The perennial architectural debate has always been, and will continue to be, about art versus use, visions versus pragmatism, aesthetics versus social responsibility.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLEWhat 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.
More Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes
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The New York Hilton is laid out with a competence that would make a computer blush.
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A disaster where marble has been substituted for imagination.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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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It supplies a necessary kind of magic to people and places that lack it. More than just a dread of empty spaces has led to the urge to decorate; it is the fear of empty selves.
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The skyscraper is the point where art and the city meet.
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Only a Californian would have observed that it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell the real fake from the fake fake.
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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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It is the rare architect who does not hope in his heart to design a great building and for whom the quest is not a quiet, consuming passion.
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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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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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Today, when so much seems to conspire to reduce life and feeling to the most deprived and demeaning bottom line,
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