Ada Louise Huxtable
Ada Louise Huxtable
Ada Louise Huxtablewas an architecture critic and writer on architecture. In 1970 she was awarded the first ever Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. The esteemed architecture critic Paul Goldberger, also a Pulitzer Prize-winnerfor architectural criticism, said in 1996: "Before Ada Louise Huxtable, architecture was not a part of the public dialogue." "She was a great lover of cities, a great preservationist and the central planet around which every other critic revolved," said architect Robert A. M. Stern, dean of the Yale...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionCritic
Date of Birth14 March 1921
CountryUnited States of America
Ada Louise Huxtable quotes about
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.
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.
The New York Hilton is laid out with a competence that would make a computer blush.
An excellent job with a dubious undertaking, which is like saying it would be great if it wasn't awful.
A disaster where marble has been substituted for imagination.
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.
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.
Nothing was more up-to-date when it was built, or is more obsolete today, than the railroad station.
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.
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.
Every age cuts and pastes history to suit its own purposes; art always has an ax to grind.
Only a Californian would have observed that it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell the real fake from the fake fake.
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.
All autonomous agencies and authorities, sooner or later, turn into self-perpetuating strongholds of conventional thought and practice.