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.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE. 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.
More Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes
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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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Real estate is the closest thing to the proverbial pot of gold.
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A disaster where marble has been substituted for imagination.
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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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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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Who’s afraid of the big, bad buildings? Everyone, because there are so many things about gigantism that we just don’t know.
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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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That turns the Jersey wasteland into a pretty classy dump.
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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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There are two kinds of people in the world – those who have a horror of a vacuum and those with a horror of the things that fill it. Translated into domestic interiors, this means people who live with, and without, clutter.
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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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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.
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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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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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