Film Screening | Annual Barry Downs Lecture Series

Standard $30 | Senior $25 | Under 30 $25

Tickets: Available here.

Location: Kay Meek Arts Centre, Grosvenor Theatre, Main Theatre, 1700 Mathers Ave, West Vancouver, BC

This two-part event includes the film screening of Arthur Erickson: Beauty Between The Lines and the Annual Barry Downs Lecture Series: The Architecture of Encounter, with Dr. Jeff Derksen.

Film Screening: Arthur Erickson: Beauty Between The Lines

Arthur Erickson: Beauty Between The Lines chronicles the untold personal and professional triumphs and tragedies of one of the most captivating modernist architects of the 20th Century.
The film delves into the life and work of Arthur Erickson, a visionary architect first in Canada and ultimately throughout the world. With intimate interviews, unseen archival footage, and an exploration of his architectural masterpieces, the film weaves together the complexities of Erickson's personal and professional life. It reveals a man who transcended traditional boundaries, who fused art, culture, and nature and in the process, redefined modern architecture.

Annual Barry Downs Lecture Series: The Architecture of Encounter, with Dr. Jeff Derksen

Using the film, Arthur Erickson: Beauty Between the Lines, Dr. Jeff Derksen will approach Erickson's architecture through the concept of the encounter. Informed by his travels as an architectural student, and shaped by an optimistic 1960s moment in Canadian culture, Erickson's expansive imagination sought to bring together architectural elements from many cultures and to structure his building as spaces of encounter. The architectural encounter with the site of his buildings brings not only a sensitivity to place and the nuances of a terrain — natural or built -- but it also sets up a deeper encounter between the building, the site, and the inhabitant.  In his educational buildings, Erickson pushed forward a radical architecture that set up the encounter between different forms of knowledges, trying to eliminate the separation of the arts, science, and other academic disciplines. Drawing on his imagination of education as an understanding of the world and the student as a citizen whose own imagination can be taken in many directions — even unpredicted directions — by encounters with culture, with other students, and with the world, Erickson's educational buildings are important architectural reminders of education as a journey and as a right. Lastly, Erickson's public buildings all aimed at bringing the urban encounter into the possibility of the building, where the possibility of meeting and spending time was structured into the plan of the building and its site.

About the Speaker

Jeff Derksen’s research and creative work resides in the intersection of poetry and urbanism. His poetry books include Future Works, The Vestiges, and Transnational Muscle Cars. His critical books include After Euphoria and How High is the City, How Deep is Our Love. With the collective Urban Subjects, he has co-edited The Militant Image Reader and Autogestion: Henri Lefebvre in New Belgrade. As a curator, he brought The Vienna Model: Housing for the 21st Century to the Museum of Vancouver. A former research fellow at the Centre for Place, Culture and Politics at The Graduate Center, CUNY, Derksen is a professor at Simon Fraser University and lives in Vancouver and Vienna.

A West Vancouver Art Museum and Kay Meek Arts Centre co-presentation.

Supported by The Compelling Opportunities Fund of the West Vancouver Foundation.