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NYC - Ada Louise Huxtable, Champion of Livable Architecture

Ada Louise Huxtable on Park Ave in the 1970s             Bernard Gotfryd/Getty Images

Arrived in the city to read that Ada Louise Huxtable had died the day before, Monday January 7th 2013 at the age of 91. I went on to discover that she pioneered modern architectural criticism in the pages of the New York Times beginning in 1963, as the first full time architecture critic at an American newspaper. She won the first Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism in 1970. More recently she was the architecture critic of the Wall Street Journal. Here is an excerpt from her Obituary, published in the New York Times Tuesday, January 8 2013, by David W. Dunlap.

“Mrs. Huxtable invented a new profession,” a valedictory Times editorial said in 1981, just as she was leaving the newspaper, “and, quite simply, changed the way most of us see and think about man-made environments.”

At a time when architects were still in thrall to blank-slate urban renewal, Ms. Huxtable championed preservation — not because old buildings were quaint, or even necessarily historical landmarks, but because they contributed vitally to the cityscape. She was appalled at how profit dictated planning and led developers to squeeze the most floor area onto the least amount of land with the fewest public amenities.
Ms. Huxtable was assistant curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art from 1946 to 1950. She was a Fulbright fellow, studying Italian architecture and design in 1950-52, and a Guggenheim fellow in 1958. She had also begun writing for architectural journals.

In 1958 she addressed a broader audience in The New York Times Magazine with an article criticizing how newspapers covered urban development. “Superblocks are built, the physiognomy and services of the city are changed, without discussion,” Ms. Huxtable wrote. “Architecture is the stepchild of the popular press.” Her interest in preservation did not make her an enemy of modernity. In “The Tall Building Artistically Reconsidered: The Search for a Skyscraper Style” (1984), Ms. Huxtable said the glass curtain-wall skyscraper, epitomized by the work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, offered “a superb vernacular, probably the handsomest and most useful set of architectural conventions since the Georgian row house.”

What infuriated her were “authentic reproductions” of historical architecture and “surrogate environments” like Colonial Williamsburg and master-planned communities like the Disney Company’s Celebration, Fla. “Private preserves of theme park and supermall increasingly substitute for nature and the public realm, while nostalgia for what never was replaces the genuine urban survival,” she wrote in “The Unreal America: Architecture and Illusion” (1997).

Ultimately, however, what animated and sustained her were not the mistakes but the triumphs. As she said of New York City in The Times in 1968:
“When it is good, this is a city of fantastic strength, sophistication and beauty. It is like no other city in time or place. Visitors and even natives rarely use the words urban character or environmental style, but that is what they are reacting to with awe in the presence of massed, concentrated, steel, stone, power and life.”