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Father Abraham
Abraham Rogatnick’s ideas shaped
the very DNA of Vancouver, and have never been more
relevant. But is anybody listening?
By Bruce Grierson
At the tiny hole-in-the-wall Chinese
restaurant around the corner from his Point Grey house,
Abraham Rogatnick needs no introduction. He is a regular,
with his table, his chair. On a sunny afternoon not
long ago the owner looked up as he came through the
door. She smiled sweetly with a tiny bow of the head,
disappeared into the back, and quietly returned with
the Yellow Pages for him to sit on.
Rogatnick is an elfin man. Wearing a neatly knotted
black tie and white shirt under a red sweater, he could
be Billy Crystal’s dad. His face rings a bell,
the way character actors’ faces do, though you
can’t be sure where you’ve seen them. In
Rogatnick’s case, it could have been the crime
drama Just Cause, in which he played a nutty old judge
on a couple of episodes. Since he broke into acting
around 1998, at age 74—propelled by a love for
the language of Shakespeare, and with a little more
time on his hands at last—he has been steered
by his agent away from the stage and into movie and
TV roles, more Lear than Romeo.
“I’ve played old men,” he said. “Usually
dying old men.”
It occurred to him, as he worked on his chicken soup,
that he’d eaten here for four consecutive days,
with a different companion each time. Though he retired
from the architecture department at UBC in 1985, academics
and artists and former students seek him out. Something
about him invites questions.
His face registered his pleasure with the soup. “It’s
so good today,” he said. “It’s better
than it has been for a long time. It must be a new
batch.” It was the soup of the day, the soup
of the place. If you tried to take it home it wouldn’t
be the same soup. He lingered over it. “I eat
very slowly,” he said. “I just can’t
swallow as fast as everyone else.”
There are people who visibly wield power. And then
there are the people who quietly prop them up. Sometimes
the backroom partners emerge with a bit of a profile
of their own—Raymond Carver’s editor, Helen
Keller’s teacher, George W. Bush’s pastor—but
more often they don’t. Influence that isn’t
particularly interested in fame can easily stay hidden.
It’s a different kind
of power, exerted by sitting on design panels or crafting
inspirational lectures that ignite promising students
or eating dinner with men who buy ink by the barrel—but
it’s vital to the forward movement of the culture.
Abraham Rogatnick (“Abe” is reserved for
his oldest friends) is an architect, a historian, a
professor, a public intellectual. Newspaper reporters
sometimes reach for goofy catchall phrases like “octogenarian
livewire” to describe him because no single label
captures him.
Behold Abraham Jedidiah Rogatnick. Who trained at Harvard’s
Graduate School of Design under the directorship of
Walter Gropius—the Bauhaus founder and one of
the pioneers of modern architecture. Who popped into
town in the fall of 1955 for a quick visit and was
welcomed by the arts community the way a drowner welcomes
a floating barrel, and just never left. Who pretty
much explained modern-art to Vancouver—after
opening the doors to one of the first contemporary
art galleries in Canada. (This was six weeks after
arriving.) Who helped create what became the Arts Club
Theatre, and was parachuted in to restore stability
to the Vancouver Art Gallery after its Watergate in
1974. Who invented a “studies abroad” program
for architecture students, so they could live in some
of the world’s great cities. (When you leave
home, as the poet said, you see your own home.) Who
chose a water-squeezed tourist mecca for the first
platoon of outgoing UBC architecture students—and
became one of the world’s foremost authorities
on Venice. (That there are plenty of lessons Vancouver
can learn from Venice has been one of his chief preoccupations.)
Who walked its streets with Buckminster Fuller and
Louis Kahn, as their interpreter. Who may have covered
more of Vancouver on foot than anyone else alive. Who
hiked the Chilkoot Trail with Pierre Berton. Who met
Bill Reid when Reid had only recently learned he had
some Haida blood in him (and so was phasing out of
a career as a CBC broadcaster to explore his roots
in art). Who would stand at the intersection of a sample
of some of Vancouver’s most important architects
and painters of the last century: the landscape architect
Cornelia Oberlander, architects Arthur Erickson and
Ned Pratt and Ron Thom and Barry Downs and Fred Hollingsworth,
painters Bert Binning and Jack Shadbolt and Gordon
Smith. Who was present at the birth of West Coast modernism—the
closest we have come to an indigenous art movement—and
managed to keep his eye on the ball as a new bunch
of artists emerged to put Vancouver on the map again.
(He remains good friends with Jeff Wall, Stan Douglas,
Rodney Graham, Ken Lum, Ian Wallace, Attila Richard
Lukacs.) Who is one of a very few men in this city
who can get away with wearing a cape. Who tipped the
last Vancouver mayoral election. And who claims to
be puzzled that people think he’s worth writing
about.
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