Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes

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.

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

Good architecture is still the difficult, conscientious, creative, expressive planning for that elusive synthesis that is a near-contradiction in terms: efficiency and beauty.

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.

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

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.

Every generation tailors history to its taste.

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

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

Nothing was more up-to-date when it was built, or is more obsolete today, than the railroad station.

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

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

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

A disaster where marble has been substituted for imagination.

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

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

An excellent job with a dubious undertaking, which is like saying it would be great if it wasn't awful.

Only a Californian would have observed that it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell the real fake from the fake fake.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.