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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.

Ada Louise Huxtable

Real estate is the closest thing to the proverbial pot of gold.
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Estate Gold Pot Proverbial Real
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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Activity Enforced Hed People Specialist Waiting
Washington is an endless series of mock palaces clearly built for clerks.
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Build Clearly Clerk Country Endless Palace
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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Aim Art Decoration Require Self Skill Sophisticated
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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Design Establishes Heart Hope Passion Quest
In Paris style is everything. That is traditionally understood. Every street, every structure, every shopgirl has style.
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Consistency Everything Paris Structure Style
. Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves. Even when we had Penn Station, we couldn’t afford to keep it clean.
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Admire City Country Demolished Ultimately
An excellent job with a dubious undertaking, which is like saying it would be great if it wasn’t awful.
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Dubious Excellent Job Saying Would
The skyscraper is the point where art and the city meet.
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Art City Meet Point Skyscraper
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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Art Cities Concentrated Country Scale Sunlight Superskyscrap
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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Building Delight Dimension Extra Important National Sense Tragedy Wonder
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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Academic Architecture Century Developed Dictate
The New York Hilton is laid out with a competence that would make a computer blush.
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Blush Competence Country Computer Laid
The age of Lincoln and Jefferson memorials is over. It will be presidential libraries from now on.
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Age Aged Explore Library Memorial Over Presential Presidential Read
Every generation tailors history to its taste.
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Generation History Tailor Taste
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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Cal Constant Decoration Nothing Place Process
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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Country Extraordinary Gamble Payoff Ultimately
Beauty or beast, the modern skyscraper is a major force with a strong magnetic field. It draws into its physical being all of the factors that propel and characterize modern civilization.
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Art Civilization Draw Magnetic Physical Strong
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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Art Box Candy Lying National Sarcophagus Tragedy
That turns the Jersey wasteland into a pretty classy dump.
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Class Jersey Pretty Turn Wasteland
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.
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Deemed Distinction False Longer Necessary Real Unbearable
Nothing was more up-to-date when it was built, or is more obsolete today, than the railroad station.
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More Obsolete Railroad System Today
California … is the place that sets the trends and establishes the values for the rest of the country; like a slow ooze, California culture spreads eastward across the land.
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Country Established Land Rest Country Trend Value
All autonomous agencies and authorities, sooner or later, turn into self-perpetuating strongholds of conventional thought and practice.
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Agency Conventional Later Practice Self Sooner Stronghold
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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Age Building Cities Dream Landmark Past Tall
A disaster where marble has been substituted for imagination.
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Disaster Imagination Marble Substituted
Postmodernism is a freewheeling, unfettered, and unapologetic pursuit of style.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Architecture Pursuit Style Unapologetic Unfettered

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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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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