Arthur Erickson Quotes

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

  Arthur Erickson

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

  Arthur Erickson

• Whenever we witness art in a building, we are aware of an energy contained by it.

  Arthur Erickson

• 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.

  Arthur Erickson

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

  Arthur Erickson

• We settled this continent without art. So it was easy for us to treat it as an imported luxury, not a necessity.

  Arthur Erickson

• 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

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

  Arthur Erickson

• 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

• 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.

  Arthur Erickson

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

  Arthur Erickson

• 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

• We are guilty for sending teams into foreign countries to advise them how to be like us.

  Arthur Erickson

• 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

• 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

• 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.

  Arthur Erickson

• There is an increasing awareness of the interrelatedness of things. We are becoming less prone to accept an immediate solution without questioning its larger implications.

  Arthur Erickson

• 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

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

  Arthur Erickson

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

  Arthur Erickson

Arthur Erickson (64)

Birth:	14th June, 1924
Death:	20th May, 2009
Nationality:	Canadian
Profession:	Architect

About

Arthur Charles Erickson was born in Vancouver. He was a Canadian architect and urban planner. He studied Asian languages at the University of British Columbia, and later earned a degree in architecture from McGill University.  After graduating from McGill in 1950, Erickson traveled a few years then taught at the University of Oregon and subsequently the University of British Columbia. Erickson's buildings are often modernist concrete structures designed to respond to the natural conditions of their locations, especially climate. Many buildings, such as the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver, are inspired by the post and beam architecture of the Coastal First Nations. The personal selection of Arthur Erickson as the architect for the Canadian Embassy in Washington, DC by then-Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau was controversial, because Trudeau overruled the objections and choices of the embassy's design committee.  In 1986, he received the AIA Gold Medal.

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