Good architecture is still the difficult, conscientious, creative, expressive planning for that elusive synthesis that is a near-contradiction in terms: efficiency and beauty.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLEThe building is a national tragedy – a cross between a concrete candy box and a marble sarcophagus in which the art of architecture lies buried.
More Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes
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Who’s afraid of the big, bad buildings? Everyone, because there are so many things about gigantism that we just don’t know.
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In Paris style is everything. That is traditionally understood. Every street, every structure, every shopgirl has style.
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Every generation tailors history to its taste.
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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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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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the search for the ultimate skyscraper goes on. … At worst, overbuilding will make urban life unbearable. At best, we will go out in a blaze of style.
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That turns the Jersey wasteland into a pretty classy dump.
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The gamble of triumph or tragedy at this scale – and ultimately it is a gamble – demands an extraordinary payoff. The trade center towers could be the start of a new skyscraper age or the biggest tombstones in the world.
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Postmodernism is a freewheeling, unfettered, and unapologetic pursuit of style.
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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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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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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.
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If the British are a nation of shopkeepers, Americans are a nation of shoppers.
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There are few violations of this taste, and there is exemplary architectural consistency. Paris has defined the aesthetics of a sophisticated urban culture.
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Symbol and metaphor are as much a part of the architectural vocabulary as stone and steel.
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