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
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLEUntil the first blow fell, no one was convinced that Penn Station really would be demolished, or that New York would permit this monumental act of vandalism against one of the largest and finest landmarks of its age of Roman elegance
More Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes
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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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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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And infrastructure, on its already tenuous livability, overrides any aesthetic. … Art becomes worthless in a city brutalized by overdevelopment.
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Postmodernism is a freewheeling, unfettered, and unapologetic pursuit of style.
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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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Surrogate experience and surrogate environments have become the American way of life.
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A disaster where marble has been substituted for imagination.
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Every generation tailors history to its taste.
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If the British are a nation of shopkeepers, Americans are a nation of shoppers.
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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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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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Nothing was more up-to-date when it was built, or is more obsolete today, than the railroad station.
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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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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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It supplies a necessary kind of magic to people and places that lack it. More than just a dread of empty spaces has led to the urge to decorate; it is the fear of empty selves.
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