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.
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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All autonomous agencies and authorities, sooner or later, turn into self-perpetuating strongholds of conventional thought and practice.
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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.
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Waiting is a large part of living. Great, passive, negative chunks of our time are consumed by waiting, from birth to death.
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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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Nothing was more up-to-date when it was built, or is more obsolete today, than the railroad station.
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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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If the British are a nation of shopkeepers, Americans are a nation of shoppers.
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I have a feeling that picking up will go on long after ways have been found to circumvent death and taxes.
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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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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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No matter what an architect may be at home, he becomes a monumentalist when he comes to Washington.
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Postmodernism is a freewheeling, unfettered, and unapologetic pursuit of style.
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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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Symbol and metaphor are as much a part of the architectural vocabulary as stone and steel.
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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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An excellent job with a dubious undertaking, which is like saying it would be great if it wasn’t awful.
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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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It is the rare architect who does not hope in his heart to design a great building and for whom the quest is not a quiet, consuming passion.
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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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New York, thy name is irreverence and hyperbole. And grandeur.
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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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The New York Hilton is laid out with a competence that would make a computer blush.
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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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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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In New York, the impact of these concentrated superskyscrapers on street scale and sunlight, on the city’s aniquated support systems, circulation
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