Quotes from Arthur Erickson

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

No wonder the film industry started in the desert in California where, like all desert dwellers, they dream their buildings, rather than design them.

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

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.

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.

Rationalism is the enemy of art, though necessary as a basis for architecture.

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

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

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.

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

Roman civilization had achieved, within the bounds of its technology, relatively as great a mastery of time and space as we have achieved today.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

What is the thread of western civilization that distinguished its course in history? It has to do with the preoccupation of western man with his outward command and his sense of superiority.

We are stymied by regulations, limited choice and the threat of litigation. Neither consultants nor industry itself provide research which takes architecture forward.

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.

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