Every generation tailors history to its taste.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLEEmbellishment 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.
More Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes
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The building is a national tragedy – a cross between a concrete candy box and a marble sarcophagus in which the art of architecture lies buried.
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All autonomous agencies and authorities, sooner or later, turn into self-perpetuating strongholds of conventional thought and practice.
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Nothing was more up-to-date when it was built, or is more obsolete today, than the railroad station.
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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.
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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.
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Real estate is the closest thing to the proverbial pot of gold.
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the search for the ultimate skyscraper goes on. … At worst, overbuilding will make urban life unbearable. At best, we will go out in a blaze of style.
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Clutter in its highest and most organized form is called collecting.
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I have a feeling that picking up will go on long after ways have been found to circumvent death and taxes.
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The 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
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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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If the British are a nation of shopkeepers, Americans are a nation of shoppers.
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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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The New York Hilton is laid out with a competence that would make a computer blush.
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Beauty or beast, the modern skyscraper is a major force with a strong magnetic field. It draws into its physical being all of the factors that propel and characterize modern civilization.
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