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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
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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
Way
Places
Never
Built
World
Style
Quite
Demeaning
Wonder
Improves
Whether
Counts
Experience
Noticed
Makes
Architecture
More quotes by Ada Louise Huxtable
Every age cuts and pastes history to suit its own purposes art always has an ax to grind.
Ada Louise Huxtable
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.
Ada Louise Huxtable
The age of Lincoln and Jefferson memorials is over. It will be presidential libraries from now on.
Ada Louise Huxtable
The New York Hilton is laid out with a competence that would make a computer blush.
Ada Louise Huxtable
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.
Ada Louise Huxtable
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
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
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
If the British are a nation of shopkeepers, Americans are a nation of shoppers.
Ada Louise Huxtable
Only a Californian would have observed that it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell the real fake from the fake fake.
Ada Louise Huxtable
All autonomous agencies and authorities, sooner or later, turn into self-perpetuating strongholds of conventional thought and practice.
Ada Louise Huxtable
An excellent job with a dubious undertaking, which is like saying it would be great if it wasn't awful.
Ada Louise Huxtable
The skyscraper and the twentieth century are synonymous the tall building is the landmark of our age. ... Shaper of cities and fortunes, it is the dream, past and present, acknowledged or unacknowledged, of almost every architect.
Ada Louise Huxtable
Nothing was more up-to-date when it was built, or is more obsolete today, than the railroad station.
Ada Louise Huxtable
Every generation tailors history to its taste.
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.
Ada Louise Huxtable
Good architecture is still the difficult, conscientious, creative, expressive planning for that elusive synthesis that is a near-contradiction in terms: efficiency and beauty.
Ada Louise Huxtable
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
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
Symbol and metaphor are as much a part of the architectural vocabulary as stone and steel.
Ada Louise Huxtable
