War & Peace Quote by Arthur Erickson

Erickson’s line draws a clean, almost mischievous border between two ways of making: the measurable and the felt. “Rationalism” here isn’t reason in the broad sense; it’s the design ideology that treats buildings as solved problems - grids, efficiencies, systems, proofs. In art, that posture can be fatal. It flattens ambiguity, distrusts intuition, and turns surprise into error. The “enemy” phrasing is deliberately combative, as if Erickson is warning architects about a professional hazard: the slow seduction of being able to justify everything.

Then he pivots: rationalism is “necessary as a basis for architecture.” That’s the concession that keeps the quote from being romantic fluff. Buildings must stand, circulate air, shed water, meet codes, survive budgets. Architecture is burdened with consequence in a way painting isn’t. Erickson’s subtext is that architecture begins with rational constraints but can’t end there. The basis is structure; the point is experience.

The context matters. Erickson came of age in the long shadow of modernism, when rationalist planning promised social progress and often delivered sterile sameness. His own work - especially in the Pacific Northwest - leaned into landscape, light, and procession, the parts of a building you can’t reduce to a spreadsheet. The quote functions as a manifesto for the second half of the job: once the logic is secure, you have to risk poetry. Without that risk, architecture becomes competent infrastructure with an ego, not a cultural act.