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West Coast Modern and More

West Coast Modern and More

Vancouver’s best and most influential architects:
Ned Pratt
Arthur Erickson
Ron Thom
Fred Hollingsworth

Ned Pratt, Craighead house (1949) at 3097 Connaught Avenue, North Vancouver.

Ned Pratt, Saba house (1947) at 2870 West 47th Street, Vancovuer

Vancouver architect Ned Pratt produced work in an era that—from the standpoint of our developer-led moment—is quickly starting to look like a golden age.

Ned Pratt’s own 1951 house in West Vancouver
Ned Pratt’s original 1953 home in West Vancouver
Ned Pratt’s 1953 home at 430 Stevens
The house is a little faded now perhaps, modest and in need of some wood treatment,
but it is nevertheless a beautiful modernist post and beam structure.
It’s interesting how much smaller the average family home was in those days; when did
houses start ballooning?

BC Electric building of 1955, Ron Thom

BC artist B.C. Binning designed the famous mosaic of the BC Electric Building

B.C. Binning was a friend of Pratt’s and his own house is not far away from this one. 
It was the first commercial building to be designated heritage in Vancouver,
and in 1998 the BC Electric Building, once Vancouver’s most visible landmarks,
was turned into condos in a surprisingly successful conversion called The Electra.

Pratt’s Dal Grauer substation is hoped to be protected as an important heritage site.

Edward Mahon House - Ned Pratt was the architect for Edward and Lilette Mahon’s new
house at 2747 SW Marine Drive, built in 1941.
Lilette (Edward’s widow after 1937) was connected to the Art In Living movement and
was friend of BC Binning and Net Pratt.

Architectural Firm - Thomson Berwick Pratt

Killam-Massey House, Erickson & Massey, 1955
Artist Ruth Killam's house shows influence from Richard Neutra's designs
with its rough and sleek materials juxtaposed.  Artist Ruth Killam, later married Geoffrey Massey.
The house shows the sense of the crisp, elegant, white Modernist envelope.
Its economical and strongly articulated support is based on the Miesian Exoskeleton.

The house was a longitudinal bar, built on a promontory perpendicular to the shoreline to
take advantage of a spectacular view of Howe Sound.
With a sky lit studio at the inland end, the house once again had great variety and privacy
within very small compass. White and abstract, it hovered on the rock like a temple to an
aerial deity. Whiteness, achieved here by painting the timber frame (the infill was glass and
boards stained driftwood-grey), was becoming a trademark of Erickson's, adopted in part, I think,
to distinguish his work in the Bauhaus spirit from that of the timber regionalists.

Geoffrey Massey, a young architect trained at Harvard's Graduate School of Design.

Erickson and Massey designed a small house for the Modernist painter Gordon Smith and
weaver Marion Smith in suburban West Vancouver.
Begun in the year Erickson returned, it suggests an attempt to reconcile internationalist, specifically
Bauhaus, ideas with the regional style.

Though framed in timber with plank ceilings and a brick chimney (Smith did much of the carpentry
himself), the house was a pale, glazed, oblong volume lifted off the forest floor but anchored
at one end by a utility-block and studio of double height.
The effect was lighter and crisper, more skeletal and abstract. than that of other houses in
the local style. Balancing needs for privacy and entertainment, its plan of just over 1,300 square feet
was varied and contrapuntal, with generous, flowing spaces.

Richard Neutra stated:
"Heighten and intensify what [the site] may offer, never work against its grain and fibre,"
Neutra sought to nest his houses into the landscape without sacrificing abstract modern perfection.
Neutra's houses are often laid out in the L, T, and pinwheel plans.
Richard Neutra's designs for houses are seen in resort areas of California,
such as the Kaufmann desert house at Palm Springs, of 1946.
In these designs Neutra sought to balance a sense of place with universal,
international principles of modern design.
Neutra had loomed over Modernist circles in Vancouver since the early 1940s,
when Binning had begun inviting him to visit the city each summer and to lecture
informally on his philosophy of humane modernism.

