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 HUXTABLEThere are few violations of this taste, and there is exemplary architectural consistency. Paris has defined the aesthetics of a sophisticated urban culture.
More Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes
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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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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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In Paris style is everything. That is traditionally understood. Every street, every structure, every shopgirl has style.
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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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The age of Lincoln and Jefferson memorials is over. It will be presidential libraries from now on.
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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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An excellent job with a dubious undertaking, which is like saying it would be great if it wasn’t awful.
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New York, thy name is irreverence and hyperbole. And grandeur.
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Surrogate experience and surrogate environments have become the American way of life.
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Washington is an endless series of mock palaces clearly built for clerks.
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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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If the British are a nation of shopkeepers, Americans are a nation of shoppers.
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The skyscraper is the point where art and the city meet.
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Tossed into the Secaucus graveyard are about 25 centuries of classical culture and the standards of style, elegance and grandeur that it gave to the dreams and constructions of Western man.
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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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