Over the course of his distinguished career, architect Arthur Erickson
(1924-2009) designed numerous houses, each an exercise in transforming
the needs of his clients into tangible form in the context of site and
place. Artists Gordon Smith (1919-) and Marion Smith (1918-2009) of
Vancouver were the only Erickson clients to commission him to design two
homes. The first (1955) was a straightforward exercise in post-World War
II modernism that represented the transplantation of prevailing North
American design thinking to the mountainous rain forests of coastal
Vancouver. The second house (1966) - Smith House II as it came to be
known - likewise situated in a forest but with the added benefit of
ocean and island vistas, was simultaneously a deft reworking of the
stylistic and spatial culture of the first house and a remarkable,
path-breaking study in cultural transposition, interpretation and
adaptation. Emphasizing its disavowal of conventional demarcations of
space and the movement within and through it, it translated the material
and aesthetic sensibilities of 17th century Japanese domestic
architecture to the circumstances of mid-20th century North America (and
the northerly Pacific coast).