Embellishment is an irresistible and consuming impulse, going back to the beginnings of human history.Probably the strongest motivating force is the simplest: the inability of almost everyone to ever leave well enough alone.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLEToday, when so much seems to conspire to reduce life and feeling to the most deprived and demeaning bottom line,
More Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes
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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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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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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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Today, when so much seems to conspire to reduce life and feeling to the most deprived and demeaning bottom line,
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The style of Parisian architecture has been proved and refined by at least three centuries of academic dictates and highly developed taste.
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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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The skyscraper is the point where art and the city meet.
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Every age cuts and pastes history to suit its own purposes; art always has an ax to grind.
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Clutter in its highest and most organized form is called collecting.
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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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No matter what an architect may be at home, he becomes a monumentalist when he comes to Washington.
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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.
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A disaster where marble has been substituted for imagination.
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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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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