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 HUXTABLEEmbellishment 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.
More Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes
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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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In New York, the impact of these concentrated superskyscrapers on street scale and sunlight, on the city’s aniquated support systems, circulation
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Washington is an endless series of mock palaces clearly built for clerks.
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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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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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New York, thy name is irreverence and hyperbole. And grandeur.
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If the British are a nation of shopkeepers, Americans are a nation of shoppers.
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The New York Hilton is laid out with a competence that would make a computer blush.
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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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Nothing was more up-to-date when it was built, or is more obsolete today, than the railroad station.
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A disaster where marble has been substituted for imagination.
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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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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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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.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE