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.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLEThe perennial architectural debate has always been, and will continue to be, about art versus use, visions versus pragmatism, aesthetics versus social responsibility.
More Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes
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Postmodernism is a freewheeling, unfettered, and unapologetic pursuit of style.
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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 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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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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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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The age of Lincoln and Jefferson memorials is over. It will be presidential libraries from now on.
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A disaster where marble has been substituted for imagination.
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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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Clutter in its highest and most organized form is called collecting.
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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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There are few violations of this taste, and there is exemplary architectural consistency. Paris has defined the aesthetics of a sophisticated urban culture.
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If the British are a nation of shopkeepers, Americans are a nation of shoppers.
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Washington is an endless series of mock palaces clearly built for clerks.
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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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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