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 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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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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Washington is an endless series of mock palaces clearly built for clerks.
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That turns the Jersey wasteland into a pretty classy dump.
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Postmodernism is a freewheeling, unfettered, and unapologetic pursuit of style.
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Every generation tailors history to its taste.
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Clutter in its highest and most organized form is called collecting.
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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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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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Every age cuts and pastes history to suit its own purposes; art always has an ax to grind.
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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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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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A disaster where marble has been substituted for imagination.
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The building is a national tragedy – a cross between a concrete candy box and a marble sarcophagus in which the art of architecture lies buried.
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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.
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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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Surrogate experience and surrogate environments have become the American way of life.
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New York, thy name is irreverence and hyperbole. And grandeur.
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Symbol and metaphor are as much a part of the architectural vocabulary as stone and steel.
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And infrastructure, on its already tenuous livability, overrides any aesthetic. … Art becomes worthless in a city brutalized by overdevelopment.
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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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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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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
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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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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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All autonomous agencies and authorities, sooner or later, turn into self-perpetuating strongholds of conventional thought and practice.
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The New York Hilton is laid out with a competence that would make a computer blush.
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