The reopening last month of Arthur Erickson’s 1976 Museum of Anthropology on what would have been the prolific architect’s 100th birthday, calls to mind a Japanese tradition.
As a meditation on the idea of impermanence, the Shikinen Sengu divine palace within the 2000-year-old Ise-Jingu Shinto shrine is demolished every 20 years and then rebuilt to the same dimensions but on an alternate site within the precinct. In a similar vein, Erickson’s modernist monument and Canada’s largest teaching museum has been reincarnated – after an 18-month closure for a $60 million seismic upgrade – with new aesthetic and architectural life.
