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A new exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal showcases photography, travel diaries, and sketches from the archives of Arthur Erickson, one of Canada’s most renowned 20th century architects. Being There: Photography in Arthur Erickson’s Early Travel Diaries was curated by David Covo, associate professor at McGill University’s School of Architecture, and runs until March 16, 2025.
Throughout his life, Erickson was a prolific traveler, a passion that was first ignited shortly after his undergraduate education at McGill University. Having been awarded a prestigious travel scholarship, the young architect visited the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe from 1950 to 1952, documenting canonical architectural sites along the way. His intention for the voyage: to catalogue the emergence of classical architecture.
Later in his career, Erickson received a travel grant from the Canada Council for the Arts that allowed him to visit Japan, China, Cambodia, and Bali in 1961. According to a press release from the CCA, materials from this trip are “central to the show,” particularly a documented correspondence between Erickson and his mentor Gordon Weber.
Erickson’s attention to architectural detail during his travels came to inform his own work back in British Columbia. Vernacular forms from across the globe appeared in his early residential work, a sign of the architect’s penchant for site-specific contextual design.
To illustrate this attention to detail, the show pairs many of the photographs with site descriptions written by Erickson. For example, discussing the Kinkaku-Ji temple in Kyoto, Japan, Erickson wrote, “what the origin of the lifting corner of the roof is—I do not know—but it is surprising to see how clearly it corresponds to the lift at the end of a pine branch, and how closely it harmonizes with the forest because of this.”
In other notes, the architect’s insights are more philosophical. In Bali in 1961 he wrote, “I think that one’s impression of beauty comes not from any single thing, such as the topography of the island or the physical grace of the people, but from the total interdependence of every aspect of culture.”
The opening of the CCA’s exhibition corresponds with a recently premiered documentary about the architect, Arthur Erickson: Beauty Between the Lines, which screened at this year’s Architecture and Design Film Festival (ADFF). Erickson’s renowned Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia also recently reopened following a major renovation.