Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes

42 Sourced Quotes

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

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
A city that is as heartbreaking in its beauty as it is in its poverty and decay. It is still a city of dreams—promised, built, and broken.

Ada Louise Huxtable
There is a Parkinson-type law that once you provide a super-route, you do not just speed the already stuck cars and trucks on their way, you acquire a lot of new traffic.

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
I wish people would stop asking me what my favorite buildings are. I do not think it really matters very much what my personal favorites are, except as they illuminate principles of design and execution useful and essential to the collective spirit that we call society. For irreplaceable examples of that spirit I will do real battle.

Ada Louise Huxtable
When it is good, this is a city of fantastic strength, sophistication and beauty. It is like no other city in time or place. Visitors and even natives rarely use the words urban character or environmental style, but that is what they are reacting to with awe in the presence of massed, concentrated, steel, stone, power and life.

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

Ada Louise Huxtable
In New York, the impact of these concentrated superskyscrapers on street scale and sunlight, on the city's antiquated 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
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