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Who’s afraid of the big, bad buildings? Everyone, because there are so many things about gigantism that we just don’t know.

Ada Louise Huxtable

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
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
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
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
Every generation tailors history to its taste.
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Generation History Tailor Taste
Clutter in its highest and most organized form is called collecting.
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Clutter Collecting Form Highest Organised
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
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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Cal Constant Decoration Nothing Place Process
The perennial architectural debate has always been, and will continue to be, about art versus use, visions versus pragmatism, aesthetics versus social responsibility.
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Architectural Art Object Perennial Responsibility Versus Vision
Symbol and metaphor are as much a part of the architectural vocabulary as stone and steel.
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Architectural Reel Steel Stone Vocabulary
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
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
California … is the place that sets the trends and establishes the values for the rest of the country; like a slow ooze, California culture spreads eastward across the land.
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Country Established Land Rest Country Trend Value
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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Art Cities Concentrated Country Scale Sunlight Superskyscrap
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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Afford Architecture City Ultimate Deserve Keep
New York, thy name is irreverence and hyperbole. And grandeur.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

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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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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