Arthur Erickson Artist Quotations

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

God's designs may be frequent justification for our actions, but it is we, the self-made men, who take the credit.

Builders eventually took advantage of the look of modernism to build cheaply and carelessly.

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

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

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

In those countries with centuries of a craft tradition behind their building methods, techniques are tightly coordinated under the direction of the architect.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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 Achilles Heel of the Americas was the lack of cultural confidence typical of new settlers.

We find Japan a little more difficult to understand because it has proven its 20th century prowess though the ancient traditions still persist.

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

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

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.

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.

We regard those other cultures, such as that of India, where many people live and believe and behave much as they did 1,000 or 2,000 years ago, as undeveloped.

Materialism has never been so ominous as now in North America, as management takes over.

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.

Compared to industry in Europe or Japan, where industry was based on a craft tradition, we are sadly behind.

The essentially unchangeable established order of things slowly disappeared and was forgotten for a while completely.

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