"A disaster where marble has been substituted for imagination"
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A surgical insult, and a very architectural one: Huxtable makes “marble” stand in for all the ways institutions try to buy legitimacy instead of earning it. Marble is permanence, money, pedigree. Imagination is risk, argument, humanity. Calling the result a “disaster” isn’t just aesthetic snobbery; it’s a moral diagnosis. She’s saying the building (or plan, or civic gesture) fails because it confuses cost with meaning, surface with idea.
The line works because it skewers a familiar cultural reflex: when anxious elites want to look serious, they reach for the language of monuments. Marble becomes a kind of alibi. It signals “timelessness” while dodging the harder task of making something that actually belongs to its time and place. Huxtable’s subtext is that this substitution is intentional. It’s not ignorance; it’s a strategy. If you can wrap a thin concept in luxury materials, you can demand deference and call dissent “uncultured.”
Context matters. Huxtable rose as the sharpest mainstream voice against postwar American development when cities were being remade by corporate modernism, urban renewal, and prestige projects that often bulldozed neighborhoods in the name of progress. Her criticism targeted not just bad taste but bad civic thinking: buildings that perform authority while draining public life.
There’s also a jab at nostalgia. Marble evokes classical gravitas, the borrowed confidence of temples and courthouses. Huxtable implies that imitation isn’t heritage; it’s evasion. When imagination is replaced by stone, you don’t get beauty-you get a monument to insecurity.
The line works because it skewers a familiar cultural reflex: when anxious elites want to look serious, they reach for the language of monuments. Marble becomes a kind of alibi. It signals “timelessness” while dodging the harder task of making something that actually belongs to its time and place. Huxtable’s subtext is that this substitution is intentional. It’s not ignorance; it’s a strategy. If you can wrap a thin concept in luxury materials, you can demand deference and call dissent “uncultured.”
Context matters. Huxtable rose as the sharpest mainstream voice against postwar American development when cities were being remade by corporate modernism, urban renewal, and prestige projects that often bulldozed neighborhoods in the name of progress. Her criticism targeted not just bad taste but bad civic thinking: buildings that perform authority while draining public life.
There’s also a jab at nostalgia. Marble evokes classical gravitas, the borrowed confidence of temples and courthouses. Huxtable implies that imitation isn’t heritage; it’s evasion. When imagination is replaced by stone, you don’t get beauty-you get a monument to insecurity.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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