Arthur Erickson’s MacMillan Bloedel building is béton-brut Modernism as it was meant to be: honest and functional. Its unselfconscious monumentality bespeaks economic confidence; at the time of construction in 1968, MacMillan Bloedel was the pre-eminent firm dominating the forestry business. In a manner unthinkable today, forestry and mining were the business of the province. The solid bedrock of the BC economy generated high income jobs for the uneducated rural working class, paying the equivalent of professional salaries in Montreal and Toronto. Fallers in the interior often had incomes exceeding that of university professors back east. MacMillan Bloedel spent what at the time seemed an extravagant sum: $9.5 million, roughly the 2010 cost of an executive condo in the Shangri-la.
In many ways the Mac Blo is structurally the opposite of the International Modernist Miesian block’s central core and hung glass curtain wall. Here, the walls are solid and load-bearing, a structure seldom seen in tall buildings since the birth of the skyscraper. The concrete shell dictates a completely different kind of interior from that of a regular office tower. In Erickson’s words “it completely counters the impermanent, jerrybuilt aspect of the modern office building epitomized by hung ceilings and flexible partitioning on the inside and the curtain wall on the outside.” The load-bearing walls allow a column-free open-plan interior – rare for an office tower – with solid floors and ceilings. The spaciousness of the interiors far exceeds any business tower build by Frank Lloyd Wright. Erickson’s unconventional load-bearing window walls opened new possibilities in office design.
Indeed, the building exudes permanence and solidity. Its exterior walls start with a ten-foot thickness at the base and taper down to one foot at the top of the 27-floor building. This has drawn comparison to the shape of a great rainforest tree – a thick solid trunk at the base, tapering skyward – but however apt, this comparison was not premeditated by Erickson. The walls are poured-in-place concrete left raw in the béton brut style (which takes its name from the French for “raw concrete”). Poured-in-place concrete has a more irregular and textured appearance than the usual pre-cast concrete; this augments the appearance of solidity and monumentality, and the resulting visual artifact of the construction process is seen by Modernists as laudable “truth to materials”.
This is a seamless fusion of classical proportion and Modernist aesthetic. From the classical tradition comes a simplicity of form; clean, gently tapering vertical lines recall the doric order, and each monolithic rectangular mass is in the proportion of the “golden ratio”, which reflects ratios in the human body and in nature. From Modernism comes a stark rectilinearity, and béton-brut monumentality in its most undiluted form. With elements from each tradition and some common to both, the building’s conception seems to have emerged organically from both traditions. Like the Museum of Anthropology, its references to past architectural forms are implicit rather than stuck-on cutesy postmodernist decoration.
While definitively béton brut, this is a unique one-of-a-kind building. Often overlooked in architectural literature, it stands among the great buildings of the late 20th century as a monument to the genius of Vancouver’s greatest architect.
[Next post: Asian Fusion and the Bungalow]
No comments:
Post a Comment