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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

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.
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Creative Creativity Draw Know Past Pretend
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Every age cuts and pastes history to suit its own purposes; art always has an ax to grind.
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Art Cutting Grind History Purpose
The age of Lincoln and Jefferson memorials is over. It will be presidential libraries from now on.
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Age Aged Explore Library Memorial Over Presential Presidential Read
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
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
Washington is an endless series of mock palaces clearly built for clerks.
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Build Clearly Clerk Country Endless Palace
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.
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Consuming Embellishment Enough Establishing History Human Inability
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

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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