Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes, Art Quotes, Responsibility 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.

6 years ago

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Tags : Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes , Art Quotes , Responsibility 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

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

In Paris style is everything. That is traditionally understood. Every street, every structure, every shopgirl has style. The style of Parisian architecture has been proved and refined by at least three centuries of academic dictates and highly developed taste. 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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An excellent job with a dubious undertaking, which is like saying it would be great if it wasn't awful.

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

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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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Tossed into the Secaucus graveyard are about 25 centuries of classical culture and the standards of style, elegance and grandeur that it gave to the dreams and constructions of Western man. That turns the Jersey wasteland into a pretty classy dump.

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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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If the British are a nation of shopkeepers, Americans are a nation of shoppers.

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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

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

Beauty or beast, the modern skyscraper is a major force with a strong magnetic field. It draws into its physical being all of the factors that propel and characterize modern civilization. The skyscraper is the point where art and the city meet.

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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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Every generation tailors history to its taste.

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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

Summer is the time when one sheds one's tensions with one's clothes, and the right kind of day is jeweled balm for the battered spirit. A few of those days and you can become drunk with the belief that all's right with the world.

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Tags : Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes , Love Quotes , Summer 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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Tags : Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes , Mean Quotes , Two Quotes

Surrogate experience and surrogate environments have become the American way of life. 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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