New York, thy name is irreverence and hyperbole. And grandeur.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLESome 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.
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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. 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.
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Surrogate experience and surrogate environments have become the American way of life.
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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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An excellent job with a dubious undertaking, which is like saying it would be great if it wasn’t awful.
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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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Every age cuts and pastes history to suit its own purposes; art always has an ax to grind.
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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
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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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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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Every generation tailors history to its taste.
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Symbol and metaphor are as much a part of the architectural vocabulary as stone and steel.
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The style of Parisian architecture has been proved and refined by at least three centuries of academic dictates and highly developed taste.
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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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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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