Time & Perspective Quote by Arthur Erickson

A certain Western self-myth hums beneath Erickson's line: history as a ledger of output. Not ideas entertained, not lives endured, but deeds logged, actions executed, results delivered. For an architect - and a modernist one, working in a century obsessed with performance, infrastructure, and measurable progress - that framing is both confession and critique. It treats history like a project report: what got built, what changed the skyline, what proved itself in steel and concrete.

The phrasing is bluntly kinetic. "Deed", "actions", "results" stack up like a construction schedule, each word more utilitarian than the last. It's also quietly ideological. Western history gets reduced to agency and achievement, the stuff that can be credited, commemorated, and photographed. That selection bias flatters empires, entrepreneurs, and "great men" narratives while sidelining the slower, murkier forces that don't read as "results": care work, cultural continuity, spiritual life, the aftermath of conquest, the environmental tab. What's unspoken is who gets to count as the doer.

In Erickson's professional context, the line reflects architecture's uneasy marriage to power. Buildings are literally deeds made visible; they announce intention and advertise capacity. Yet architecture also teaches the limits of the results-obsessed worldview: the most consequential outcomes of a project often appear decades later in displacement, maintenance, public use, and the politics of space. Erickson's sentence captures the Western addiction to doing, then dares you to notice what that addiction edits out.