Herbert Muschamp quotes

“A building does not have to be an important work of architecture to become a first-rate landmark. Landmarks are not created by architects. They are fashioned by those who encounter them after they are built. The essential feature of a landmark is not its design, but the place it holds in a city's memory. Compared to the place it occupies in social history, a landmark's artistic qualities are incidental.”
-- Herbert Muschamp

#Memories Quotes #Cities Quotes #History Quotes

“We were the children of white flight, the first generation to grow up in postwar American suburbs. By the time the ’60s rolled around, many of us, the gay ones especially, were eager to make a U-turn and fly back the other way. Whether or not the city was obsolete, we couldn’t imagine our personal futures in any other form. The street and the skyline signified to us what the lawn and the highway signified to our parents: a place to breathe free.”
-- Herbert Muschamp

Source : "The Secret History of 2 Columbus Circle" by Herbert Muschamp, www.nytimes.com. January 8, 2006.

#Children Quotes #Growing Up Quotes #Gay Quotes

“Fashion is just a name for one of the things that happen where mind and body intersect.”
-- Herbert Muschamp

#Fashion Quotes #Names Quotes #Mind Quotes

“You count on it, you rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then, just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.”

Source : A. Bartlett Giamatti (1998). “A Great and Glorious Game: Baseball Writings of A. Bartlett Giamatti”, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

“Blaire, This was my grandmother’s. My father’s mother. She came to visit me before she passed away. I have fond memories of her visits and when she passed on she left this ring to me. In her will I was told to give it to the woman who completes me. She said it was given to her by my grandfather who passed away when my dad was just a baby but that she’d never loved another the way she’d loved him. He was her heart. You are mine. This is your something old. I love you, Rush”

“We had our thing. It is a really good memory but now we're older. Things change.”

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

“God the first garden made, and the first city Cain.”

“Until the first blow fell, no one was convinced that Penn Station really would be demolished, or that New York would permit this monumental act of vandalism against one of the largest and finest landmarks of its age of Roman elegance. Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves. Even when we had Penn Station, we couldn’t afford to keep it clean. We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tinhorn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed”

“The only bridge I've ever burned along this legacy I dance is the one that linked the cities of prosperity and chance.”

“The past actually happened. History is what someone took the time to write down.”

“A land without ruins is a land without memories - a land without memories is a land without history.”

Source : Abram Joseph Ryan, John Moran (1896). “Poems ...”

“Every age cuts and pastes history to suit its own purposes; art always has an ax to grind.”

Source : Ada Louise Huxtable (2010). “On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change”, p.1, Bloomsbury Publishing USA