Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Architect
Doe
Rare
Great
Architecture
Heart
Quiet
Design
Building
Quests
Quest
Passion
Consuming
Hope
More quotes by 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
Postmodernism is a freewheeling, unfettered, and unapologetic pursuit of style.
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
The age of Lincoln and Jefferson memorials is over. It will be presidential libraries from now on.
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
A disaster where marble has been substituted for imagination.
Ada Louise Huxtable
Symbol and metaphor are as much a part of the architectural vocabulary as stone and steel.
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
Washington is an endless series of mock palaces clearly built for clerks.
Ada Louise Huxtable
Real serious waiting is done in waiting rooms, and what they all have in common is their purpose, or purposelessness, if you will they are places for doing nothing and they have no life of their own. ... their one constant is what might be called a decorative rigor mortis.
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
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
Only a Californian would have observed that it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell the real fake from the fake fake.
Ada Louise Huxtable
Real estate is the closest thing to the proverbial pot of gold.
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
If the British are a nation of shopkeepers, Americans are a nation of shoppers.
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
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
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
Every generation tailors history to its taste.
Ada Louise Huxtable