Top 71 Quotes & Sayings by Arthur Erickson - Page 2

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

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.

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

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

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

Life is rich, always changing, always challenging, and we architects have the task of transmitting into wood, concrete, glass and steel, of transforming human aspirations into habitable and meaningful space.

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

We regard those other cultures such as that of India, where many people live and believe and behave much as they did 1000 or 2000 years ago - as "undeveloped".

We are not peddlers of the fashionable. We believe that good design defies fashion, is truly innovative, eminently sensible, yet a source of inspiration to those who have the pleasure of living with it.

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

Does an architecture to assuage the spirit have a place in all this? Unfortunately we are no longer the interpreters of our culture's myths but the followers of that dubious client, the developer, who has little patience with the art of architecture, the fine detail and obscure promise, which can upset his financial activity.