Being There: Photography in Arthur Erickson’s Early Travel Diaries

“First impressions are confusing, bewildering as a matter of fact”— writes Arthur Erickson in a letter to his teacher, Gordon Webber, on his trip to Japan in 1961, where he grappled with the relationship of buildings to landscapes and the formal austerity of historic Japanese architecture.

Today, we open the exhibition Being There: Photography in Arthur Erickson’s Early Travel Diaries, curated by David Covo and examining Erickson’s exchanges with people, places, landscapes, buildings, rituals, and ideas during his travels in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East between 1950 and 1952, and in Asia in 1961. The project is part of a longer, ongoing investigation at the CCA into the use of photography and new media as a means of studying the built environment. This new chapter explores how travel photography acts as a mode of notetaking and thinking in design practice.

Arthur Erickson (1924–2009) studied architecture at McGill University and graduated in the spring of 1950. With the support of a travelling scholarship, he spent the first two-and-a-half years of his career in North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. In the summer of 1961, at a moment when his work had already been recognized with national awards, a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts enabled another five months of travel, this time in Japan, Hong Kong, Macau, and parts of Southeast Asia. Being There is a geographic and thematic reading of Erickson’s photography, site notes, and correspondence, and a critical assessment of the impact of his early travels on his thinking and architectural work.

Sensitive to the interdependence of site and building that was evident in his early houses and even in his student work, Erickson believed, as he wrote in his application to the Canada Council for the Arts, that “the essence and meaning of the architecture of a culture remain evasive and hidden until experienced.” His approach to travel was rooted in the concept of genius loci: the ineffable quality of a place that is discovered only by being physically present. Erickson’s opportunity for prolonged time on site, conversation with his hosts, observation, and reflection created space for understanding new places and processing new ideas.

Erickson did not keep a journal, but he documented his early travels with his cameras, handwritten notes in guidebooks and on the backs of maps, and in the dozens of letters sent to family, friends, colleagues, and former teachers. Central to this exhibition are the 1961 letters from Japan, Macau, Cambodia, and Bali to his family and his former teacher, artist Gordon Webber, whom he cited as one of three major influences on his life, along with his mother, Myrtle Erickson, and painter Lawren Harris. Coinciding with the exhibition opening, we release the article An Accumulation of Experiences, which juxtaposes Erickson’s slides with excerpts of letters he wrote to Webber on his trip to Japan in 1961.

A large selection of the objects in the exhibition are part of the Arthur Erickson Fonds held at the CCA. The first donation of the archive by Arthur Erickson dates back to 1987, with additional gifts received between 1989 and 2004. More recently, in 2010 and 2013, the Erickson Family donated additional archival material. 

We also invite you to follow Arthur Erickson on Learning Systems, the first volume of the Building Arguments series conceived and co-published by the CCA and Concordia University Press, which presents a selection of writings by Erickson advocating for interdisciplinary educational approaches and methods for sharing knowledge.

To find out about more findings from our archives, and about upcoming conversations, subscribe here.

The CCA would like to thank the Arthur Erickson Foundation for their continuous support of the exhibition, as well as the Erickson Family Collection; the Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill Libraries; the Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture, McGill University; the Canadian Architectural Archives, University of Calgary Libraries; the West Vancouver Art Museum; and the West Vancouver Archives that kindly lent their objects.