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 HUXTABLEReally living without clutter takes an iron will … This involves eternal watchfulness and that oldest and most relentless of the housewife’s occupations, picking up.
More Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes
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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.
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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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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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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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Postmodernism is a freewheeling, unfettered, and unapologetic pursuit of style.
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Surrogate experience and surrogate environments have become the American way of life.
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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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Today, when so much seems to conspire to reduce life and feeling to the most deprived and demeaning bottom line,
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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.
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Every generation tailors history to its taste.
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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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Waiting is a large part of living. Great, passive, negative chunks of our time are consumed by waiting, from birth to death.
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New York, thy name is irreverence and hyperbole. And grandeur.
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The perennial architectural debate has always been, and will continue to be, about art versus use, visions versus pragmatism, aesthetics versus social responsibility.
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That turns the Jersey wasteland into a pretty classy dump.
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