The Globe and Mail

A demolition permit is expected to be issued this week, possibly as early as today, for an Arthur Erickson-designed house in West Vancouver. The David Graham House, completed in 1963, helped kick-start Erickson's auspicious career. Set dramatically on a cliff "like a ladder," the house is multilevelled, with overlapping roofs and stacking terraces. "The living room is a hovering glass platform with marvellous twisted pines clinging to the rock around it," Erickson wrote in his 1975 book The Architecture of Arthur Erickson. "The master bedroom hangs over the sea and its bathroom opens on submarine windows into the swimming pool." Erickson has credited the Graham House with launching his reputation as "the architect you went to when you had an impossible site."But in recent years, the house has fallen into a desperate state of disrepair. "Every beam is twisting and buckling, apparently," says West Vancouver Mayor Pamela Goldsmith-Jones.