The spotlight of this 12 months’s West Coast Fashionable Week, (9-14 July 2024) is a becoming homage to the late nice Arthur Erickson, whose centenary celebrations started on what would have been his hundredth birthday, 14 June.
Not solely is the West Vancouver Artwork Museum (the HQ for WCMW) now celebrating its personal thirtieth anniversary and providing an exhibition of Selwyn Pullan photos of Arthur Erickson’s own residence and backyard – full with an iteration of his front room – it is usually that includes two of his residential designs on its annual West Vancouver Fashionable Houses Tour on 13 July.
(Picture credit score: Luis Valdizon (When They Discover Us))
West Coast Fashionable Week House Tour 2024
In a province with among the weakest safety for modernist heritage in North America, the annual houses tour is as a lot a preservationist plea as a showcase for architectural gems. Certainly Arthur’s well-known Smith home, was demolished in West Vancouver in 2007, a lot to the chagrin of native archi-philes.
Additionally on tour is the just lately renovated residence of Erickson’s long-time skilled companion Geoffrey Massey. The well-preserved seaside home is considered one of many examples of West Coast modernism in bucolic West Vancouver’s very susceptible architectural treasure trove.
(Picture credit score: Luis Valdizon (When They Discover Us))
However this 12 months the celebrities of the houses tour, sponsored by British Pacific Properties and Livingspace, are Erickson’s Eppich Homes 1 and a pair of. Of the 2 houses, designed for twin brother metal producers Helmut and Hugo Eppich respectively, the second designed in 1979 is definitely the diva.
A stroll by way of the metal entrance cover reveals a living-dining ‘nice room’ that opens onto the forested web site, pond and past to views of Burrard Inlet. A curved wall of glass blocks on the jap edge extends to the higher main bedroom, offering mild and reflections of greenery, in addition to privateness. In every single place you look, the views of surrounding bushes and water conflate inside and exterior. At one level, a geranium planter within the dwelling space – framed by a metal ovaloid that may very well be a mirror or a portal to a different dimension – seems to be open air.
(Picture credit score: Luis Valdizon (When They Discover Us))
The household room opens onto the infinity pool, which additional blurs boundaries. Strolling by way of the home is to expertise shape-shifting architectural choreographies and ever-changing framed views of the encircling atmosphere. Erickson all the time spoke concerning the significance of sunshine in the home. He used water and polished chrome-plated metal columns to deliver the solar into the bottom aircraft; ‘they straight mirror the sky’, he mentioned. And even on sombre winter days, when all of the surfaces are darkish, ‘that sky is mild’.
(Picture credit score: Luis Valdizon (When They Discover Us))
The Eppich I, designed by Arthur Erickson in 1972 as a concrete body home and sensitively up to date by BattersbyHowat Architects in 2015, is a extra sober sibling with an appropriate gravitas and class.
Each houses include parts of Erickson’s work from his 1970’s heyday of public tasks – together with the just lately reopened (after a 40-million-dollar seismic improve) 1976 Museum of Anthropology. In his centenary 12 months, it’s a uncommon deal with to witness the Ericksonian spirit embodied in these two effective residences.
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