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Every generation tailors history to its taste.

Ada Louise Huxtable

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
In Paris style is everything. That is traditionally understood. Every street, every structure, every shopgirl has style.
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Consistency Everything Paris Structure Style
If the British are a nation of shopkeepers, Americans are a nation of shoppers.
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British Nation Shopkeeper Shopper Shopping United States
The skyscraper is the point where art and the city meet.
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Art City Meet Point Skyscraper
. 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
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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Aesthetic Centuries Developed Proved Violation
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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Architect Conflict Essential Little Tension Tragedy
New York, thy name is irreverence and hyperbole. And grandeur.
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Country Grandeur Hyperbole Irreverence Name
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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Aim Art Decoration Require Self Skill Sophisticated
A disaster where marble has been substituted for imagination.
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Disaster Imagination Marble Substituted
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 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
Surrogate experience and surrogate environments have become the American way of life.
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Friendly Real Way
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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Appaling Needlework People Piece Some Truly
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
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

Building Delight Dimension Extra Important National Sense Tragedy Wonder

Every generation tailors history to its taste.

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Every generation tailors history to its taste.

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