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.
Architects mostly work for privileged people, people who have money and power. Power and money are invisible, so people hire us to visualize their power and money by making monumental architecture. I love to make monuments, too, but I thought perhaps we can use our experience and knowledge more for the general public, even for those who have lost their houses in natural disasters.
If architecture is going to nudge, cajole, and inspire a community to challenge the status quo into making responsible changes, it will take the subversive leadership of academics and practitioners who keep reminding students of the profession’s responsibilities.
The space within becomes the reality of the building.
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'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!
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.
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