New York, thy name is irreverence and hyperbole. And grandeur.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLEIt 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.
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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Every generation tailors history to its taste.
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Washington is an endless series of mock palaces clearly built for clerks.
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There are few violations of this taste, and there is exemplary architectural consistency. Paris has defined the aesthetics of a sophisticated urban culture.
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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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. 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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An excellent job with a dubious undertaking, which is like saying it would be great if it wasn’t awful.
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The perennial architectural debate has always been, and will continue to be, about art versus use, visions versus pragmatism, aesthetics versus social responsibility.
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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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Postmodernism is a freewheeling, unfettered, and unapologetic pursuit of style.
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That turns the Jersey wasteland into a pretty classy dump.
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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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All autonomous agencies and authorities, sooner or later, turn into self-perpetuating strongholds of conventional thought and practice.
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And infrastructure, on its already tenuous livability, overrides any aesthetic. … Art becomes worthless in a city brutalized by overdevelopment.
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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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