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New York, thy name is irreverence and hyperbole. And grandeur.

Ada Louise Huxtable

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.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Empty Magic Necessary People Space Supplies
I have a feeling that picking up will go on long after ways have been found to circumvent death and taxes.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Circumvent Death Feeling Found Tax
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
All autonomous agencies and authorities, sooner or later, turn into self-perpetuating strongholds of conventional thought and practice.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Agency Conventional Later Practice Self Sooner Stronghold
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 HUXTABLE

Build Count Experience Style Way World
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
. Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves. Even when we had Penn Station, we couldn’t afford to keep it clean.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Admire City Country Demolished Ultimately
Surrogate experience and surrogate environments have become the American way of life.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Friendly Real Way
An excellent job with a dubious undertaking, which is like saying it would be great if it wasn’t awful.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Dubious Excellent Job Saying Would
The age of Lincoln and Jefferson memorials is over. It will be presidential libraries from now on.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Age Aged Explore Library Memorial Over Presential Presidential Read
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.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Goes Skyscraper Style Unbearable Urban
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
Clutter in its highest and most organized form is called collecting.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Clutter Collecting Form Highest Organised
No matter what an architect may be at home, he becomes a monumentalist when he comes to Washington.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Home Matter May Monummentaist
Real serious waiting is done in waiting rooms, and what they all have in common is their purpose, or purposelessness,
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Common Real Rigor Mortis Room Waiting Wanting
The style of Parisian architecture has been proved and refined by at least three centuries of academic dictates and highly developed taste.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Academic Architecture Century Developed Dictate

New York, thy name is irreverence and hyperbole. And grandeur.

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New York, thy name is irreverence and hyperbole. And grandeur.

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