Arthur Erickson Quotes

The new architecture of transparency and lightness comes from Japan and Europe.

The obsession with performance left no room for the development of the intuitive or spiritual impact of space and form other than the aesthetic of the machine itself.

The Renaissance is studded by the names of the artists and architects, with their creations recorded as great historical events.

The tourist transports his own values and demands to his destinations and implants them like an infectious disease, decimating whatever values existed before.

The way of architecture is the quiet voice that underlies it and has guided it from the beginning.

There is a single thread of attitude, a single direction of flow, that joins our present time to its early burgeoning in Mediterranean civilization.

There is little doubt that we are in the midst of a revolution of a much more profound and fundamental nature than the social and political revolutions of the last half century.

This great, though disastrous, culture can only change as we begin to stand off and see... the inveterate materialism which has become the model for cultures around the world.

Today's developer is a poor substitute for the committed entrepreneur of the last century for whom the work of architecture represented a chance to celebrate the worth of his enterprise.

Vitality is radiated from exceptional art and architecture.

We are stymied by regulations, limited choice and the threat of litigation. Neither consultants nor industry itself provide research which takes architecture forward.

We can appreciate but not really understand the medieval town. We cannot comprehend its compactness, the contiguity of all its buildings as a single uninterrupted whole.

We have today a fairly thorough knowledge of the early Greco-Roman period because our motivations are the same.

We regard those other cultures, such as that of India, where many people live and believe and behave much as they did 1,000 or 2,000 years ago, as undeveloped.

We settled this continent without art. So it was easy for us to treat it as an imported luxury, not a necessity.

Western history has been a history of deed done, actions performed and results achieved.

What is the thread of western civilization that distinguished its course in history? It has to do with the preoccupation of western man with his outward command and his sense of superiority.

Whenever we witness art in a building, we are aware of an energy contained by it.

With production alone as the goal, industry in North America was dominated by the assembly line, standardization for mass consumption.

You have to see a building to comprehend it. Photographs cannot convey the experience, nor film.