"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"
About this Quote
Erickson’s warning lands with the quiet authority of someone who spent a lifetime watching skylines erase their own memory. As an architect, he’s not pleading for museumified “heritage” in the nostalgic sense; he’s arguing that human culture is an ecosystem with a worse immune system than forests and rivers. Nature, given time, regenerates. A language, a craft tradition, a neighborhood’s informal rules of belonging, a way of building that fits climate and community can disappear in a single generation once prestige, capital, and policy decide it’s “obsolete.”
The phrase “the force of our own” is the tell. It’s not only about conquest by armies; it’s about the soft violence of standards: zoning codes that outlaw vernacular building, “revitalization” that prices out the very people who made a place meaningful, modernist certainty that equates uniformity with progress. Erickson knew modernism’s seductions and its collateral damage. Architecture can be a megaphone for a dominant culture’s assumptions about privacy, family, work, even what counts as beauty. When exported as a universal solution, it becomes an instrument of assimilation disguised as efficiency.
His intent is conservation, but not as stasis. He’s making a case for restraint and humility: to build without flattening difference, to modernize without treating other cultures as raw material for a global style. Coming from late-20th-century Canada, with its intensifying debates about Indigenous rights, multiculturalism, and rapid urban development, the subtext is clear: “progress” too often arrives as an eraser.
The phrase “the force of our own” is the tell. It’s not only about conquest by armies; it’s about the soft violence of standards: zoning codes that outlaw vernacular building, “revitalization” that prices out the very people who made a place meaningful, modernist certainty that equates uniformity with progress. Erickson knew modernism’s seductions and its collateral damage. Architecture can be a megaphone for a dominant culture’s assumptions about privacy, family, work, even what counts as beauty. When exported as a universal solution, it becomes an instrument of assimilation disguised as efficiency.
His intent is conservation, but not as stasis. He’s making a case for restraint and humility: to build without flattening difference, to modernize without treating other cultures as raw material for a global style. Coming from late-20th-century Canada, with its intensifying debates about Indigenous rights, multiculturalism, and rapid urban development, the subtext is clear: “progress” too often arrives as an eraser.
Quote Details
| Topic | Respect |
|---|
More Quotes by Arthur
Add to List
