patient — thought the marriage was off. His fiancée disagreed. As she said later, “I'd rather marry a man with wooden legs than a wooden head.”

In a series of interviews with Edith Iglauer for the
New Yorker
(which later became the basis for her book
Seven Stones
), Erickson remembered his father as a conservative both socially and politically, but a kind and humble man who behaved as though he didn't have a disability. His mother was gregarious, an innovative cook, an aficionado of Canadian art, and an expansive hostess who kept the house teeming with visitors.

Erickson began painting when he was about thirteen, using the bedroom walls as canvases for a rich jumble of plants, fish, and animals. At sixteen he won an honourable mention for two of his abstract pastels in a show at the Vancouver Art Gallery and attracted the attention of Group of Seven artist Lawren Harris, who became a family friend. Beset with career suggestions and torn between a fascination with biology and a creative passion for painting, Erickson asked Harris what path he should follow and received the curt but excellent advice “it's your life, not mine,” and, therefore, “it is your decision.” Forever after, when aspiring acolytes asked Erickson the same question, he repeated Harris's mantra.

Erickson entered an engineering program at the University of British Columbia in September 1942, nine months after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Like so many other young men, he joined the Canadian Officers' Training Corps. Within a year he had taken intensive instruction at a Japanese-language school and had received a commission in the Intelligence Corps of the army. He was stationed in India as a commando in a field broadcasting unit waiting for deployment behind enemy lines in Malaya — a precarious proposition — when Japan finally surrendered. He was demobilized with the rank of captain.

Back in Vancouver in 1946, he began studying economics, history, and Japanese with a view to a diplomatic career or perhaps anthropology or archaeology. Then, by chance, he saw colour photographs of Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West in
Fortune
magazine. “If you can do as imaginative and creative a thing as that in architecture, I want to be an architect,” he remembered thinking. As a Westerner, he was curious about the East, and although it was barely a month before the academic year began, he wired a slew of universities, including Harvard,
MIT
, and the University of Toronto. McGill was the only one that replied, so that is where he headed.

Four years later he graduated first in his class with an honours degree in architecture. “I didn't listen to my teachers much, but I had three people who influenced me — all keenly observant, original spirits,” he told Iglauer. The first and the strongest was his unconventional mother, then Lawren Harris, and finally Gordon Webber, a design professor at McGill. “He was very vague, never explained anything clearly, which forced you to see for yourself. I don't think I would be as receptive to everything as I am had it not been for Gordon Webber.”

Surprisingly, he didn't mention Frank Lloyd Wright. The summer before his final year at McGill, he went to visit Wright at Taliesin East, in Wisconsin, which he later described as “an absolutely beautiful blending of building and landscape.” When Wright invited him to spend the year at Taliesin, he gladly accepted and raced back to Montreal to pack. But he changed his mind when he learned that he was likely to win the travelling scholarship awarded to McGill's top graduating student in architecture.

Why would he give up a chance to study with Frank Lloyd Wright in favour of travelling to as many architectural sites as the $1,500 stipend would allow? “He was turning out little toy soldiers and I wanted to find my own way,” Erickson replied in an interview in 2008. Intuitively, he knew he had to escape Wright's shadow and see the world with his own eyes. He eked out his funds over three years before returning to Vancouver and the workaday world of Canadian architecture in the mid-1950s.

Several firms hired him and a couple fired him before he began teaching at
UBC
in 1957 and hooked up with Geoffrey Massey, the architect son of actor Raymond Massey. Together they designed houses for friends and did solo projects such as Erickson's Filberg house in Comox, on Vancouver Island. He quit teaching in 1963, the same year that he and Massey scored their huge architectural coup to design Simon Fraser University in nearby Burnaby. Having ignored most of the competition specifics, they attended the award announcement only out of curiosity about the winning design and were stunned to hear their names announced.

The Erickson-Massey proposal combined visions of the Acropolis in Athens with the clusters of terraced houses clinging to the hillsides of Italy. It emphasized the horizontal rather than the vertical, as though the mountain itself was part of the design, and knitted the “learning elements” of the university together rather than separating them into isolated units or colleges, as in the Oxbridge tradition. Construction began in 1964 and the almost “instant university” opened eighteen months later, on September 9, 1965.

