Today, when so much seems to conspire to reduce life and feeling to the most deprived and demeaning bottom line, it is more important than ever that we receive that extra dimension of dignity or delight and the elevated sense of self that the art of building can provide through the nature of the places where we live and work. 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 New York Hilton is laid out with a competence that would make a computer blush.
cities blush computer competence
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.
rights belief thetimes time days world kind spirit day summer seasons drunk clothes
A discreet study in expensive nonostentation.
study
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.
architecture art lies cross tragedy box candy
An excellent job with a dubious undertaking, which is like saying it would be great if it wasn't awful.
job great
Nothing was more up-to-date when it was built, or is more obsolete today, than the railroad station.
today
Once benchmarks of civilization and style, these gateways to the cities were palaces of splendor and objects of civic pride. Now they are caverns of gloom.
style pride gloom civilization cities
In the random way that democracy scatters art and monuments among its leaders, Lyndon Baines Johnson has a winner.
art random democracy winner leaders
The age of Lincoln and Jefferson memorials is over. It will be presidential libraries from now on.
age libraries lincoln jefferson
Superfluous curtains that needlessly cover glass would give Salome a lifetime supply of veils.
glass lifetime give
A disaster where marble has been substituted for imagination.
disaster imagination
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.
new-york-city
architecture
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