Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes, Art Quotes, Self Quotes

Today, when so much seems to conspire to reduce life and feeling to the most deprived and demeaning bottom line, 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. 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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No matter what an architect may be at home, he becomes a monumentalist when he comes to Washington.

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Clutter in its highest and most organized form is called collecting.

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The age of Lincoln and Jefferson memorials is over. It will be presidential libraries from now on.

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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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Tags : Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes , Style Quotes , World Quotes

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

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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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Tags : Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes , Country Quotes , Land Quotes

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; 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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Tags : Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes , Art Quotes , Self Quotes

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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Tags : Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes , Inability Quotes , Enough Quotes

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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Tags : Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes , Style Quotes , Unbearable Quotes

The perennial architectural debate has always been, and will continue to be, about art versus use, visions versus pragmatism, aesthetics versus social responsibility. 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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Tags : Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes , Art Quotes , Responsibility Quotes

In New York, the impact of these concentrated superskyscrapers on street scale and sunlight, on the city's aniquated support systems, circulation, and infrastructure, on its already tenuous livability, overrides any aesthetic. ... Art becomes worthless in a city brutalized by overdevelopment.

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Tags : Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes , Art Quotes , New York Quotes

Waiting is a large part of living. Great, passive, negative chunks of our time are consumed by waiting, from birth to death. 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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Tags : Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes , People Quotes , Waiting Quotes

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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Washington is an endless series of mock palaces clearly built for clerks.

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Real serious waiting is done in waiting rooms, and what they all have in common is their purpose, or purposelessness, 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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It is the rare architect who does not hope in his heart to design a great building and for whom the quest is not a quiet, consuming passion.

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Every age cuts and pastes history to suit its own purposes; art always has an ax to grind.

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Nothing was more up-to-date when it was built, or is more obsolete today, than the railroad station.

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Tags : Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes , Railroads Quotes , Today Quotes

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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Tags : Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes , Creative Quotes , Synthesis Quotes