Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes

42 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Ada Louise Huxtable
If you look at Rockefeller Center in detail, it's a very elegant plan: higher and lower levels that lead you from one to the other, streets cut through to keep the human scale. You always feel you're going around a corner, not around a wind-swept plaza, into some other area that has an inviting activity.

Ada Louise Huxtable
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
In New York, the towers of the mammoth World Trade Center rise aggressively over everything else, gleaming like new-minted money — the architecture of power.

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

Ada Louise Huxtable
The skyscraper is Olympian or Orwellian, depending on how you look at it.

Ada Louise Huxtable
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
The capital city specializes in ballooning monuments and endless corridors. It uses marble like cotton wool. It is the home of government of, for, and by the people, and of taste for the people — the big, the bland, and the banal.

Ada Louise Huxtable
Gnomes always draw curtains where there are views.

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

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

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

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

Ada Louise Huxtable
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
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
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
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
Architecture is a very real and important art; it affects us all so directly. You must judge it in terms of problem-solving in this uneasy, difficult combination of structure and art.

Ada Louise Huxtable
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
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