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New York, thy name is irreverence and hyperbole. And grandeur.

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
Irreverence
Hyperbole
Grandeur
York
Name
Names

More quotes by Ada Louise Huxtable

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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
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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
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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
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Only a Californian would have observed that it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell the real fake from the fake fake.
Ada Louise Huxtable
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Real estate is the closest thing to the proverbial pot of gold.
Ada Louise Huxtable
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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
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No matter what an architect may be at home, he becomes a monumentalist when he comes to Washington.
Ada Louise Huxtable
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Every generation tailors history to its taste.
Ada Louise Huxtable
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Washington is an endless series of mock palaces clearly built for clerks.
Ada Louise Huxtable
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An excellent job with a dubious undertaking, which is like saying it would be great if it wasn't awful.
Ada Louise Huxtable
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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
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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
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The New York Hilton is laid out with a competence that would make a computer blush.
Ada Louise Huxtable
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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
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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
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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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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
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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
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Postmodernism is a freewheeling, unfettered, and unapologetic pursuit of style.
Ada Louise Huxtable
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Nothing was more up-to-date when it was built, or is more obsolete today, than the railroad station.
Ada Louise Huxtable