Ada Louise Huxtable - City Quotes

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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

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

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

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

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