Arthur Erickson
34 quotes
Biography
Arthur Charles Erickson was a Canadian architect and urban planner. He studied at the University of British Columbia and, in 1950, received his B.Arch. (Honours) from McGill University.
"Whenever we witness art in a building, we are aware of an energy contained by it."
"The great dream merchant Disney was a success because make-believe was what everyone seemed to need in a spiritually empty land."
"Rationalism is the enemy of art, though necessary as a basis for architecture."
"Vitality is radiated from exceptional art and architecture."
"With production alone as the goal, industry in North America was dominated by the assembly line, standardization for mass consumption."
"The details are the very source of expression in architecture. But we are caught in a vice between art and the bottom line."
"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."
"Great buildings that move the spirit have always been rare. In every case they are unique, poetic, products of the heart."
"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."
"Architecture doesn't come from theory. You don't think your way through a building."
"Does an architecture to assuage the spirit have a place?"
"The new architecture of transparency and lightness comes from Japan and Europe."
"The way of architecture is the quiet voice that underlies it and has guided it from the beginning."
"We are stymied by regulations, limited choice and the threat of litigation. Neither consultants nor industry itself provide research which takes architecture forward."
"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."
"There is a single thread of attitude, a single direction of flow, that joins our present time to its early burgeoning in Mediterranean civilization."
"Only when inspired to go beyond consciousness by some extraordinary insight does beauty manifest unexpectedly."
"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."
"The details are the very source of expression in architecture. But we are caught in a vice between art and the bottom line."
"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."
"No wonder the film industry started in the desert in California where, like all desert dwellers, they dream their buildings, rather than design them."
"You have to see a building to comprehend it. Photographs cannot convey the experience, nor film."
"Modernism released us from the constraints of everything that had gone before with a euphoric sense of freedom."
"Western history has been a history of deed done, actions performed and results achieved."