Arthur Erickson Quotes
Nowhere has specialization penetrated so deeply into the building professions as North America. Only when inspired to go beyond consciousness by some extraordinary insight does beauty manifest unexpectedly. Our engineering departments build freeways which destroy a city or a landscape, in the process. Our incapacity to comprehend other cultures stems from our insistence on measuring things in our own terms. Our settlement of land is without regard to the best use of land. Our universities advocate fragmentation in their course systems. 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. Profit and bottom line, the contemporary mantra, eliminates the very source of architectural expression. Rationalism is the enemy of art, though necessary as a basis for architecture. Roman civilization had achieved, within the bounds of its technology, relatively as great a mastery of time and space as we have achieved today. 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. 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. The Achilles Heel of the Americas was the lack of cultural confidence typical of new settlers. 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. The delusion of entertainment is devoid of meaning. It may amuse us for a bit, but after the initial hit we are left with the dark feeling of desolation. The details are the very source of expression in architecture. But we are caught in a vice between art and the bottom line. The essentially unchangeable established order of things slowly disappeared and was forgotten for a while completely. The great dream merchant Disney was a success because make-believe was what everyone seemed to need in a spiritually empty land. The heart, not the head, must be the guide. 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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