Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

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
Form
Abandon
Thought
Wait
Vegetative
States
Truly
Needlework
Take
Pieces
Constructively
People
Waiting
Knit
Purpose
Appalling
Read
Uneasy
Others
Watched

More quotes by Ada Louise Huxtable

Image
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
Image
Nothing was more up-to-date when it was built, or is more obsolete today, than the railroad station.
Ada Louise Huxtable
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The age of Lincoln and Jefferson memorials is over. It will be presidential libraries from now on.
Ada Louise Huxtable
Image
If the British are a nation of shopkeepers, Americans are a nation of shoppers.
Ada Louise Huxtable
Image
New York, thy name is irreverence and hyperbole. And grandeur.
Ada Louise Huxtable
Image
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
Image
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
Image
A disaster where marble has been substituted for imagination.
Ada Louise Huxtable
Image
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
Image
Symbol and metaphor are as much a part of the architectural vocabulary as stone and steel.
Ada Louise Huxtable
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Clutter in its highest and most organized form is called collecting.
Ada Louise Huxtable
Image
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
Image
Every age cuts and pastes history to suit its own purposes art always has an ax to grind.
Ada Louise Huxtable
Image
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