Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• 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

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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

  Real, California, Fake

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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

  Art, Strong, Civilization

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

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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

  Real, Friendly, Way

  "The Pasteboard Past" by Witold Rybczynski, www.nytimes.com. April 6, 1997.

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• If the British are a nation of shopkeepers, Americans are a nation of shoppers.

  Ada Louise Huxtable

  Shopping, United States, British

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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

  Style, Unbearable, Goes On

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

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• 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

  Inability, Enough, Embellishment

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

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• Because it is a national landmark, there is only one way to judge the Kennedy Center - against the established standard of progressive and innovative excellence in architectural design that this country is known and admired for internationally. Unfortunately, the Kennedy Center not only does not achieve this standard of innovative excellence; it also did not seek it. The architect opted for something ambiguously called 'timelessness' and produced meaninglessness. It is to the Washington manner born. Too bad, since there is so much of it.

  Ada Louise Huxtable

  Country, Judging, Design

  Ada Louise Huxtable (2010). “On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change”, p.81, Bloomsbury Publishing USA

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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

  Railroads, Today, Obsolete

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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

  Jobs, Dubious, Would Be

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• 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

  Iron, Long, Feelings

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

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• 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

  People, Waiting, Purpose

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

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• The New York Hilton is laid out with a competence that would make a computer blush.

  Ada Louise Huxtable

  New York, Computer, Competence

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• All autonomous agencies and authorities, sooner or later, turn into self-perpetuating strongholds of conventional thought and practice.

  Ada Louise Huxtable

  Practice, Agency, Self

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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

  Real, Rigor Mortis, Waiting Rooms

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

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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

  Mean, Two, People

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

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• The age of Lincoln and Jefferson memorials is over. It will be presidential libraries from now on.

  Ada Louise Huxtable

  Memorial, Presidential, Age

  "An Appraisal" by Ada Louise Huxtable, www.nytimes.com. May 23, 1971.

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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

  Country, Land, California

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• 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

  Passion, Heart, Design

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

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