“The skyscraper is Orwellian or Olympian, depending on how you look at it.”

-Ada Louise Huxtable, American architecture critic, 1921-2013.

Ada Louise Huxtable was a legendary architecture critic. One of her best known works, The Tall Building Artistically Reconsidered, dealt with the subject of skyscrapers and their relationship to the city. In the passage including the above quote, she’s exploring the dichotomy of the skyscraper, and how they can simultaneously enhance and destroy the character of the city. The full passage follows:

The title of the world’s tallest building has a fleeting but special cachet; it is a favored setting for publicity stunts and self-celebrations, media events, and cinema mythology. But if the status and drama of the tall building, its engineering and architectural achievements, its embodiment of superlatives, are universally admired, the philosophical questions that it raises continue to be disturbing: its symbolism is complex, its role in the life of the city and the individual is vexing, and its impact is shattering. The skyscraper is Orwellian or Olympian, depending on how you look at it.[1]


[1]: Huxtable, Ada Louise. The Tall Building Artistically Reconsidered: The Search For A Skyscraper Style. New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1984. 11.