Quotes By Arthur Erickson

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

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

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

We are yet to have a conscience at all about the exploitation of human cultures.

The heart, not the head, must be the guide.

The essentially unchangeable established order of things slowly disappeared and was forgotten for a while completely.

Inspiration in Science may have to do with ideas, but not in Art. In art it is in the senses that are instinctively responsive to the medium of expression.

The details are the very source of expression in architecture. But we are caught in a vice between art and the bottom line.

No amount of thought can ever reveal what comes unexpectedly.

The innovative spirit was America's strongest attribute, transforming everything into a brave new world, but there lingered an insecurity about the arts.

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

Does an architecture to assuage the spirit have a place?

It is the mystery of the creative act that something other than our conscious self takes over.

Profit and bottom line, the contemporary mantra, eliminates the very source of architectural expression.

Our settlement of land is without regard to the best use of land.

Part of our western outlook stems from the scientific attitude and its method of isolating the parts of a phenomenon in order to analyze them.

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.

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.

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

Nearly all of the advances in structural and aesthetic innovation is coming from abroad.

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.

The great dream merchant Disney was a success because make-believe was what everyone seemed to need in a spiritually empty land.

Our engineering departments build freeways which destroy a city or a landscape, in the process.

Our universities advocate fragmentation in their course systems.

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

The Achilles Heel of the Americas was the lack of cultural confidence typical of new settlers.

Vitality is radiated from exceptional art and architecture.

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