Daily Inspiration Quote by Arthur Erickson

Erickson is drawing a hard line between architecture as lived fact and architecture as portable image, and it reads like a quiet rebuke to a culture that treats buildings as content. The insistence on "have to see" is doing double duty: it sounds obvious, almost stubbornly literal, but it’s really a claim about comprehension itself. For him, understanding isn’t visual recognition; it’s bodily orientation. You don’t "get" a building the way you get a postcard. You get it by entering its scale, feeling its acoustics, noticing how light lands on surfaces over time, registering the small negotiations your body makes with thresholds, stairs, and corridors.

The subtext is an architect’s anxiety about mediation. A photograph is a decision: a single angle, a flattering hour, a cropped context. Film adds motion but still funnels experience through someone else’s framing, editing, and soundtrack. Both turn spatial complexity into narrative and spectacle, often rewarding what reads well over what works well. Erickson is defending the non-transferable parts: peripheral vision, temperature, smell, crowding, distance, the way a plaza makes you speed up or slow down.

Context matters here. Erickson’s career matured alongside the late-20th-century rise of architectural photography, glossy monographs, and the early logic of "starchitecture" where a building’s reputation could be built as much in magazines as in concrete. His point isn’t anti-image so much as anti-substitution: representation can document and seduce, but it cannot deliver the ethical core of architecture, which is how it shapes daily life when no one is filming.