Words matter. These are the best Arthur Erickson Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The new architecture of transparency and lightness comes from Japan and Europe.
Compared to industry in Europe or Japan, where industry was based on a craft tradition, we are sadly behind.
The way of architecture is the quiet voice that underlies it and has guided it from the beginning.
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.
It is the mystery of the creative act that something other than our conscious self takes over.
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.
Our engineering departments build freeways which destroy a city or a landscape, in the process.
Illusion is needed to disguise the emptiness within.
Profit and bottom line, the contemporary mantra, eliminates the very source of architectural expression.
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.
Architecture doesn’t come from theory. You don’t think your way through a building.
Nearly all of the advances in structural and aesthetic innovation is coming from abroad.
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.
Does an architecture to assuage the spirit have a place?
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 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.
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.
Nowhere has specialization penetrated so deeply into the building professions as North America.
We are yet to have a conscience at all about the exploitation of human cultures.
Vitality is radiated from exceptional art and architecture.
Rationalism is the enemy of art, though necessary as a basis for architecture.
God’s designs may be frequent justification for our actions, but it is we, the self-made men, who take the credit.
In those countries with centuries of a craft tradition behind their building methods, techniques are tightly coordinated under the direction of the architect.
We are guilty for sending teams into foreign countries to advise them how to be like us.
Materialism has never been so ominous as now in North America, as management takes over.
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.
Western history has been a history of deed done, actions performed and results achieved.
Our universities advocate fragmentation in their course systems.
Roman civilization had achieved, within the bounds of its technology, relatively as great a mastery of time and space as we have achieved today.
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.
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.
The Renaissance is studded by the names of the artists and architects, with their creations recorded as great historical events.
