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Symbol and metaphor are as much a part of the architectural vocabulary as stone and steel.

Ada Louise Huxtable

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.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Creative Creativity Draw Know Past Pretend
Good architecture is still the difficult, conscientious, creative, expressive planning for that elusive synthesis that is a near-contradiction in terms: efficiency and beauty.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Architecture Creative Elusive Expressive Good Planning Synthesis
Clutter in its highest and most organized form is called collecting.
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Clutter Collecting Form Highest Organised
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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Art Cities Concentrated Country Scale Sunlight Superskyscrap
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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Goes Skyscraper Style Unbearable Urban
Every age cuts and pastes history to suit its own purposes; art always has an ax to grind.
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Art Cutting Grind History Purpose
No matter what an architect may be at home, he becomes a monumentalist when he comes to Washington.
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Home Matter May Monummentaist
A disaster where marble has been substituted for imagination.
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Disaster Imagination Marble Substituted
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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Academic Architecture Century Developed Dictate
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
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.
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Building Delight Dimension Extra Important National Sense Tragedy Wonder
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
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
Postmodernism is a freewheeling, unfettered, and unapologetic pursuit of style.
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Architecture Pursuit Style Unapologetic Unfettered
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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Empty Magic Necessary People Space Supplies
The skyscraper is the point where art and the city meet.
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Art City Meet Point Skyscraper

Symbol and metaphor are as much a part of the architectural vocabulary as stone and steel.

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Symbol and metaphor are as much a part of the architectural vocabulary as stone and steel.

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