The New York Hilton is laid out with a competence that would make a computer blush.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLEIn 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.
More Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes
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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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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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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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Washington is an endless series of mock palaces clearly built for clerks.
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It is the rare architect who does not hope in his heart to design a great building and for whom the quest is not a quiet, consuming passion.
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Real estate is the closest thing to the proverbial pot of gold.
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If you will; they are places for doing nothing and they have no life of their own. … their one constant is what might be called a decorative rigor mortis.
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New York, thy name is irreverence and hyperbole. And grandeur.
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Clutter in its highest and most organized form is called collecting.
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The style of Parisian architecture has been proved and refined by at least three centuries of academic dictates and highly developed taste.
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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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All autonomous agencies and authorities, sooner or later, turn into self-perpetuating strongholds of conventional thought and practice.
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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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And infrastructure, on its already tenuous livability, overrides any aesthetic. … Art becomes worthless in a city brutalized by overdevelopment.
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If the British are a nation of shopkeepers, Americans are a nation of shoppers.
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