If you will; they are places for doing nothing and they have no life of their own. … their one constant is what might be called a decorative rigor mortis.
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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New York, thy name is irreverence and hyperbole. And grandeur.
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Clutter in its highest and most organized form is called collecting.
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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.
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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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Summer is the time when one sheds one’s tensions with one’s clothes, and the right kind of day is jeweled balm for the battered spirit. A few of those days and you can become drunk with the belief that all’s right with the world.
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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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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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And infrastructure, on its already tenuous livability, overrides any aesthetic. … Art becomes worthless in a city brutalized by overdevelopment.
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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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In New York, the impact of these concentrated superskyscrapers on street scale and sunlight, on the city’s aniquated support systems, circulation
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Symbol and metaphor are as much a part of the architectural vocabulary as stone and steel.
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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.
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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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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.
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If the British are a nation of shopkeepers, Americans are a nation of shoppers.
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