Arthur Erickson is Canada’s top architect. Greatness has eluded him, but why? “Erickson remains strangely disengaged from architecture as anything more than an exercise in aesthetics. In an age as ugly and coarse as ours, one is loathe to complain about an architect whose main preoccupation is beauty, yet even the most diehard connoisseur of buildings must admit they have a broader function, a larger social responsibility. The best buildings — and the most beautiful — transcend themselves in a way that Erickson’s rarely do.”