Quotes By Arthur Erickson

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.

I plead for conservation of human culture, which is much more fragile than nature herself. We needn't destroy other cultures with the force of our own.

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

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.

Our universities advocate fragmentation in their course systems.

After 1980, you never heard reference to space again. Surface, the most convincing evidence of the descent into materialism, became the focus of design. Space disappeared.

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

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

We are guilty for sending teams into foreign countries to advise them how to be like us.

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

Nowhere has specialization penetrated so deeply into the building professions as North America.

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.

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

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

Only when inspired to go beyond consciousness by some extraordinary insight does beauty manifest unexpectedly.

Ancient Rome was as confident of the immutability of its world and the continual expansion and improvement of the human lot as we are today.

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

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.

God's designs may be frequent justification for our actions, but it is we, the self-made men, who take the credit.

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

Illusion is needed to disguise the emptiness within.

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.

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.

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

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

In those countries with centuries of a craft tradition behind their building methods, techniques are tightly coordinated under the direction of the architect.

Our incapacity to comprehend other cultures stems from our insistence on measuring things in our own terms.

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.

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.