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All autonomous agencies and authorities, sooner or later, turn into self-perpetuating strongholds of conventional thought and practice.

Ada Louise Huxtable

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

Aim Art Decoration Require Self Skill Sophisticated
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
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Afford Architecture City Ultimate Deserve Keep
Summer is the time when one sheds one’s tensions with one’s clothes, and the right kind of day is jeweled balm for the battered spirit. A few of those days and you can become drunk with the belief that all’s right with the world.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Clothes Kind Love Right Summer Tension
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.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Horror Kid Mean People Two Vacuum World
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

Goes Skyscraper Style Unbearable Urban
No matter what an architect may be at home, he becomes a monumentalist when he comes to Washington.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Home Matter May Monummentaist
A disaster where marble has been substituted for imagination.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Disaster Imagination Marble Substituted
. 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.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Admire City Country Demolished Ultimately
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.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Architect Conflict Essential Little Tension Tragedy
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.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

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
Only a Californian would have observed that it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell the real fake from the fake fake.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Becoming California Difficult Fake Real Take
There are few violations of this taste, and there is exemplary architectural consistency. Paris has defined the aesthetics of a sophisticated urban culture.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Aesthetic Centuries Developed Proved Violation
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.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Empty Magic Necessary People Space Supplies
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.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Cal Constant Decoration Nothing Place Process
I have a feeling that picking up will go on long after ways have been found to circumvent death and taxes.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Circumvent Death Feeling Found Tax

All autonomous agencies and authorities, sooner or later, turn into self-perpetuating strongholds of conventional thought and practice.

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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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