Art & Creativity Quote by Arne Jacobsen

Jacobsen’s jab lands because it punctures the comforting fantasy that buildings are mostly engineering plus money. If architecture were merely shelter, he implies, we’d all be done by lunchtime: stack walls, add a roof, move in. The “astonishingly easy” is bait. It frames the real struggle not as construction but as judgment, and that’s where his unfinished last word - “selecting” - does the heavy lifting.

Selection is the invisible labor of modern design: deciding what to leave out, which constraint to honor, which line deserves to exist at all. Jacobsen, a key Danish modernist, built a reputation on precisely this kind of disciplined choice-making, from the Swan and Egg chairs to buildings where details (handles, lighting, even cutlery) carry the same moral seriousness as the facade. In that world, the architect isn’t a heroic sculptor imposing form; he’s an editor, shaving away until the necessary feels inevitable.

The subtext is also a quiet defense of architecture’s status as art without resorting to romantic mysticism. Art here isn’t decoration applied after the “real work” is done. It’s the set of decisions that shape experience: proportion, light, tactility, rhythm, how a room tells you to move, linger, behave. By calling selection the “most difficult task,” Jacobsen reframes taste as responsibility - and hints at the anxiety behind clean modernism: when you remove ornament and alibis, every choice is exposed, and every mistake has nowhere to hide.