Filberg House, Arthur Erickson
Designed for the wealthy, idealistic Robert Filberg.

The house incorporates mysticism of site, light, and contrasting materials and textures.

It is decorative and curvilinear, with upswept eaves and perforated screens like
Islamic woodwork mashrabiyas.
The structural frame is of steel. not wood, and details, including the screens and curious,
prominent "columns" concealing lighting devices, are of bronze.

The hearth and shaped ceilings have a Corbusian flavour. The "shimmer" and complex
layering of the design, part of the post-Miesian mood of "decorated modernism" captured
in the better-known work of Yamasaki and Stone, had not been seen in Erickson's earlier,
more austere designs.

The house consists of cross-axial volumes slung across a hollow between
natural mounds and resting on a rough masonry podium representing protection
and mass more emphasis is on the landscape than architecture.

This podium is reminiscent of the artificial masonry "mesa" that underpins Taliesin West
(he had seen Wright's winter home and studio in Arizona about a year before he designed
the Filberg house), though the superstructure of Taliesin West partakes of rough naturalness,
whereas Erickson's self-conscious temple-like glass pavilion sets it off.

Dal Grauer House, Arthur Erickson - commissioned in the late 1950's.
The house has a Mediterraneanism with its garden-terrace and pool cabana

It is a Spanish Colonial Revival home for the cultured, progressive chairman
of B.C. Electric, Dal Grauer.
The additions to this Vancouver property were exquisitely inflected and calibrated to their
surroundings, with keen sensitivity to light, especially at night.

Arthur Erickson's later years - a fascination with new technology.

Moulded fibreglass shells were fabricated for the roof of the shelter,
the shapes evoking Classical and Islamic arcades.
Here, in germ, is the Erickson of space-frames, water-covered roofs, and underground
buildings we came to know later, who married knowing historic references with
technology "as modern as tomorrow."

Arthur Erickson was more than the Coast-Style Modernist house designer.
Was he a B.C. regionalist,
a North American organicist of the Wrightian sort,
a Corbusian neo-primitivist,
an architectural Abstract Expressionist
an International Modernist  and neo-Bauhaiisler?

One of Arthur Erickson's trademarks was the one-storey oblong pavilion.
The minimal, rectangular pavilion had been a gesture of modern architecture at least since
Le Corbusier's (then Jeanneret's) Dom-i-no house of 1914, but it enjoyed a burst of renewed
favour in the late 1940s and early 1950s after Mies used it for the much-published
Farnsworth House in Illinois.

Arthur Erickson was clearly drawn to the Dom-i-no house compositional style with pavilions set at 90-degree angles
around courtyards or in parallel runs terracing down slopes.

Arthur Erickson used this compositional style in many of his houses of the 1960s and 1970s
The Danto house in Vancouver is illustrative of this style.

Arthur Erickson follows a Bauhaus analogue, via Neutra, to the Beaux-Arts idea that design is generated by plan and parti.
So, along with his spiritual belief in progress, his Bauhaus training at McGill explains Erickson's
lifelong faith in the validity of Modernism-though he has since inflected and modified that faith.

Arthur Erickson said the key to meaning in architecture is the "dialogue" between a building's programme and its site.

Arthur Erickson was more like Le Corbusier, Buckminster Fuller or Louis Kahn than a Canadian
architect like, say, Ron Thorn.
No wonder he was restless in local architects' offices and did not satisfy them, which he admits
was largely his own fault.

Though a local boy, he had made himself an outsider or foreigner, a role he now confesses he
used to relish.  This also partly explains why the U.B .C. school of architecture did not hire him to
teach till1957, by which time it may have been embarrassing not to have him on the faculty

Le Corbusier was exceptionally important to Erickson at this time and has remained so.
To a great degree he has adopted Corbusier's model of design as laboratory activity-recherches
minutieuses-and his turn to Antiquity as a "useable past" in the search for a physical, bodily
architecture of masses seen in light.

