VIFF Celebrates Centenary of Legendary Architect Arthur Erickson

Press release from VIFF

VANCOUVER, BC (May 2024) – The VIFF Centre marks the one-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Vancouver’s most famous and influential architect with Erickson on Film, three special programs of screenings and talks guest-curated by architecture critic and historian Trevor Boddy FRAIC.

Each feature screening begins with a short introductory talk from Boddy, who will then host a dialogue with Erickson’s key design collaborators and the documentarians and film crews drawn to the visual power of his creations. Erickson on Film will chart the Vancouver architect’s life and creative works — as seen by both documentarians and Hollywood directors, offering a glimpse at how his ideas and passions have transformed the city.

Intersection, at VIFF Centre

Celebrations kick off on June 14 with birthday cake and the first program, Erickson on Film: Intersecting Lives. Boddy will introduce the architect's training and first houses, showing how his early designs prefigure his most famous achievement, the UBC Museum of Anthropology (MOA), which reopens June 13 following the 18-month total reconstruction of its Great Hall. The pre-feature dialogue features West Vancouver film producer Christine Haebler, a location scout for Mark Rydell’s 1993 feature Intersection. Haebler toured the cast and production team with Arthur Erickson to his residences and MOA, many of them showing up as shooting locations or architectural models in the final film. Haebler will be interviewed alongside long-term Erickson collaborator Nick Milkovich FRAIC, who worked on the original building design, and was then commissioned to build the scale models used in the film production. Intersection sees an Armani-suited Richard Gere eerily doubling for Erickson, in a stylish melodrama which tracks his troubled marriage to fellow architect Sharon Stone. 

The second event on June 16, Erickson on Film: Documenting the Designer, focuses on documentary films that track Erickson's ever-higher profile, and his sometimes-controversial career as both an innovative designer and public intellectual. Boddy will introduce filmic tours of his buildings, and interviews with the architect and his admirers, featuring the triumphs of SFU, Mac-Blo Tower, Robson Square and Tacoma Museum, along with his life of constant global travel and two difficult bankruptcies. This will be followed by a panel with longtime Erickson associate Wyn Bieleska FRAIC and Michele Smolkin, the writer-director of feature documentary Concrete Poetry, a 2003 Radio Canada film on Erickson which will have its English-language Vancouver theatrical premiere.

The Groundstar Conspiracy, at VIFF Centre

The final program runs on June 18. Erickson on Film: The Smell of Wet Concrete will be devoted to the architect’s major public buildings, including Lethbridge University, Canada’s Washington Chancery, the Waterfall Building, and most important of all, the entire original campus of Simon Fraser University (SFU). The 1963 competition-winning SFU campus design he co-authored with Geoffrey Massey figures strongly in the subsequent dialogue featuring Geoffrey Erickson, the architect’s nephew and co-organizer of Erickson 100, and Bruno Freschi FRAIC FAIA, a member of the original SFU design team and architect of Science World and the Burnaby Jamatkhana. The closing feature film, which stars hard-boiled versions of George Peppard and Michael Sarrazin, is The Groundstar Conspiracy. Directed by action flick maestro Lamont Johnson, the majority of this 1972 film was shot on the university's plazas, hallways, classrooms, and the Burnaby Mountain hillside; the campus successfully portraying an evil hub for a "space-computer.”

Guest-curator Trevor Boddy said:

“Arthur Erickson’s conceptions for Robson Square, SFU, MOA, along with the houses and office buildings he designed, are more responsible for Vancouver’s visual identity than the works of any other creator. His works and ideas inspire not just fellow designers and writers, but also the imaginations of talented filmmakers of all stripes, as will be clear in this delightful and unprecedented trio of programs.”

VIFF Centre Year-Round Programmer Tom Charity said:

"When director Mark Rydell and Richard Gere came up to Vancouver in the early 90s to make a film about an architect it was only natural that they would meet with Arthur Erickson. More surprisingly, Erickson became a consultant on the project and the model for the role; Gere's character studies models of Erickson’s houses, and is credited with designing MOA. After production wrapped, Gere and the Vancouverite became friends, with a Los Angeles house design commissioned but never built. The title of their movie is Intersection, and I'm thrilled that the series Trevor has curated in Erickson's honour explores so many cross-cultural touch points between architecture and film, art and life. Arthur was one of the very first guest speakers when the VIFF Centre opened in 2006 so it's more than fitting that we should pay tribute to his centennial here."

Tickets for each event are $18, and are available at viff.org/erickson.

Additional screenings of select titles run from June 19 alongside Colin Waugh's recent documentary Arthur Erickson's Dyde House.