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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.

Ada Louise Huxtable

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
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
Every generation tailors history to its taste.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Generation History Tailor Taste
A disaster where marble has been substituted for imagination.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Disaster Imagination Marble Substituted
There are few violations of this taste, and there is exemplary architectural consistency. Paris has defined the aesthetics of a sophisticated urban culture.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Aesthetic Centuries Developed Proved Violation
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
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
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Aim Art Decoration Require Self Skill Sophisticated
Tossed into the Secaucus graveyard are about 25 centuries of classical culture and the standards of style, elegance and grandeur that it gave to the dreams and constructions of Western man.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Century Dream Man Secaucus Standard Style Tossed
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
I have a feeling that picking up will go on long after ways have been found to circumvent death and taxes.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Circumvent Death Feeling Found Tax
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.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Art Civilization Draw Magnetic Physical Strong
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
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
The style of Parisian architecture has been proved and refined by at least three centuries of academic dictates and highly developed taste.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Academic Architecture Century Developed Dictate
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

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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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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