Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Every generation tailors history to its taste.
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
Generations
History
Every
Tailors
Generation
Taste
More quotes by 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
Tossed into the Secaucus graveyard are about 25 centuries of classical culture and the standards of style, elegance and grandeur that it gave to the dreams and constructions of Western man. That turns the Jersey wasteland into a pretty classy dump.
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
Every age cuts and pastes history to suit its own purposes art always has an ax to grind.
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
Postmodernism is a freewheeling, unfettered, and unapologetic pursuit of style.
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 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
Symbol and metaphor are as much a part of the architectural vocabulary as stone and steel.
Ada Louise Huxtable
Clutter in its highest and most organized form is called collecting.
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
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
Real estate is the closest thing to the proverbial pot of gold.
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
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
No matter what an architect may be at home, he becomes a monumentalist when he comes to Washington.
Ada Louise Huxtable
The New York Hilton is laid out with a competence that would make a computer blush.
Ada Louise Huxtable
New York, thy name is irreverence and hyperbole. And grandeur.
Ada Louise Huxtable
The age of Lincoln and Jefferson memorials is over. It will be presidential libraries from now on.
Ada Louise Huxtable