The success of Simon Fraser meant the duo was in demand for innovative, statement-making buildings, including the University of Lethbridge. As with
SFU
, the Lethbridge design linked the disparate studying and living parts of the university. As always, the site influenced the design. Instead of perching atop a mountain, the University of Lethbridge is nestled into the tawny ravines of the headlands of the Oldman River Valley. The roofline remains a constant flat plane, barely rising above the horizon, while the building plunges into the crevices created by the barren, undulating landscape.

After the Erickson-Massey partnership dissolved, Erickson formed his own practice in 1972 and embarked on even bigger projects, such as the breathtaking post-and-beam construction of the Museum of Anthropology at
UBC
and the massive concrete headquarters of forestry giant MacMillan Bloedel in downtown Vancouver. The strong horizontals evoke Haida longhouses built out of mammoth cedar logs and planks.

The Robson Square redevelopment was a series of structures, built out of concrete, glass, and wood, that turned the twentieth-century skyscraper on its side and opened normally sequestered law courts to the gaze of the public. Nicholas Olsberg, author of
Arthur Erickson: Critical Works
,
says that with this building Erickson “re-introduced a spiritual dimension to architecture.”

Like his friend and intellectual soulmate Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Erickson was an iconoclast who railed against authority and regimentation. As prime minister, Trudeau overrode his own bureaucrats in the early 1980s and personally appointed Erickson to design the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C., on a prime site between the Capitol and the White House.

Confronted with a lengthy list of neoclassical design requirements to make the building conform to existing structures, Erickson sent up the process in his cheeky creation of
de rigueur
columns supporting a “Rotunda of the Provinces” at the southeast corner of the embassy. The twelve columns — one for each province and territory — are made from aluminum, so they are too lightweight to support anything. Instead of making visitors walk through the columns to enter the embassy, he created a tiny entrance off to the side, all to poke a little fun and to create a disparity between the appearance and the reality of the building. He even toyed with the idea of installing an empty chair in the rotunda facing the Capitol, as an ironic reference to the Lincoln Memorial, but thought better of the notion.

The more famous Erickson became, the more projects he took on. Eventually he opened offices in several locations around the world — at one point he was operating five concurrently — stretching his financial reach far beyond the management abilities of a single architect, especially one who was more interested in design than administration. Thinking, creating, and envisaging were his strengths; the humdrum business of budgets and accounts receivable he left to others. As he said to Iglauer in 1981, with what in retrospect seems like astonishing insouciance, “I don't want to go to meetings . . . I hardly know who works for me. It is a great disadvantage to a client, I suppose, that I'm not running the office . . . [but] I'm involved in
all
the design. That's what I enjoy . . . That's why I'm hired.”

Not surprisingly, the firm became lumbered with debt in the recession of the late 1980s. After closing his Toronto and Los Angeles offices, he formed a new company, Arthur Erickson Architectural Corporation, in 1991, the year before he declared personal bankruptcy, listing more than $10.5 million in liabilities. The only asset he reported was his six-hundred-square-foot home and garden in the Point Grey district of Vancouver.

Supporters formed a group called the Arthur Erickson House and Garden Foundation, which became the registered owner of his house, allowing Erickson to continue to live there at a modest rent. Sometime later he began sharing offices and working with architect Nick Milkovich, a former student and long-time colleague. The two men collaborated on a number of projects, including the Portland Hotel, a public housing project in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside; the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington; and the Waterfall Building in Vancouver.

As he approached his eighties, Erickson's health began to fail as he struggled with the combined effects of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. At the same time, some of his dearest friends and romantic partners were dying of
HIV
/
AIDS
and related diseases. Particularly hard was the suicide in April 2000 of his former lover and long-time collaborator, the interior designer Francisco Kripacz, whom he had known since the 1960s.

At an interview early in 2008, in the offices he shared with Milkovich, Erickson was exquisitely groomed as always. Wearing a finely tailored blue suit, a matching striped shirt, and patterned blue tie, he looked almost dainty because of his medium height and slender build. He was magnetic and charming, but it quickly became apparent that his short-term memory was wobbly. He could talk in detail about dinner-table conversations with his parents when he was growing up in Vancouver, but larger queries about his career left him straining to remember. It was as though he understood the questions, and knew where he intended to go in answering them, but lost his way en route.