If the British are a nation of shopkeepers, Americans are a nation of shoppers.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLENo matter what an architect may be at home, he becomes a monumentalist when he comes to Washington.
More Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes
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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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The New York Hilton is laid out with a competence that would make a computer blush.
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An excellent job with a dubious undertaking, which is like saying it would be great if it wasn’t awful.
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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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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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We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tinhorn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed
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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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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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The age of Lincoln and Jefferson memorials is over. It will be presidential libraries from now on.
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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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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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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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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.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE