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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.

Ada Louise Huxtable

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
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
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
It is more important than ever that we receive that extra dimension of dignity or delight and the elevated sense of self that the art of building can provide through the nature of the places where we live and work.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Delight Dimension Extra Important Sense Wonder
Real estate is the closest thing to the proverbial pot of gold.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Estate Gold Pot Proverbial Real
And infrastructure, on its already tenuous livability, overrides any aesthetic. … Art becomes worthless in a city brutalized by overdevelopment.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Aesthetic City Infrastructure Override Sunlight
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
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
If the British are a nation of shopkeepers, Americans are a nation of shoppers.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

British Nation Shopkeeper Shopper Shopping United States
No matter what an architect may be at home, he becomes a monumentalist when he comes to Washington.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Home Matter May Monummentaist
Real serious waiting is done in waiting rooms, and what they all have in common is their purpose, or purposelessness,
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Common Real Rigor Mortis Room Waiting Wanting
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
Only a Californian would have observed that it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell the real fake from the fake fake.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Becoming California Difficult Fake Real Take
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

Deemed Distinction False Longer Necessary Real Unbearable
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
Until the first blow fell, no one was convinced that Penn Station really would be demolished, or that New York would permit this monumental act of vandalism against one of the largest and finest landmarks of its age of Roman elegance
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Bloom City Country Convinced Demolished Until

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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