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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

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Arthur Erickson
Age: 84 †
Born: 1924
Born: June 14
Died: 2009
Died: May 20
Architect
University Teacher
Vancouver
British Columbia
Arthur Charles Erickson
Arthur C. Erickson
Whole
Buildings
Really
Town
Towns
Appreciate
Building
Single
Uninterrupted
Understand
Medieval
Cannot
Comprehend

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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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The way of architecture is the quiet voice that underlies it and has guided it from the beginning.
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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...
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We find Japan a little more difficult to understand because it has proven its 20th century prowess though the ancient traditions still persist.
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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.
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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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With production alone as the goal, industry in North America was dominated by the assembly line, standardization for mass consumption.
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Our universities advocate fragmentation in their course systems.
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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.
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Whenever we witness art in a building, we are aware of an energy contained by it.
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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.
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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.
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Nearly all of the advances in structural and aesthetic innovation is coming from abroad.
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Materialism has never been so ominous as now in North America, as management takes over.
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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.
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You have to see a building to comprehend it. Photographs cannot convey the experience, nor film.
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No wonder the film industry started in the desert in California where, like all desert dwellers, they dream their buildings, rather than design them.
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Illusion is needed to disguise the emptiness within.
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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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