Good architecture is still the difficult, conscientious, creative, expressive planning for that elusive synthesis that is a near-contradiction in terms: efficiency and beauty.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLEAnd infrastructure, on its already tenuous livability, overrides any aesthetic. … Art becomes worthless in a city brutalized by overdevelopment.
More Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes
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A disaster where marble has been substituted for imagination.
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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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Washington is an endless series of mock palaces clearly built for clerks.
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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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And infrastructure, on its already tenuous livability, overrides any aesthetic. … Art becomes worthless in a city brutalized by overdevelopment.
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The 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.
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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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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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Waiting is a large part of living. Great, passive, negative chunks of our time are consumed by waiting, from birth to death.
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Every age cuts and pastes history to suit its own purposes; art always has an ax to grind.
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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.
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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 style of Parisian architecture has been proved and refined by at least three centuries of academic dictates and highly developed taste.
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New York, thy name is irreverence and hyperbole. And grandeur.
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Every generation tailors history to its taste.
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