It is more important than ever that we receive that extra dimension of dignity or delight and the elevated sense of self that the art of building can provide through the nature of the places where we live and work.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLEThere 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.
More Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes
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Waiting is a large part of living. Great, passive, negative chunks of our time are consumed by waiting, from birth to death.
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No matter what an architect may be at home, he becomes a monumentalist when he comes to Washington.
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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.
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Postmodernism is a freewheeling, unfettered, and unapologetic pursuit of style.
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A disaster where marble has been substituted for imagination.
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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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If the British are a nation of shopkeepers, Americans are a nation of shoppers.
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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 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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Every age cuts and pastes history to suit its own purposes; art always has an ax to grind.
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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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There are few violations of this taste, and there is exemplary architectural consistency. Paris has defined the aesthetics of a sophisticated urban culture.
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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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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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Today, when so much seems to conspire to reduce life and feeling to the most deprived and demeaning bottom line,
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That turns the Jersey wasteland into a pretty classy dump.
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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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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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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 skyscraper is the point where art and the city meet.
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New York, thy name is irreverence and hyperbole. And grandeur.
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. 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.
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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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I have a feeling that picking up will go on long after ways have been found to circumvent death and taxes.
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Good architecture is still the difficult, conscientious, creative, expressive planning for that elusive synthesis that is a near-contradiction in terms: efficiency and beauty.
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The skyscraper and the twentieth century are synonymous; the tall building is the landmark of our age.Shaper of cities and fortunes, it is the dream, past and present, acknowledged or unacknowledged, of almost every architect.
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