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Until 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

Ada Louise Huxtable

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
Until 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
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Bloom City Country Convinced Demolished Until
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.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Art Box Candy Lying National Sarcophagus Tragedy
All autonomous agencies and authorities, sooner or later, turn into self-perpetuating strongholds of conventional thought and practice.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Agency Conventional Later Practice Self Sooner Stronghold
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.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Appaling Needlework People Piece Some Truly
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
The New York Hilton is laid out with a competence that would make a computer blush.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Blush Competence Country Computer Laid
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

Build Count Experience Style Way World
Really living without clutter takes an iron will … This involves eternal watchfulness and that oldest and most relentless of the housewife’s occupations, picking up.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Clutter Feeling. Oldest Involve Iron Long Most
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
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
In Paris style is everything. That is traditionally understood. Every street, every structure, every shopgirl has style.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Consistency Everything Paris Structure Style
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.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Activity Enforced Hed People Specialist Waiting
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
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Aim Art Decoration Require Self Skill Sophisticated
Clutter in its highest and most organized form is called collecting.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Clutter Collecting Form Highest Organised
There are few violations of this taste, and there is exemplary architectural consistency. Paris has defined the aesthetics of a sophisticated urban culture.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Aesthetic Centuries Developed Proved Violation

Until 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

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Until 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

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