The perennial architectural debate has always been, and will continue to be, about art versus use, visions versus pragmatism, aesthetics versus social responsibility.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLEthe 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.
More Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes
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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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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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No matter what an architect may be at home, he becomes a monumentalist when he comes to Washington.
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The art of decoration requires the most sophisticated and self-indulgent skills. Its aim has always been to sate the senses as gloriously as possible. … ornament is not only a source of sensuous pleasure
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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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An excellent job with a dubious undertaking, which is like saying it would be great if it wasn’t awful.
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New York, thy name is irreverence and hyperbole. And grandeur.
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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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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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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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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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The New York Hilton is laid out with a competence that would make a computer blush.
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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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Today, when so much seems to conspire to reduce life and feeling to the most deprived and demeaning bottom line,
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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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