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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
Washington is an endless series of mock palaces clearly built for clerks.
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Build Clearly Clerk Country Endless Palace
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
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
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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Build Count Experience Style Way World
Nothing was more up-to-date when it was built, or is more obsolete today, than the railroad station.
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More Obsolete Railroad System Today
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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

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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