Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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

  Love, Summer, Clothes

  Ada Louise Huxtable (2010). “On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change”, p.462, Bloomsbury Publishing USA

  53 Copy quote

• Until the first blow fell, no one was convinced that Penn Station really would be demolished, or that New York would permit this monumental act of vandalism against one of the largest and finest landmarks of its age of Roman elegance. Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves. Even when we had Penn Station, we couldn’t afford to keep it clean. We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tinhorn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed

  Ada Louise Huxtable

  New York, Blow, Cities

  31 Copy quote

• Today, when so much seems to conspire to reduce life and feeling to the most deprived and demeaning bottom line, it is more important than ever that we receive that extra dimension of dignity or delight and the elevated sense of self that the art of building can provide through the nature of the places where we live and work. 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

  Art, Self, Feelings

  31 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Lying, Tragedy

  Ada Louise Huxtable (2010). “On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change”, p.84, Bloomsbury Publishing USA

  25 Copy quote

• 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

  Tombstone, Tragedy, Triumph

  "PG&E's real estate rumors" by David Lazarus, www.sfgate.com. October 12, 2001.

  19 Copy quote

• 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

  Style, World, Way

  Ada Louise Huxtable (2010). “On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change”, p.34, Bloomsbury Publishing USA

  22 Copy quote

• 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

  Creative, Synthesis, Planning

  Ada Louise Huxtable (2010). “On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change”, p.43, Bloomsbury Publishing USA

  23 Copy quote

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

  Ada Louise Huxtable

  New York, Names, Irreverence

  Ada Louise Huxtable (1976). “Kicked a building lately?”, Crown

  21 Copy quote

• Every age cuts and pastes history to suit its own purposes; art always has an ax to grind.

  Ada Louise Huxtable

  Art, Cutting, History

  Ada Louise Huxtable (2010). “On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change”, p.1, Bloomsbury Publishing USA

  25 Copy quote

• Every generation tailors history to its taste.

  Ada Louise Huxtable

  History, Generations, Tailors

  Ada Louise Huxtable (1986). “The Tall Building Artistically Reconsidered: The Search for a Skyscraper Style”, Pantheon

  16 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, New York, Cities

  Ada Louise Huxtable (1984). “The tall building artistically reconsidered: the search for a skyscraper style”, Pantheon

  16 Copy quote

• The perennial architectural debate has always been, and will continue to be, about art versus use, visions versus pragmatism, aesthetics versus social responsibility. In the end, these unavoidable conflicts provide architecture's essential and productive tensions; the tragedy is that so little of it rises above the level imposed by compromise, and that this is the only work most of us see and know.

  Ada Louise Huxtable

  Art, Responsibility, Vision

  Ada Louise Huxtable (2010). “On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change”, p.34, Bloomsbury Publishing USA

  10 Copy quote

• Real estate is the closest thing to the proverbial pot of gold.

  Ada Louise Huxtable

  Real, Gold, Pot

  13 Copy quote

• One of the most basic human instincts is the need to decorate. Nothing is exempt - the body, the objects one uses, from intimate to monumental, and all personal and ceremonial space. It is an instinct that responds ... to some deep inner urge that has been variously described as the horror of a vacuum and the need to put one's imprint on at least one small segment of the world.

  Ada Louise Huxtable

  Clothes, Space, Vacuums

  Ada Louise Huxtable (1986). “ARCHITECTURE, ANYONE?”, Random House

  16 Copy quote

• 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

  Creativity, Past, Creative

  15 Copy quote

• Symbol and metaphor are as much a part of the architectural vocabulary as stone and steel.

  Ada Louise Huxtable

  Vocabulary, Stones, Steel

  12 Copy quote

• Washington is an endless series of mock palaces clearly built for clerks.

  Ada Louise Huxtable

  Clerks, Palaces, Endless

  8 Copy quote

• Clutter in its highest and most organized form is called collecting.

  Ada Louise Huxtable

  Form, Collecting, Clutter

  Ada Louise Huxtable (2010). “On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change”, p.439, Bloomsbury Publishing USA

  4 Copy quote

• A disaster where marble has been substituted for imagination.

  Ada Louise Huxtable

  Imagination, Disaster, Marble

  8 Copy quote

• In Paris style is everything. That is traditionally understood. Every street, every structure, every shopgirl has style. The style of Parisian architecture has been proved and refined by at least three centuries of academic dictates and highly developed taste. There are few violations of this taste, and there is exemplary architectural consistency. Paris has defined the aesthetics of a sophisticated urban culture.

  Ada Louise Huxtable

  Paris, Consistency, Style

  Ada Louise Huxtable (1986). “ARCHITECTURE, ANYONE?”, Random House

  17 Copy quote

• Postmodernism is a freewheeling, unfettered, and unapologetic pursuit of style.

  Ada Louise Huxtable

  Style, Unapologetic, Architecture

  Ada Louise Huxtable (1986). “The Tall Building Artistically Reconsidered: The Search for a Skyscraper Style”, Pantheon

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  People, Waiting, Special

  Ada Louise Huxtable (1986). “ARCHITECTURE, ANYONE?”, Random House

  16 Copy quote

• The art of decoration requires the most sophisticated and self-indulgent skills. Its aim has always been to sate the senses as gloriously as possible. ... ornament is not only a source of sensuous pleasure; it supplies a necessary kind of magic to people and places that lack it. More than just a dread of empty spaces has led to the urge to decorate; it is the fear of empty selves.

  Ada Louise Huxtable

  Art, Self, Skills

  Ada Louise Huxtable (1986). “ARCHITECTURE, ANYONE?”, Random House

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Dream, Past, Cities

  Ada Louise Huxtable (2010). “On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change”, p.132, Bloomsbury Publishing USA

  21 Copy quote

• No matter what an architect may be at home, he becomes a monumentalist when he comes to Washington.

  Ada Louise Huxtable

  Home, May, Matter

  7 Copy quote

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