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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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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
Hope
Consuming
Doe
Architect
Great
Rare
Heart
Architecture
Quiet
Design
Building
Quests
Passion
Quest
More quotes by Ada Louise Huxtable
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
Every generation tailors history to its taste.
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
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
Washington is an endless series of mock palaces clearly built for clerks.
Ada Louise Huxtable
Clutter in its highest and most organized form is called collecting.
Ada Louise Huxtable
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
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
New York, thy name is irreverence and hyperbole. And grandeur.
Ada Louise Huxtable
If the British are a nation of shopkeepers, Americans are a nation of shoppers.
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
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
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
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
Symbol and metaphor are as much a part of the architectural vocabulary as stone and steel.
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
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
The age of Lincoln and Jefferson memorials is over. It will be presidential libraries from now on.
Ada Louise Huxtable
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.
Ada Louise Huxtable
