There are few violations of this taste, and there is exemplary architectural consistency. Paris has defined the aesthetics of a sophisticated urban culture.
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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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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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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Symbol and metaphor are as much a part of the architectural vocabulary as stone and steel.
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Surrogate experience and surrogate environments have become the American way of life.
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The New York Hilton is laid out with a competence that would make a computer blush.
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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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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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Washington is an endless series of mock palaces clearly built for clerks.
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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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If the British are a nation of shopkeepers, Americans are a nation of shoppers.
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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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It is the rare architect who does not hope in his heart to design a great building and for whom the quest is not a quiet, consuming passion.
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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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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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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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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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No matter what an architect may be at home, he becomes a monumentalist when he comes to Washington.
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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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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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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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Real serious waiting is done in waiting rooms, and what they all have in common is their purpose, or purposelessness,
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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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All autonomous agencies and authorities, sooner or later, turn into self-perpetuating strongholds of conventional thought and practice.
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That turns the Jersey wasteland into a pretty classy dump.
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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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Postmodernism is a freewheeling, unfettered, and unapologetic pursuit of style.
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