Quote

Postmodernism is a freewheeling, unfettered, and unapologetic pursuit of style.

Ada Louise Huxtable

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Pursuit
Style
Freewheeling
Unapologetic
Unfettered
Architecture

More quotes by Ada Louise Huxtable

Image
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
Image
Washington is an endless series of mock palaces clearly built for clerks.
Ada Louise Huxtable
Image
If the British are a nation of shopkeepers, Americans are a nation of shoppers.
Ada Louise Huxtable
Image
An excellent job with a dubious undertaking, which is like saying it would be great if it wasn't awful.
Ada Louise Huxtable
Image
The age of Lincoln and Jefferson memorials is over. It will be presidential libraries from now on.
Ada Louise Huxtable
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Every age cuts and pastes history to suit its own purposes art always has an ax to grind.
Ada Louise Huxtable
Image
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
Image
Only a Californian would have observed that it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell the real fake from the fake fake.
Ada Louise Huxtable
Image
A disaster where marble has been substituted for imagination.
Ada Louise Huxtable
Image
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
Image
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
Image
New York, thy name is irreverence and hyperbole. And grandeur.
Ada Louise Huxtable
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Ada Louise Huxtable
Image
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
Image
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