Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
If the British are a nation of shopkeepers, Americans are a nation of shoppers.
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
Shopkeepers
Shoppers
Shopping
British
Americans
Nation
Nations
More quotes by 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
No matter what an architect may be at home, he becomes a monumentalist when he comes to Washington.
Ada Louise Huxtable
Postmodernism is a freewheeling, unfettered, and unapologetic pursuit of style.
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
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
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
The age of Lincoln and Jefferson memorials is over. It will be presidential libraries from now on.
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
Nothing was more up-to-date when it was built, or is more obsolete today, than the railroad station.
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
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
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
Clutter in its highest and most organized form is called collecting.
Ada Louise Huxtable
Every generation tailors history to its taste.
Ada Louise Huxtable
Symbol and metaphor are as much a part of the architectural vocabulary as stone and steel.
Ada Louise Huxtable
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
Real estate is the closest thing to the proverbial pot of gold.
Ada Louise Huxtable
Washington is an endless series of mock palaces clearly built for clerks.
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