The skyscraper is the point where art and the city meet.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLEThe 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
More Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes
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New York, thy name is irreverence and hyperbole. And grandeur.
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. Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves. Even when we had Penn Station, we couldn’t afford to keep it clean.
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Embellishment is an irresistible and consuming impulse, going back to the beginnings of human history.Probably the strongest motivating force is the simplest: the inability of almost everyone to ever leave well enough alone.
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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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Postmodernism is a freewheeling, unfettered, and unapologetic pursuit of style.
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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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If the British are a nation of shopkeepers, Americans are a nation of shoppers.
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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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Symbol and metaphor are as much a part of the architectural vocabulary as stone and steel.
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Every generation tailors history to its taste.
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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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The perennial architectural debate has always been, and will continue to be, about art versus use, visions versus pragmatism, aesthetics versus social responsibility.
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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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And infrastructure, on its already tenuous livability, overrides any aesthetic. … Art becomes worthless in a city brutalized by overdevelopment.
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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.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE