Daily Inspiration Quote by Arthur Erickson

“Sadly behind” lands like a quiet indictment, and Erickson knows exactly who he’s indicting: North America’s postwar faith that speed, scale, and standardization could substitute for skill. By holding up Europe and Japan as places where “industry was based on a craft tradition,” he’s not romanticizing quaint artisans so much as pointing to an industrial culture that never fully severed itself from making, from tacit knowledge passed hand-to-hand and refined over generations. Craft here isn’t nostalgia; it’s infrastructure.

The subtext is architectural, but it’s also economic and moral. Erickson spent his career pushing modernism that still cared about texture, light, and site - the human consequences of production choices. When he says “industry,” he’s talking about the whole ecosystem that determines what buildings can be: the quality of materials, the competence of fabricators, the respect given to trades, the patience baked into schedules. A craft tradition produces not just better joinery, but better judgment.

Context matters: mid-to-late 20th century Canada (and the broader North American market) leaned hard into resource extraction and mass construction, often importing “innovation” while underinvesting in the slow cultivation of expertise. Erickson’s comparison carries a sting because it suggests the gap isn’t technical, it’s cultural - a deficit of pride in workmanship and a willingness to treat buildings as disposable products. His lament doubles as a challenge: if design ambition outpaces industrial capability, the built world shrinks to whatever the supply chain can cheaply repeat.