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In Paris style is everything. That is traditionally understood. Every street, every structure, every shopgirl has style.

Ada Louise Huxtable

Symbol and metaphor are as much a part of the architectural vocabulary as stone and steel.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Architectural Reel Steel Stone Vocabulary
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.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Consuming Embellishment Enough Establishing History Human Inability
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
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.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Age Building Cities Dream Landmark Past Tall
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
An excellent job with a dubious undertaking, which is like saying it would be great if it wasn’t awful.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Dubious Excellent Job Saying Would
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
. 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
New York, thy name is irreverence and hyperbole. And grandeur.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Country Grandeur Hyperbole Irreverence Name
Every generation tailors history to its taste.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Generation History Tailor Taste
Some people wait constructively; they read or knit. I have watched some truly appalling pieces of needlework take form. Others – I am one of them – abandon all thought and purpose to an uneasy vegetative states.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Appaling Needlework People Piece Some Truly
If the British are a nation of shopkeepers, Americans are a nation of shoppers.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

British Nation Shopkeeper Shopper Shopping United States
Clutter in its highest and most organized form is called collecting.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Clutter Collecting Form Highest Organised
In Paris style is everything. That is traditionally understood. Every street, every structure, every shopgirl has style.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Consistency Everything Paris Structure Style
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.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Clothes Kind Love Right Summer Tension
Every creative act draws on the past whether it pretends to or not. It draws on what it knows. There’s no such thing, really, as a creative act in a vacuum.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Creative Creativity Draw Know Past Pretend

In Paris style is everything. That is traditionally understood. Every street, every structure, every shopgirl has style.

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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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