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 HUXTABLEGood architecture is still the difficult, conscientious, creative, expressive planning for that elusive synthesis that is a near-contradiction in terms: efficiency and beauty.
More Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes
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Every 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.
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Some people wait constructively; they read or knit. I have watched some truly appalling pieces of needlework take form. Others – I am one of them – abandon all thought and purpose to an uneasy vegetative states.
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The New York Hilton is laid out with a competence that would make a computer blush.
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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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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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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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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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The skyscraper is the point where art and the city meet.
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Real estate is the closest thing to the proverbial pot of gold.
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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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No matter what an architect may be at home, he becomes a monumentalist when he comes to Washington.
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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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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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Today, when so much seems to conspire to reduce life and feeling to the most deprived and demeaning bottom line,
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