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 HUXTABLESymbol and metaphor are as much a part of the architectural vocabulary as stone and steel.
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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Real serious waiting is done in waiting rooms, and what they all have in common is their purpose, or purposelessness,
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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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Today, when so much seems to conspire to reduce life and feeling to the most deprived and demeaning bottom line,
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New York, thy name is irreverence and hyperbole. And grandeur.
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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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In Paris style is everything. That is traditionally understood. Every street, every structure, every shopgirl has style.
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That turns the Jersey wasteland into a pretty classy dump.
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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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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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Real estate is the closest thing to the proverbial pot of gold.
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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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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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All autonomous agencies and authorities, sooner or later, turn into self-perpetuating strongholds of conventional thought and practice.
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Summer is the time when one sheds one’s tensions with one’s clothes, and the right kind of day is jeweled balm for the battered spirit. A few of those days and you can become drunk with the belief that all’s right with the world.
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