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At its May 29, 2019 meeting, AEF's Board resolved to invite architect Barry Johns to fill a vacant Board position for the remainder of the 2018/19 term. Barry has accepted the appointment, adding that he is"extremely proud and honoured to be part of this organization". He will join six other Board members seeking new terms at the June 27 AGM. A further eight Board members will continue in office, with terms expiring in 2020 and 2021.

Since its founding in 1981, Barry Johns Architecture has sustained a Canadian and international reputation as an innovative design practice – with 100 design awards from around the world, including an Olympic Gold Medal for the Arts and the Governor General's Medal for Architecture. Barry Johns has also received multiple honours from the profession including Honorary Fellowship with the American Institute of Architects, The Royal Canadian Academy of Arts and the Order of Athabasca University. He is the first international recipient (2018) of the Leslie M. Boney Medal from the AIA. Deeply influenced by a six-year tenure with Arthur Erickson Architects in the 1970s, the firm is passionate about the role of architecture as a means to leading positive change in our communities. The practice includes architecture, urban design, teaching, public lectures, architectural juries and public service on volunteer fund raising and professional Boards across Canada. The firm’s design experience and reputation for sustainable buildings has enabled it to remain small and participate in collaboration with other larger Canadian practices including (the former) Smith Carter, Stantec, Gibbs Gage Architects, Group2 Architecture Engineering and Perkins + Will. The firm believes in the need to ‘tread lightly upon the earth’ by working in harmony with nature and in an architecture that champions inclusive humanism. A summary of the firm’s history and body of work is included in a new eBook available from the firm’s website, bjalstudio.ca.

Reviewer Alex Bozikovic, writing in The March 15, 2019 edition of The Globe & Mail about Greg Bellerby's new book, "Eppich House II: The Story of an Arthur Erickson Masterwork": "It aligns Erickson with this moment in architecture ... He is ripe for discovery by a new generation ...".
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On March 2, 2019 CBC News reported: "Even for an architect whose wide range includes the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, the MacMillan Bloedel building in downtown Vancouver, and Simon Fraser University, Eppich House II — which is now up for sale — stands out for several reasons ..."
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Following the AEF's 25th Annual General Meeting on June 22, 2018, Trevor Boddy was appointed by directors' resolution to fill one of two Board vacancies. He joins four Board members re-elected at the AGM by acclamation: Phyllis Lambert, Neill Cumberbirch, William McLean, and Christopher Erickson. A further nine Board members continue in office, with terms expiring in 2019 and 2020. 

Mr. Boddy is a critic, curator, historian of architecture/urbanism, teacher and consulting urban designer. He curated the 2008 exhibition Vancouverism and related Trafalgar Square site-specific construction, named a marquee event for the 2008 London Festival of Architecture, and re-mounted in 2009 at Place d’Invalides, Paris. An expanded version was installed at Woodward’s for the 2010 Olympics. His career retrospective exhibition entitled Telling Details: The Architecture of Clifford Wiens toured nationally to five galleries nationally. For the City of Surrey he was co-organizer of TownShift: Suburb Into City, the largest ideas design competition ever mounted by a Canadian municipality, and conceived their new civic design awards.

Trevor has written on architecture and cities for the Globe and Mail, Vancouver Sun, Edmonton Journal, Ottawa Citizen, Seattle Times, Architectural Review, Architectural Record, Bauwelt, A/V and l’Architecture d’aujourdhui, and has won the Western Magazine and Alberta Book of the Year prizes. He holds a Master’s degree in architecture from the University of Calgary, has taught design studio, history, and urbanism on four continents, and lectures globally on contemporary design and city-building. RAIC awarded Trevor its 2010 Advocacy Award, and he is an honorary member of AIA and the Bulgarian Union of Architects.

AEF Director Michael Prokopow has published his new book: Smith House II. This monograph on the house of Gordon and Marion Smith, the second house designed by Arthur Erickson for the artists, is the seventh book in the UBC SALA West Coast Modern House series. The series was established to recognize and document significant, endangered modern residences in the region.

Guy Dixon, writing in the Globe & Mail 2018.05.08: "As with Mr. Erickson’s Robson Square in Vancouver and the Simon Fraser University campus in Burnaby, much of the late architect’s greatness was the dialogue he created between nature and modernism. And the possible loss of the atrium garden had conservationists particularly worried prior to the bank headquarters’ three-year, $460-million full-scale renovation, which was completed last year ... (read more)

The Arthur Erickson Foundation has welcomed its first Alliance level members: Nienkamper Furniture & Accessories Inc. (Klaus Nienkamper); and College of Architecture, Illinois Institute of Technology (Michaelangelo Sabatino). Are you a firm or organization interested in upgrading to this new level of AEF support? Alliance benefits and privileges are explained here.

At its March 2018 meeting, AEF's Board of Directors appointed Linda Fraser, Archivist and Chief Curator at Canadian Architectural Archives, University of Calgary, and former AEF Board member, as the latest Patron of the Foundation. The appointment was pursuant to Bylaw 13.1.

From an undated speech, included in "Speeches by Arthur Erickson" (University of British Columbia Library): "The house was purchased in 1957 for $11,000. What attracted me to it was the garden—the whole of the property (66x120) was to the south of the house, since the house was on the lane, and had been developed as a colourful English herbaceous border garden concealing a vegetable and raspberry patch at the southern end. The house itself had been built about 40 years earlier as a garage to be lived in while the main house was built—properly, on the centre of the property. It was temporarily converted into a dwelling with a small lean-to and divided into a set of miniature rooms, a living room, dining room, kitchen, front hall, bedroom and bathroom. But the owners never built the main house. Instead they added a single garage next door which, when I bought it, was used for storage.

"I set a destructive Irish sailor-handyman to taking down all the partitions, arriving only in time to save the collapse of the roof by propping it up with a wood and terra cotta Ionian column I had retrieved from the demolition of a former residence. That was the first conversion—as a one-roomed house furnished with marble slabs from the urinals of the old Vancouver Hotel and seating made from the straw benches of the former trolley cars of Vancouver, gold dragon's-blood Chinese paper lacquered into antiquity with many layers of pigmented lacquer and a teak cabinet kitchen. The garage became a guest room for visiting guests but only in summer for there was no heat.

"The garden changed more dramatically. In the second year long grass covered the property since it was never cut and the English garden struggled through the grass as if the place had been romantically deserted. But the third year the flowers no longer appeared, except for the forlorn roses hanging off the trellises and the grass was too long to even scythe. The only solution was to bring in a bulldozer and use it for contouring the lot to obscure the only disturbing view from the house—that down the length of the lot to the ugly brown shingle arched front porch of the neighbor across the street to the south …" 

AE in his living room at 4195 West 14th Avenue, 1972
Photo credit: Selwyn Pullan 

Brent Jang, writing in the Globe & Mail 2017.12.05: "It could be just the ticket for saving some of Vancouver's heritage properties, starting with the cherished home and garden of the late architect Arthur Erickson ... (read more)