A disaster where marble has been substituted for imagination.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLEThe skyscraper and the twentieth century are synonymous; the tall building is the landmark of our age.Shaper of cities and fortunes, it is the dream, past and present, acknowledged or unacknowledged, of almost every architect.
More Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes
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Who’s afraid of the big, bad buildings? Everyone, because there are so many things about gigantism that we just don’t know.
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Today, when so much seems to conspire to reduce life and feeling to the most deprived and demeaning bottom line,
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Clutter in its highest and most organized form is called collecting.
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Real estate is the closest thing to the proverbial pot of gold.
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Symbol and metaphor are as much a part of the architectural vocabulary as stone and steel.
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Every generation tailors history to its taste.
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Washington is an endless series of mock palaces clearly built for clerks.
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Summer is the time when one sheds one’s tensions with one’s clothes, and the right kind of day is jeweled balm for the battered spirit. A few of those days and you can become drunk with the belief that all’s right with the world.
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Beauty or beast, the modern skyscraper is a major force with a strong magnetic field. It draws into its physical being all of the factors that propel and characterize modern civilization.
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the search for the ultimate skyscraper goes on. … At worst, overbuilding will make urban life unbearable. At best, we will go out in a blaze of style.
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No matter what an architect may be at home, he becomes a monumentalist when he comes to Washington.
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The perennial architectural debate has always been, and will continue to be, about art versus use, visions versus pragmatism, aesthetics versus social responsibility.
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The gamble of triumph or tragedy at this scale – and ultimately it is a gamble – demands an extraordinary payoff. The trade center towers could be the start of a new skyscraper age or the biggest tombstones in the world.
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What counts more than style is whether architecture improves our experience of the built world; whether it makes us wonder why we never noticed places in quite this way before.
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If the British are a nation of shopkeepers, Americans are a nation of shoppers.
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