Daily Inspiration Quote by Arthur Erickson

Erickson is drawing a hard line between architecture as competent service and architecture as art that can actually rearrange your insides. The key word is "rare" - not because we lack money or technology, but because most building is structurally conservative in the deepest sense: shaped by codes, budgets, real estate math, client fear, and the bland safety of precedent. A building that "moves the spirit" is an outlier because it risks being too strange, too costly, too personal.

"Unique" and "poetic" are doing quiet polemical work. He is rejecting the idea that greatness can be systematized into a style guide, a corporate brand language, or a repeatable typology. Poetic here doesnt mean decorative; it means a building has an internal logic that reads like a line of verse - compressed, inevitable, and impossible to paraphrase without losing its force. You cant value-engineer that without killing it.

"Products of the heart" is also a rebuke to architectural cultures that fetishize pure intellect: the diagram, the concept, the machine aesthetic. Erickson isnt arguing against rigor; he is insisting that rigor without emotional stakes produces buildings that perform but dont haunt you. Coming from a modernist who worked at civic scale, the sentiment lands as a moral claim: public space deserves more than efficiency. The subtext is a defense of authorship and tenderness in an industry that constantly pressures both out of existence.