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 HUXTABLEIf 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.
More Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes
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An excellent job with a dubious undertaking, which is like saying it would be great if it wasn’t awful.
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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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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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The gamble of triumph or tragedy at this scale – and ultimately it is a gamble – demands an extraordinary payoff. The trade center towers could be the start of a new skyscraper age or the biggest tombstones in the world.
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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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New York, thy name is irreverence and hyperbole. And grandeur.
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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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Who’s afraid of the big, bad buildings? Everyone, because there are so many things about gigantism that we just don’t know.
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Surrogate experience and surrogate environments have become the American way of life.
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. 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.
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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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Nothing was more up-to-date when it was built, or is more obsolete today, than the railroad station.
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The perennial architectural debate has always been, and will continue to be, about art versus use, visions versus pragmatism, aesthetics versus social responsibility.
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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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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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