The style of Parisian architecture has been proved and refined by at least three centuries of academic dictates and highly developed taste.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLEEvery 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.
More Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes
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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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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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. Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves. Even when we had Penn Station, we couldn’t afford to keep it clean.
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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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Every generation tailors history to its taste.
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Clutter in its highest and most organized form is called collecting.
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Washington is an endless series of mock palaces clearly built for clerks.
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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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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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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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No matter what an architect may be at home, he becomes a monumentalist when he comes to Washington.
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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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The age of Lincoln and Jefferson memorials is over. It will be presidential libraries from now on.
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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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Real serious waiting is done in waiting rooms, and what they all have in common is their purpose, or purposelessness,
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