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 HUXTABLEThe style of Parisian architecture has been proved and refined by at least three centuries of academic dictates and highly developed taste.
More Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes
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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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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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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
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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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No matter what an architect may be at home, he becomes a monumentalist when he comes to Washington.
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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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The building is a national tragedy – a cross between a concrete candy box and a marble sarcophagus in which the art of architecture lies buried.
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Real estate is the closest thing to the proverbial pot of gold.
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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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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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Real serious waiting is done in waiting rooms, and what they all have in common is their purpose, or purposelessness,
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New York, thy name is irreverence and hyperbole. And grandeur.
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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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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.
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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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