And infrastructure, on its already tenuous livability, overrides any aesthetic. … Art becomes worthless in a city brutalized by overdevelopment.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLEClutter in its highest and most organized form is called collecting.
More Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes
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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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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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Postmodernism is a freewheeling, unfettered, and unapologetic pursuit of style.
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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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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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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.
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Symbol and metaphor are as much a part of the architectural vocabulary as stone and steel.
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Surrogate experience and surrogate environments have become the American way of life.
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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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Real estate is the closest thing to the proverbial pot of gold.
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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 Paris style is everything. That is traditionally understood. Every street, every structure, every shopgirl has style.
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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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Good architecture is still the difficult, conscientious, creative, expressive planning for that elusive synthesis that is a near-contradiction in terms: efficiency and beauty.
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The New York Hilton is laid out with a competence that would make a computer blush.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE