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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

All autonomous agencies and authorities, sooner or later, turn into self-perpetuating strongholds of conventional thought and practice.
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Agency Conventional Later Practice Self Sooner Stronghold
And infrastructure, on its already tenuous livability, overrides any aesthetic. … Art becomes worthless in a city brutalized by overdevelopment.
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Aesthetic City Infrastructure Override Sunlight
A disaster where marble has been substituted for imagination.
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Disaster Imagination Marble Substituted
Postmodernism is a freewheeling, unfettered, and unapologetic pursuit of style.
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Architecture Pursuit Style Unapologetic Unfettered
Today, when so much seems to conspire to reduce life and feeling to the most deprived and demeaning bottom line,
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Art Demeaning Deprived Feeling Reduce Self
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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Age Building Cities Dream Landmark Past Tall
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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Build Count Experience Style Way World
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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Country Established Land Rest Country Trend Value
Nothing was more up-to-date when it was built, or is more obsolete today, than the railroad station.
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More Obsolete Railroad System Today
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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Cal Constant Decoration Nothing Place Process
Distinctions are no longer made, or deemed necessary, between the real and the false; the edge usually goes to the latter, as an improved version with defects corrected – accessible and user-friendly.
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Deemed Distinction False Longer Necessary Real Unbearable
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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Clutter Feeling. Oldest Involve Iron Long Most
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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Century Dream Man Secaucus Standard Style Tossed
Symbol and metaphor are as much a part of the architectural vocabulary as stone and steel.
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Architectural Reel Steel Stone Vocabulary
No matter what an architect may be at home, he becomes a monumentalist when he comes to Washington.
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Home Matter May Monummentaist
New York, thy name is irreverence and hyperbole. And grandeur.
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Country Grandeur Hyperbole Irreverence Name
Every generation tailors history to its taste.
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Generation History Tailor Taste
Real serious waiting is done in waiting rooms, and what they all have in common is their purpose, or purposelessness,
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Common Real Rigor Mortis Room Waiting Wanting
Waiting is a special kind of activity – if activity is the right word for it – because we are held in enforced suspension between people and places, removed from the normal rhythms of our days and lives.
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Activity Enforced Hed People Specialist Waiting
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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Bloom City Country Convinced Demolished Until
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.
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Empty Magic Necessary People Space Supplies
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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Horror Kid Mean People Two Vacuum World
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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Chunk Consume Decoration People Special Waiting
Good architecture is still the difficult, conscientious, creative, expressive planning for that elusive synthesis that is a near-contradiction in terms: efficiency and beauty.
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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.
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Becoming California Difficult Fake Real Take
Real estate is the closest thing to the proverbial pot of gold.
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Estate Gold Pot Proverbial Real
An excellent job with a dubious undertaking, which is like saying it would be great if it wasn’t awful.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Dubious Excellent Job Saying Would

Good architecture is still the difficult, conscientious, creative, expressive planning for that elusive synthesis that is a near-contradiction in terms: efficiency and beauty.

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Good architecture is still the difficult, conscientious, creative, expressive planning for that elusive synthesis that is a near-contradiction in terms: efficiency and beauty.

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