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

Builders eventually took advantage of the look of modernism to build cheaply and carelessly.
- Arthur Erickson Quote

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

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

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.
- Arthur Erickson Quote

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

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.
- Arthur Erickson Quote

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

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

No amount of thought can ever reveal what comes unexpectedly.
- Arthur Erickson Quote

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.
- Arthur Erickson Quote

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

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

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

Our settlement of land is without regard to the best use of land.
- Arthur Erickson Quote

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.
- Arthur Erickson Quote

Rationalism is the enemy of art, though necessary as a basis for architecture.
- Arthur Erickson Quote

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

The Achilles Heel of the Americas was the lack of cultural confidence typical of new settlers.
- Arthur Erickson Quote

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.
- Arthur Erickson Quote

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

The innovative spirit was America's strongest attribute, transforming everything into a brave new world, but there lingered an insecurity about the arts.
- Arthur Erickson Quote

The new architecture of transparency and lightness comes from Japan and Europe.
- Arthur Erickson Quote

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

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

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

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.
- Arthur Erickson Quote

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.
- Arthur Erickson Quote

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

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

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

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.
- Arthur Erickson Quote

Western history has been a history of deed done, actions performed and results achieved.
- Arthur Erickson Quote

Whenever we witness art in a building, we are aware of an energy contained by it.
- Arthur Erickson Quote

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

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