Arthur Erickson

Architect

1924-06-14 – 2009-05-20

Arthur Erickson was a Canadian architect and urban planner. He was born on 1924-06-14 and died on 2009-05-20. He designed landmark civic and institutional projects across Canada and internationally.

Quotes by Arthur Erickson

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Nowhere has specialization penetrated so deeply into the building professions as North America.
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Tahiti has been spoiled for many years, but Bali is one of the few cultures with origins in one of the great ancient cultures which is still alive.
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With production alone as the goal, industry in North America was dominated by the assembly line, standardization for mass consumption.
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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.
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Our incapacity to comprehend other cultures stems from our insistence on measuring things in our own terms.
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Nearly all of the advances in structural and aesthetic innovation is coming from abroad.
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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.
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We have today a fairly thorough knowledge of the early Greco-Roman period because our motivations are the same.
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In those countries with centuries of a craft tradition behind their building methods, techniques are tightly coordinated under the direction of the architect.
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Roman civilization had achieved, within the bounds of its technology, relatively as great a mastery of time and space as we have achieved today.
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The innovative spirit was America's strongest attribute, transforming everything into a brave new world, but there lingered an insecurity about the arts.
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The new architecture of transparency and lightness comes from Japan and Europe.
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The tourist transports his own values and demands to his destinations and implants them like an infectious disease, decimating whatever values existed before.
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The essentially unchangeable established order of things slowly disappeared and was forgotten for a while completely.
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Only when inspired to go beyond consciousness by some extraordinary insight does beauty manifest unexpectedly.
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No amount of thought can ever reveal what comes unexpectedly.
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