Daily Inspiration Quote by Arthur Erickson

Erickson is puncturing the myth of the lone, sovereign genius with a pin that architects know well: the work is never as “totally responsible” as the author wants the public to believe. Buildings are negotiated into existence - by budgets, zoning, engineers, clients, committees, gravity. Yet the culture of architecture still rewards the clean narrative of authorship, the idea that a singular mind willed a form into being. “Likes to seem” is the tell. This isn’t an accusation of fraud so much as a diagnosis of professional theater.

The second sentence sharpens the critique: the explanatory afterword, the studio-story that makes the project read like a sequence of rational choices. Erickson’s jab is that artists often reverse-engineer logic onto intuition, accident, constraint, and compromise. The talk becomes a kind of cosmetic surgery for process: it smooths the messy, contingent realities into something that can be sold, taught, juried, or published.

Coming from an architect - a discipline forced to justify itself in public language - the line carries extra bite. Architecture is evaluated through images and narratives long before it’s lived in, so the “reasonable process” is a protective script: it defends the designer’s authority and preempts critique. Erickson’s subtext is almost ethical: be wary of explanations that sound too airtight. When a creative process is presented as pure reason, it’s often a bid for control over how the work will be interpreted, and over who gets credit for its existence.