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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.

Ada Louise Huxtable

Waiting is a large part of living. Great, passive, negative chunks of our time are consumed by waiting, from birth to death.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Chunk Consume Decoration People Special Waiting
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
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Aim Art Decoration Require Self Skill Sophisticated
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.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Cal Constant Decoration Nothing Place Process
Until the first blow fell, no one was convinced that Penn Station really would be demolished, or that New York would permit this monumental act of vandalism against one of the largest and finest landmarks of its age of Roman elegance
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Bloom City Country Convinced Demolished Until
Every generation tailors history to its taste.
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Generation History Tailor Taste
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
Today, when so much seems to conspire to reduce life and feeling to the most deprived and demeaning bottom line,
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Art Demeaning Deprived Feeling Reduce Self
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 HUXTABLE

Delight Dimension Extra Important Sense Wonder
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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Age Building Cities Dream Landmark Past Tall
A disaster where marble has been substituted for imagination.
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Disaster Imagination Marble Substituted
Washington is an endless series of mock palaces clearly built for clerks.
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Build Clearly Clerk Country Endless Palace
There are few violations of this taste, and there is exemplary architectural consistency. Paris has defined the aesthetics of a sophisticated urban culture.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Aesthetic Centuries Developed Proved Violation
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
the search for the ultimate skyscraper goes on. … At worst, overbuilding will make urban life unbearable. At best, we will go out in a blaze of style.
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Goes Skyscraper Style Unbearable Urban
Symbol and metaphor are as much a part of the architectural vocabulary as stone and steel.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Architectural Reel Steel Stone Vocabulary
Real serious waiting is done in waiting rooms, and what they all have in common is their purpose, or purposelessness,
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

Common Real Rigor Mortis Room Waiting Wanting

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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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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