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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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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
Purpose
History
Grind
Art
Cuts
Every
Purposes
Always
Suit
Suits
Cutting
Age
More quotes by 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
New York, thy name is irreverence and hyperbole. And grandeur.
Ada Louise Huxtable
Clutter in its highest and most organized form is called collecting.
Ada Louise Huxtable
A disaster where marble has been substituted for imagination.
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
All autonomous agencies and authorities, sooner or later, turn into self-perpetuating strongholds of conventional thought and practice.
Ada Louise Huxtable
The age of Lincoln and Jefferson memorials is over. It will be presidential libraries from now on.
Ada Louise Huxtable
If the British are a nation of shopkeepers, Americans are a nation of shoppers.
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
No matter what an architect may be at home, he becomes a monumentalist when he comes to Washington.
Ada Louise Huxtable
Real estate is the closest thing to the proverbial pot of gold.
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
Who’s afraid of the big, bad buildings? Everyone, because there are so many things about gigantism that we just don’t know. The gamble of triumph or tragedy at this scale — and ultimately it is a gamble — demands an extraordinary payoff. The trade center towers could be the start of a new skyscraper age or the biggest tombstones in the world.
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
Symbol and metaphor are as much a part of the architectural vocabulary as stone and steel.
Ada Louise Huxtable
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
The New York Hilton is laid out with a competence that would make a computer blush.
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
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
