Ada Louise Huxtable Quotes

in architecture, mediocrity is more glaringly obvious than in other lines - because there's a huge, physical object such as a building to demonstrate it.

Frank Gehry designs buildings that make other architects half his age (he's 78) gasp with envy. Neotony is what makes him lace up his skates and whirl around the ice rink, while visionary buildings come to life and dance in his head.

My first buildings, when I was about 30, were rejected for aesthetic reasons.

Because it is a national landmark, there is only one way to judge the Kennedy Center - against the established standard of progressive and innovative excellence in architectural design that this country is known and admired for internationally. Unfortunately, the Kennedy Center not only does not achieve this standard of innovative excellence; it also did not seek it. The architect opted for something ambiguously called 'timelessness' and produced meaninglessness. It is to the Washington manner born. Too bad, since there is so much of it.

The practice of architecture is the most delightful of all pursuits. Also, next to agriculture, it is the most necessary to man. One must eat, one must have shelter. Next to religious worship itself, it is the spiritual handmaiden of our deepest convictions.

I wanted to be an architect. I used to draw houses and buildings and construct buildings on my own.

The great problem of the concert hall is that the shoebox is the ideal shape for acoustics but that no architect worth their names wants to build a shoebox.

I am equally proud of all of my architectural projects. It's always rewarding to see an ambitious design become reality.

There are people who design buildings that are not technically and financially good, and there are those who do. Two categories - simple.

I'm working on a school of architecture in China. It's rare that an architect gets to design a school of architecture, and here I get to do it. I'm so pleased that they asked me.

I studied at a time when buildings were sterile things, and their creators were hands-off people - super-intelligent people, but you felt they didn't love the stuff buildings are made from.

I live in a loft in a building I designed, but for my dream house I'd get Frank Gehry, just to see what he'd do.

The genius of architecture seems to have shed its maledictions over this land.

One of the great beauties of architecture is that each time, it is like life starting all over again.

When an architect is asked what his best building is, he usually answers, "The next one."

The only thing wrong with architecture is architects.

I think Miss Monroe as architecture is extremely good architecture, and she's a very natural actress, and a very good one.

Architecture falls between art and airports. It's pragmatic-it helps you get from point A to point B. But it also works as art. It makes you think twice. It inspires you. It brings you back to yourself.

François Mitterrand was a student of architecture, he had done a lot of research before he called me. He said, "You did something special at the National Gallery of Art in Washington - you brought the new and the old together." But John Russell Pope finished the West Building in 1941, so when the East Building opened it was only about 40 years old. But the Louvre is 800 years old! A much bigger design challenge.

To sum up the state of architecture in America: ninety percent of the buildings we live in and around aren't architecture. No, that's not right - 98 percent.

Clearly, if a building is not functionally and technically in order, then it isn't architecture either, it's just a building.

I'd like to be an architect. That would be cool. I like drawing.

I am obsessed with architecture. It is true, I am restless, trying to find myself as an architect, and how best to contribute in this world filled with contradiction, disparity, and inequality, even passion and opportunity.

Architecture is a hazardous mixture of omnipotence and impotence. It is by definition a c h a o t i c a d v e n t u r e... In other words, the utopian enterprise.