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.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLEWashington is an endless series of mock palaces clearly built for clerks.
More Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes
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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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The age of Lincoln and Jefferson memorials is over. It will be presidential libraries from now on.
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Waiting is a special kind of activity – if activity is the right word for it – because we are held in enforced suspension between people and places, removed from the normal rhythms of our days and lives.
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Surrogate experience and surrogate environments have become the American way of life.
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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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Real estate is the closest thing to the proverbial pot of gold.
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The skyscraper is the point where art and the city meet.
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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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If the British are a nation of shopkeepers, Americans are a nation of shoppers.
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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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In the end, these unavoidable conflicts provide architecture’s essential and productive tensions; the tragedy is that so little of it rises above the level imposed by compromise, and that this is the only work most of us see and know.
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It supplies a necessary kind of magic to people and places that lack it. More than just a dread of empty spaces has led to the urge to decorate; it is the fear of empty selves.
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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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Nothing was more up-to-date when it was built, or is more obsolete today, than the railroad station.
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New York, thy name is irreverence and hyperbole. And grandeur.
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