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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.

Ada Louise Huxtable

The skyscraper and the twentieth century are synonymous; the tall building is the landmark of our age.Shaper of cities and fortunes, it is the dream, past and present, acknowledged or unacknowledged, of almost every architect.
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Age Building Cities Dream Landmark Past Tall
And infrastructure, on its already tenuous livability, overrides any aesthetic. … Art becomes worthless in a city brutalized by overdevelopment.
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Aesthetic City Infrastructure Override Sunlight
It supplies a necessary kind of magic to people and places that lack it. More than just a dread of empty spaces has led to the urge to decorate; it is the fear of empty selves.
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Empty Magic Necessary People Space Supplies
A disaster where marble has been substituted for imagination.
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Disaster Imagination Marble Substituted
That turns the Jersey wasteland into a pretty classy dump.
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Class Jersey Pretty Turn Wasteland
Postmodernism is a freewheeling, unfettered, and unapologetic pursuit of style.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Architecture Pursuit Style Unapologetic Unfettered
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.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Activity Enforced Hed People Specialist Waiting
In Paris style is everything. That is traditionally understood. Every street, every structure, every shopgirl has style.
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Consistency Everything Paris Structure Style
Today, when so much seems to conspire to reduce life and feeling to the most deprived and demeaning bottom line,
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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.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Building Delight Dimension Extra Important National Sense Tragedy Wonder
Really living without clutter takes an iron will … This involves eternal watchfulness and that oldest and most relentless of the housewife’s occupations, picking up.
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Clutter Feeling. Oldest Involve Iron Long Most
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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Country Extraordinary Gamble Payoff Ultimately
Good architecture is still the difficult, conscientious, creative, expressive planning for that elusive synthesis that is a near-contradiction in terms: efficiency and beauty.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Architecture Creative Elusive Expressive Good Planning Synthesis
It is more important than ever that we receive that extra dimension of dignity or delight and the elevated sense of self that the art of building can provide through the nature of the places where we live and work.
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Delight Dimension Extra Important Sense Wonder
No matter what an architect may be at home, he becomes a monumentalist when he comes to Washington.
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Home Matter May Monummentaist
Real serious waiting is done in waiting rooms, and what they all have in common is their purpose, or purposelessness,
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Common Real Rigor Mortis Room Waiting Wanting

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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