black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

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

Ada Louise Huxtable

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 HUXTABLE

Aesthetic Centuries Developed Proved Violation
And infrastructure, on its already tenuous livability, overrides any aesthetic. … Art becomes worthless in a city brutalized by overdevelopment.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Aesthetic City Infrastructure Override Sunlight
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.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Architect Conflict Essential Little Tension Tragedy
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.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Activity Enforced Hed People Specialist Waiting
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.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Clutter Feeling. Oldest Involve Iron Long Most
Clutter in its highest and most organized form is called collecting.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

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
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Art Cities Concentrated Country Scale Sunlight Superskyscrap
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.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Consuming Embellishment Enough Establishing History Human Inability
Until the first blow fell, no one was convinced that Penn Station really would be demolished, or that New York would permit this monumental act of vandalism against one of the largest and finest landmarks of its age of Roman elegance
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Bloom City Country Convinced Demolished Until
Waiting is a large part of living. Great, passive, negative chunks of our time are consumed by waiting, from birth to death.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Chunk Consume Decoration People Special Waiting
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.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Country Extraordinary Gamble Payoff Ultimately
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.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Horror Kid Mean People Two Vacuum World
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
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Afford Architecture City Ultimate Deserve Keep
If 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.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Cal Constant Decoration Nothing Place Process
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
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Aim Art Decoration Require Self Skill Sophisticated
Real estate is the closest thing to the proverbial pot of gold.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Estate Gold Pot Proverbial Real

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

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes