Every generation tailors history to its taste.
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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That turns the Jersey wasteland into a pretty classy dump.
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Postmodernism is a freewheeling, unfettered, and unapologetic pursuit of style.
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And infrastructure, on its already tenuous livability, overrides any aesthetic. … Art becomes worthless in a city brutalized by overdevelopment.
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In Paris style is everything. That is traditionally understood. Every street, every structure, every shopgirl has style.
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A disaster where marble has been substituted for imagination.
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Good architecture is still the difficult, conscientious, creative, expressive planning for that elusive synthesis that is a near-contradiction in terms: efficiency and beauty.
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There are few violations of this taste, and there is exemplary architectural consistency. Paris has defined the aesthetics of a sophisticated urban culture.
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Distinctions are no longer made, or deemed necessary, between the real and the false; the edge usually goes to the latter, as an improved version with defects corrected – accessible and user-friendly.
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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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Nothing was more up-to-date when it was built, or is more obsolete today, than the railroad station.
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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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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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Washington is an endless series of mock palaces clearly built for clerks.
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Real serious waiting is done in waiting rooms, and what they all have in common is their purpose, or purposelessness,
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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.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE