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.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the duality of monumental architecture, highlighting both its potential for greatness and the risks involved.
In this quote, Ada Louise Huxtable emphasizes the fear and uncertainty that come with large-scale architectural projects like skyscrapers. While such constructions can symbolize progress and innovation, they also carry the risk of failure, becoming not just awe-inspiring achievements but also reminders of human hubris if they end tragically. The quote encapsulates the tension between ambition and caution in the face of monumental design.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about urban development and the challenges of architectural design.
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.
I'm a bad customer for my own buildings! If I'm choosing an apartment, I choose one about five or six stories high so that I can see the people, the trees, and the world on the street. Beyond that, I lose contact with the ground!
My architectural drive was to design new types of buildings to help poor people, especially following natural disasters and catastrophes... I will use whatever time is left to me to keep doing what I have been doing, which is to help humanity.
People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything. More and more I think that architecture has nothing to do with it. Of course, that's both liberating and alarming.
I would like to use architecture to create bonds between people who live in cities, and even use it to recover the communities that used to exist in every single city.
We used to build temples, and museums are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the idea that a good building can change your life (and a bad one ruin it).
The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his client to plant vines - so they should go as far as possible from home to build their first buildings.
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