"An excellent job with a dubious undertaking, which is like saying it would be great if it wasn't awful"
About this Quote
A scalpel disguised as a compliment, Huxtable's line is what happens when a critic refuses to let craft launder a bad idea. She grants "an excellent job" just long enough to tighten the trap: the "dubious undertaking" isn't redeemed by competence; it's indicted by it. The punchline - "it would be great if it wasn't awful" - turns the language of polite review into an absurdity, exposing how often we reach for gold-star phrasing to avoid saying the obvious: the premise is rotten.
Huxtable, the most influential American architecture critic of her era, wrote in a field where money and power love to hide behind execution. Developers point to gleaming materials, famous names, and technical prowess as if those virtues cancel out civic harm. Her sentence insists on a harsher accounting. A building (or any cultural project) can be impeccably detailed and still be a public nuisance; sometimes the better it is, the worse the outcome, because it normalizes a mistake at a monumental scale.
The subtext is impatience with a certain kind of institutional gaslighting: the push to applaud "quality" while swallowing the underlying offense, whether that's historical vandalism, human-hostile planning, or prestige architecture that treats cities as branding surfaces. The wit works because it's structurally identical to the rationalizations it mocks. She mirrors the logic of boosterism until it collapses under its own contradiction, leaving the reader with the only honest verdict: good workmanship doesn't absolve bad judgment.
Huxtable, the most influential American architecture critic of her era, wrote in a field where money and power love to hide behind execution. Developers point to gleaming materials, famous names, and technical prowess as if those virtues cancel out civic harm. Her sentence insists on a harsher accounting. A building (or any cultural project) can be impeccably detailed and still be a public nuisance; sometimes the better it is, the worse the outcome, because it normalizes a mistake at a monumental scale.
The subtext is impatience with a certain kind of institutional gaslighting: the push to applaud "quality" while swallowing the underlying offense, whether that's historical vandalism, human-hostile planning, or prestige architecture that treats cities as branding surfaces. The wit works because it's structurally identical to the rationalizations it mocks. She mirrors the logic of boosterism until it collapses under its own contradiction, leaving the reader with the only honest verdict: good workmanship doesn't absolve bad judgment.
Quote Details
| Topic | Sarcastic |
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