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 HUXTABLEIn Paris style is everything. That is traditionally understood. Every street, every structure, every shopgirl has style.
More Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes
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The building is a national tragedy – a cross between a concrete candy box and a marble sarcophagus in which the art of architecture lies buried.
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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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And infrastructure, on its already tenuous livability, overrides any aesthetic. … Art becomes worthless in a city brutalized by overdevelopment.
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Beauty or beast, the modern skyscraper is a major force with a strong magnetic field. It draws into its physical being all of the factors that propel and characterize modern civilization.
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It is more important than ever that we receive that extra dimension of dignity or delight and the elevated sense of self that the art of building can provide through the nature of the places where we live and work.
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The skyscraper is the point where art and the city meet.
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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.
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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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Every generation tailors history to its taste.
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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
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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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A disaster where marble has been substituted for imagination.
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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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Real serious waiting is done in waiting rooms, and what they all have in common is their purpose, or purposelessness,
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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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