Arthur Erickson

“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.”

“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 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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