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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

Ada Louise Huxtable

That turns the Jersey wasteland into a pretty classy dump.
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Class Jersey Pretty Turn Wasteland
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.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Country Established Land Rest Country Trend Value
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
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
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
The skyscraper is the point where art and the city meet.
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Art City Meet Point Skyscraper
Who’s afraid of the big, bad buildings? Everyone, because there are so many things about gigantism that we just don’t know.
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Bad Big Building Gigantism Tombstone Tragedy Triumph
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
If you will; they are places for doing nothing and they have no life of their own. … their one constant is what might be called a decorative rigor mortis.
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Cal Constant Decoration Nothing Place Process
An excellent job with a dubious undertaking, which is like saying it would be great if it wasn’t awful.
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Dubious Excellent Job Saying Would
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
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Afford Architecture City Ultimate Deserve Keep
Postmodernism is a freewheeling, unfettered, and unapologetic pursuit of style.
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Architecture Pursuit Style Unapologetic Unfettered
Symbol and metaphor are as much a part of the architectural vocabulary as stone and steel.
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Architectural Reel Steel Stone Vocabulary
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
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
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

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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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

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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