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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.

Ada Louise Huxtable

Real estate is the closest thing to the proverbial pot of gold.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Estate Gold Pot Proverbial Real
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
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.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Consuming Embellishment Enough Establishing History Human Inability
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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Horror Kid Mean People Two Vacuum World
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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Architect Conflict Essential Little Tension Tragedy
Real serious waiting is done in waiting rooms, and what they all have in common is their purpose, or purposelessness,
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Common Real Rigor Mortis Room Waiting Wanting
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.
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Empty Magic Necessary People Space Supplies
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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Becoming California Difficult Fake Real Take
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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Aesthetic Centuries Developed Proved Violation
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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Country Extraordinary Gamble Payoff Ultimately
The New York Hilton is laid out with a competence that would make a computer blush.
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Blush Competence Country Computer Laid
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
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Aim Art Decoration Require Self Skill Sophisticated
If the British are a nation of shopkeepers, Americans are a nation of shoppers.
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British Nation Shopkeeper Shopper Shopping United States
In Paris style is everything. That is traditionally understood. Every street, every structure, every shopgirl has style.
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Consistency Everything Paris Structure Style
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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Deemed Distinction False Longer Necessary Real Unbearable
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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Architecture Creative Elusive Expressive Good Planning Synthesis
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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Activity Enforced Hed People Specialist Waiting
New York, thy name is irreverence and hyperbole. And grandeur.
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Country Grandeur Hyperbole Irreverence Name
Who’s afraid of the big, bad buildings? Everyone, because there are so many things about gigantism that we just don’t know.
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Bad Big Building Gigantism Tombstone Tragedy Triumph
Some people wait constructively; they read or knit. I have watched some truly appalling pieces of needlework take form. Others – I am one of them – abandon all thought and purpose to an uneasy vegetative states.
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Appaling Needlework People Piece Some Truly
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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Academic Architecture Century Developed Dictate
Today, when so much seems to conspire to reduce life and feeling to the most deprived and demeaning bottom line,
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Art Demeaning Deprived Feeling Reduce Self
And infrastructure, on its already tenuous livability, overrides any aesthetic. … Art becomes worthless in a city brutalized by overdevelopment.
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Aesthetic City Infrastructure Override Sunlight
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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Circumvent Death Feeling Found Tax
No matter what an architect may be at home, he becomes a monumentalist when he comes to Washington.
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Home Matter May Monummentaist
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.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Art Civilization Draw Magnetic Physical Strong
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 HUXTABLE

Creative Creativity Draw Know Past Pretend

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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