Erickson's work is filled with veiled references to Classicism, and even today he keeps a copy of
Le Modular (1948), Corbusier's outline of his proportional system, over the centre of his office desk.

Arthur Erickson incorporated into his work the quality of light brought on by the distinct flat greyness
caused by Vancouver's perpetual rain and overcast skies. 
And the abundant browns and golds in Nature's palette, for instance, set the stroke
for his affinity for fawn-hued concrete.

Like Ron Thorn, Erickson was a painter before he was an architect and some of his mysticism
is directed at his city:  "What is it about Vancouver that keeps many of us inescapably
under its spell?" he asked in a recent essay. "Is it because we succumb so heedlessly
to the sheer beauty of its setting-to the haunting melancholy of a summer evening's
light or to the spring air washed with sea salt and the sap of alder?"

Mayhew house, 1950-51
The house resides on Beach Drive in Victoria and was designed by the thoroughly Wrightian Ron Thorn,
supported by Ned Pratt, to whom he was apprenticed.
Mayhew house, is an example of the kind of work Parkin had in mind which made easterners green with
envy.

Mayhew house uses a structural system of timber posts and beams-called at the time the "Schindler truss,"
after California architect Rudolf Schindler. 

A system that frames large areas of glass, brick, and wood.
Vancouver Modernists had worked out this system in the Forties and adapted it to the steep, densely
wooded sites, mild temperatures, and even light of the coast.

Their sources of inspiration were Frank Lloyd Wright's work,
the residential design of the Bay Region School,
Northwest Coast native construction,
Japanese spatial organization and joinery,
the Hudson's Bay Company's historic "Red River" system of post-and-groove construction,
the contemporary work of Schindler, Mies van der Rohe and Richard Neutra.

Simon Fraser University (1963-65),
The Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia (1971-76),
Robson Square and the Law Courts in Vancouver (1973-79),
Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto (1976-82),
The Canadian Chancery in Washington, D.C. (1982-89).

John Bland, Gordon Webber, Guy Desbarats of McGill University.

Douglas Shadbolt

Alvar Aalto

Dom-i-no house, Le Corbusier's (then Jeanneret's), 1914

Unite d'Habitation at Marseilles, 1947

Moholy-Nagy of the Bauhaus in Chicago

Lawren Harris
The Harris's followed Theosophy, the arcane, allegedly natural religious system
of Madame Blavatsky, who had preached ascent from mundane reality to higher, more
advanced and spiritualized life-forms.

Books
“The Green Necklace: the Vision Quest of Edward Mahon”

"Giedion's Space, Time, and Architecture"

War Memorial Gymnasium completed in 1951, Ned Pratt

Le Modular (1948)

Website
https://www.trailsintime.org/


Five essential elements that should dictate the form of a West Coast modern home.

Five points as they are in many ways as valid today as they were more than 60 years ago when Pratt articulated them.



1. Rainfall
The West Coast has lots of it so big overhangs are a must.
2. Cloudy days
Provide big windows to bring in as much light as possible.
3. Views
Make a connection to the outside world. Direct the interior views to the important things outside like the mountains, ocean and forest.
4. Exterior
The exterior of a home should be clad in locally sourced wood and should maintain its natural beauty and remain unpainted.
5. Plan
A house should be laid out on an open plan with high ceilings and a minimal use of partitions.

The Vancouver School may be long retired but a West Coast style remains strong. Today's West Coast contemporary designers embrace many of the tenets of Pratt's ideas while exploring more environmentally responsible solutions to the age-old problems.
It's an inspiring time and I look forward to seeing how our West Coast style evolves, building upon the foundation laid by the modern masters of The Vancouver School.
The Vancouver School, composed of pioneers such as Arthur Erickson, Ned Pratt, B. C. Binning, Fred Hollingsworth and Ron Thom, defined a movement that drew upon the stylistic influences of modernism while making distinctive regional adaptations to better meet the needs of the West Coast's unique environment.