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 HUXTABLEAnd infrastructure, on its already tenuous livability, overrides any aesthetic. … Art becomes worthless in a city brutalized by overdevelopment.
More Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes
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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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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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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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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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And infrastructure, on its already tenuous livability, overrides any aesthetic. … Art becomes worthless in a city brutalized by overdevelopment.
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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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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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Only a Californian would have observed that it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell the real fake from the fake fake.
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Every age cuts and pastes history to suit its own purposes; art always has an ax to grind.
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That turns the Jersey wasteland into a pretty classy dump.
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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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I have a feeling that picking up will go on long after ways have been found to circumvent death and taxes.
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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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Until the first blow fell, no one was convinced that Penn Station really would be demolished, or that New York would permit this monumental act of vandalism against one of the largest and finest landmarks of its age of Roman elegance
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