Quotes from Arthur Erickson

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.

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.

Great buildings that move the spirit have always been rare. In every case they are unique, poetic, products of the heart.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Illusion is needed to disguise the emptiness within.

Architecture doesn't come from theory. You don't think your way through a building.

Modernism released us from the constraints of everything that had gone before with a euphoric sense of freedom.

Great buildings that move the spirit have always been rare. In every case they are unique, poetic, products of the heart.

Vitality is radiated from exceptional art and architecture.

Does an architecture to assuage the spirit have a place?

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