Arthur Erickson Quotes
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You have to see a building to comprehend it. Photographs cannot convey the experience, nor film.
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Only when inspired to go beyond consciousness by some extraordinary insight does beauty manifest unexpectedly.
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No phenomenon can be isolated, but has repercussions through every aspect of our lives. We are learning that we are a fundamental part of nature's ecosystems.
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Bankers cannot afford to be concerned with only the economic aspects of projects. There may be serious implications on the natural environment, the urban environment, on human culture.
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Profit and bottom line, the contemporary mantra, eliminates the very source of architectural expression.
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Tahiti has been spoiled for many years, but Bali is one of the few cultures with origins in one of the great ancient cultures which is still alive.
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The tourist transports his own values and demands to his destinations and implants them like an infectious disease, decimating whatever values existed before.
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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.
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God's designs may be frequent justification for our actions, but it is we, the self-made men, who take the credit.
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Architecture doesn't come from theory. You don't think your way through a building.
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Our engineering departments build freeways which destroy a city or a landscape, in the process.
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Rationalism is the enemy of art, though necessary as a basis for architecture.
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There is an increasing awareness of the interrelatedness of things. We are becoming less prone to accept an immediate solution without questioning its larger implications.
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Nearly all of the advances in structural and aesthetic innovation is coming from abroad.
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Nowhere has specialization penetrated so deeply into the building professions as North America.
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Illusion is needed to disguise the emptiness within.
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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.
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The artist likes to seem totally responsible for his work. Often he begins to explain it, to make it appear as if it were a reasonable process.
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Space has always been the spiritual dimension of architecture. It is not the physical statement of the structure so much as what it contains that moves us.
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The new architecture of transparency and lightness comes from Japan and Europe.
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We settled this continent without art. So it was easy for us to treat it as an imported luxury, not a necessity.
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With production alone as the goal, industry in North America was dominated by the assembly line, standardization for mass consumption.
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Western history has been a history of deed done, actions performed and results achieved.
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The great dream merchant Disney was a success because make-believe was what everyone seemed to need in a spiritually empty land.