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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.

Ada Louise Huxtable

Clutter in its highest and most organized form is called collecting.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Clutter Collecting Form Highest Organised
Who’s afraid of the big, bad buildings? Everyone, because there are so many things about gigantism that we just don’t know.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Bad Big Building Gigantism Tombstone Tragedy Triumph
There are two kinds of people in the world – those who have a horror of a vacuum and those with a horror of the things that fill it. Translated into domestic interiors, this means people who live with, and without, clutter.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Horror Kid Mean People Two Vacuum World
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.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Country Established Land Rest Country Trend Value
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
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
The New York Hilton is laid out with a competence that would make a computer blush.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Blush Competence Country Computer Laid
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
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 HUXTABLE

Afford Architecture City Ultimate Deserve Keep
Embellishment is an irresistible and consuming impulse, going back to the beginnings of human history.Probably the strongest motivating force is the simplest: the inability of almost everyone to ever leave well enough alone.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Consuming Embellishment Enough Establishing History Human Inability
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.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Cal Constant Decoration Nothing Place Process
Surrogate experience and surrogate environments have become the American way of life.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Friendly Real Way
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
A disaster where marble has been substituted for imagination.
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Disaster Imagination Marble Substituted
Nothing was more up-to-date when it was built, or is more obsolete today, than the railroad station.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

More Obsolete Railroad System Today
Today, when so much seems to conspire to reduce life and feeling to the most deprived and demeaning bottom line,
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Art Demeaning Deprived Feeling Reduce Self

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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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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