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 HUXTABLEthe 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.
More Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes
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That turns the Jersey wasteland into a pretty classy dump.
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Nothing was more up-to-date when it was built, or is more obsolete today, than the railroad station.
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The skyscraper is the point where art and the city meet.
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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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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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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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New York, thy name is irreverence and hyperbole. And grandeur.
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If the British are a nation of shopkeepers, Americans are a nation of shoppers.
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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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Today, when so much seems to conspire to reduce life and feeling to the most deprived and demeaning bottom line,
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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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Clutter in its highest and most organized form is called collecting.
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Tossed into the Secaucus graveyard are about 25 centuries of classical culture and the standards of style, elegance and grandeur that it gave to the dreams and constructions of Western man.
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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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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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