And infrastructure, on its already tenuous livability, overrides any aesthetic. … Art becomes worthless in a city brutalized by overdevelopment.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLETossed 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.
More Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes
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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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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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California … is the place that sets the trends and establishes the values for the rest of the country; like a slow ooze, California culture spreads eastward across the land.
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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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That turns the Jersey wasteland into a pretty classy dump.
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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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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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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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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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If the British are a nation of shopkeepers, Americans are a nation of shoppers.
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the search for the ultimate skyscraper goes on. … At worst, overbuilding will make urban life unbearable. At best, we will go out in a blaze of style.
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The skyscraper and the twentieth century are synonymous; the tall building is the landmark of our age.Shaper of cities and fortunes, it is the dream, past and present, acknowledged or unacknowledged, of almost every architect.
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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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Every age cuts and pastes history to suit its own purposes; art always has an ax to grind.
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New York, thy name is irreverence and hyperbole. And grandeur.
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Real serious waiting is done in waiting rooms, and what they all have in common is their purpose, or purposelessness,
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We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tinhorn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed
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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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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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Washington is an endless series of mock palaces clearly built for clerks.
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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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The age of Lincoln and Jefferson memorials is over. It will be presidential libraries from now on.
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Postmodernism is a freewheeling, unfettered, and unapologetic pursuit of style.
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In Paris style is everything. That is traditionally understood. Every street, every structure, every shopgirl has style.
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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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