The building is a national tragedy – a cross between a concrete candy box and a marble sarcophagus in which the art of architecture lies buried.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLEUntil the first blow fell, no one was convinced that Penn Station really would be demolished, or that New York would permit this monumental act of vandalism against one of the largest and finest landmarks of its age of Roman elegance
More Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes
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It is more important than ever that we receive that extra dimension of dignity or delight and the elevated sense of self that the art of building can provide through the nature of the places where we live and work.
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It is the rare architect who does not hope in his heart to design a great building and for whom the quest is not a quiet, consuming passion.
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The age of Lincoln and Jefferson memorials is over. It will be presidential libraries from now on.
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Tossed into the Secaucus graveyard are about 25 centuries of classical culture and the standards of style, elegance and grandeur that it gave to the dreams and constructions of Western man.
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If you will; they are places for doing nothing and they have no life of their own. … their one constant is what might be called a decorative rigor mortis.
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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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Washington is an endless series of mock palaces clearly built for clerks.
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Surrogate experience and surrogate environments have become the American way of life.
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Until the first blow fell, no one was convinced that Penn Station really would be demolished, or that New York would permit this monumental act of vandalism against one of the largest and finest landmarks of its age of Roman elegance
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New York, thy name is irreverence and hyperbole. And grandeur.
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The skyscraper is the point where art and the city meet.
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Really living without clutter takes an iron will … This involves eternal watchfulness and that oldest and most relentless of the housewife’s occupations, picking up.
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California … is the place that sets the trends and establishes the values for the rest of the country; like a slow ooze, California culture spreads eastward across the land.
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. Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves. Even when we had Penn Station, we couldn’t afford to keep it clean.
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Only a Californian would have observed that it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell the real fake from the fake fake.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE