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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.

Ada Louise Huxtable

. 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.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Admire City Country Demolished Ultimately
Every age cuts and pastes history to suit its own purposes; art always has an ax to grind.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Art Cutting Grind History Purpose
Embellishment is an irresistible and consuming impulse, going back to the beginnings of human history.Probably the strongest motivating force is the simplest: the inability of almost everyone to ever leave well enough alone.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Consuming Embellishment Enough Establishing History Human Inability
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.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Clothes Kind Love Right Summer Tension
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.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Country Established Land Rest Country Trend Value
Every generation tailors history to its taste.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Generation History Tailor Taste
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
In the end, these unavoidable conflicts provide architecture’s essential and productive tensions; the tragedy is that so little of it rises above the level imposed by compromise, and that this is the only work most of us see and know.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Architect Conflict Essential Little Tension Tragedy
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.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Age Building Cities Dream Landmark Past Tall
Symbol and metaphor are as much a part of the architectural vocabulary as stone and steel.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Architectural Reel Steel Stone Vocabulary
Distinctions are no longer made, or deemed necessary, between the real and the false; the edge usually goes to the latter, as an improved version with defects corrected – accessible and user-friendly.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Deemed Distinction False Longer Necessary Real Unbearable
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.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Creative Creativity Draw Know Past Pretend
Today, when so much seems to conspire to reduce life and feeling to the most deprived and demeaning bottom line,
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Art Demeaning Deprived Feeling Reduce Self
Only a Californian would have observed that it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell the real fake from the fake fake.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Becoming California Difficult Fake Real Take
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
Washington is an endless series of mock palaces clearly built for clerks.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Build Clearly Clerk Country Endless Palace

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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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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