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A disaster where marble has been substituted for imagination.

Ada Louise Huxtable

Nothing was more up-to-date when it was built, or is more obsolete today, than the railroad station.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

More Obsolete Railroad System Today
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 HUXTABLE

Architecture Creative Elusive Expressive Good Planning Synthesis
. 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.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Admire City Country Demolished Ultimately
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.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Country Established Land Rest Country Trend Value
If the British are a nation of shopkeepers, Americans are a nation of shoppers.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

British Nation Shopkeeper Shopper Shopping United States
Symbol and metaphor are as much a part of the architectural vocabulary as stone and steel.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Architectural Reel Steel Stone Vocabulary
Clutter in its highest and most organized form is called collecting.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Clutter Collecting Form Highest Organised
If you will; they are places for doing nothing and they have no life of their own. … their one constant is what might be called a decorative rigor mortis.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Cal Constant Decoration Nothing Place Process
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

Century Dream Man Secaucus Standard Style Tossed
I have a feeling that picking up will go on long after ways have been found to circumvent death and taxes.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Circumvent Death Feeling Found Tax
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

Chunk Consume Decoration People Special Waiting
Really living without clutter takes an iron will … This involves eternal watchfulness and that oldest and most relentless of the housewife’s occupations, picking up.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Clutter Feeling. Oldest Involve Iron Long Most
A disaster where marble has been substituted for imagination.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Disaster Imagination Marble Substituted
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.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Architect Conflict Essential Little Tension Tragedy
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 HUXTABLE

Building Delight Dimension Extra Important National Sense Tragedy Wonder
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.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Country Extraordinary Gamble Payoff Ultimately

A disaster where marble has been substituted for imagination.

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A disaster where marble has been substituted for imagination.

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