Science & Tech Quote by Arthur Erickson

A faint indictment hides inside Erickson's cool, architect’s cadence: modernism didn’t just prioritize performance, it crowded out whole modes of knowing. “Obsession” isn’t neutral critique; it’s a diagnosis of a culture that confused measurable output with meaning. When he says performance “left no room,” he’s pointing to a design regime where budgets, efficiencies, and technical bravado become totalizing, colonizing decisions that used to be argued on human, symbolic, even sacred grounds.

The phrase “intuitive or spiritual impact” is doing careful work. Erickson isn’t pleading for vague mysticism; he’s naming the hard-to-quantify ways space hits the body before the brain catches up: the hush of a threshold, the lift of a ceiling, the moral geometry of light. By pairing “space and form” with “impact,” he frames architecture as an encounter, not an object. That’s a subtle rebuttal to the era’s habit of treating buildings like solved engineering problems, or worse, like branded sculptures.

Then comes the razor: “other than the aesthetic of the machine itself.” He concedes that the machine has a beauty - but calls out how it became the only sanctioned poetry. In the postwar decades, architecture rode the cultural prestige of industry and systems thinking; what couldn’t be optimized was dismissed as sentimental. Erickson’s subtext is a warning about a profession shrinking its imagination to what can be diagrammed, simulated, and justified, until the building performs perfectly and means almost nothing.