ARTHUR ERICKSON (1924–2009)

Arthur Erickson, who was widely viewed as Canada’s preeminent modernist architect, died in Vancouver, British Columbia, on Wednesday, reports the New York Times‘s Ian Austen. Erickson was eighty-four.

Over the course of his career, he designed numerous buildings that met with critical acclaim, including the San Diego Convention Center; Napp Laboratories in Cambridge, England; the Kuwait Oil Sector Complex in Kuwait City; and Kunlun Apartment Hotel Development in Beijing.

He designed the Canadian pavilion, an inverted pyramid, at Expo 67, the world’s fair in Montreal; Canada’s embassy in Washington; and, with the firm of Mathers and Haldenby, the Roy Thomson Hall, Toronto’s main concert hall: a circular, futuristic building that tapers to a flat top.

But Erickson is perhaps best known for providing Vancouver, his hometown, with many of its architectural signatures. Among his notable buildings there is the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia.

“His work always came out of the earth,” said Phyllis Lambert, the chairwoman of the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal. “He didn’t start the way most architects started. He actually started off with the earth, the landscape, and made something that inhabited the land.”