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

Ada Louise Huxtable

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Ada Louise Huxtable
Age: 91 †
Born: 1921
Born: March 14
Died: 2013
Died: January 7
Architectural Critic
Biographer
Curator
Journalist
Writer
New York City
New York
Ada Louise Landman
Palaces
Washington
Clearly
Endless
Series
Built
Clerks
Mock

More quotes by Ada Louise Huxtable

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The New York Hilton is laid out with a competence that would make a computer blush.
Ada Louise Huxtable
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The building is a national tragedy - a cross between a concrete candy box and a marble sarcophagus in which the art of architecture lies buried.
Ada Louise Huxtable
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An excellent job with a dubious undertaking, which is like saying it would be great if it wasn't awful.
Ada Louise Huxtable
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New York, thy name is irreverence and hyperbole. And grandeur.
Ada Louise Huxtable
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No matter what an architect may be at home, he becomes a monumentalist when he comes to Washington.
Ada Louise Huxtable
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The age of Lincoln and Jefferson memorials is over. It will be presidential libraries from now on.
Ada Louise Huxtable
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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.
Ada Louise Huxtable
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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.
Ada Louise Huxtable
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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.
Ada Louise Huxtable
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Clutter in its highest and most organized form is called collecting.
Ada Louise Huxtable
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All autonomous agencies and authorities, sooner or later, turn into self-perpetuating strongholds of conventional thought and practice.
Ada Louise Huxtable
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Every age cuts and pastes history to suit its own purposes art always has an ax to grind.
Ada Louise Huxtable
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Really living without clutter takes an iron will ... This involves eternal watchfulness and that oldest and most relentless of the housewife's occupations, picking up. I have a feeling that picking up will go on long after ways have been found to circumvent death and taxes.
Ada Louise Huxtable
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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.
Ada Louise Huxtable
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A disaster where marble has been substituted for imagination.
Ada Louise Huxtable
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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.
Ada Louise Huxtable
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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.
Ada Louise Huxtable
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Some people wait constructively they read or knit. I have watched some truly appalling pieces of needlework take form. Others - I am one of them - abandon all thought and purpose to an uneasy vegetative states.
Ada Louise Huxtable
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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.
Ada Louise Huxtable
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Postmodernism is a freewheeling, unfettered, and unapologetic pursuit of style.
Ada Louise Huxtable