The Globe and Mail

It was downtown Vancouver's last building that could remind us of the 1930s - a whirling wedding cake of streamline stucco that most of us knew as the Fido outlet at Georgia and Richards, first built as the Collier Auto Showroom. It got knocked down early one morning during the civic strike, leaving one more empty-tooth slot in the mug's face of downtown. Then, on Dec. 6, the wrecking crews went to work on one of Arthur Erickson's most world-renowned and influential houses, a grand sequence of portals and frames elegantly descending down a Horseshoe Bay cliffside. This 1963 house for David Graham was featured on the pages of Life magazine and leased as a love nest to Warren Beatty and Julie Christie when in town to shoot Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller. West Vancouver resident Barry Downs, one of British Columbia's most-respected house architects and authors, says "the Graham House was Arthur Erickson's Fallingwater" - a reference to Frank Lloyd Wright's career-reviving, rural Pennsylvania concrete and brick house, which similarly cascades over rocks down a hill.