A Woman to Know: Ada Louise Huxtable
We will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed. — Ada
(image via The Ada Louise Huxtable Archive)
She hated demolition. She hated Madison Square Garden (as she so famously wrote at the time, "we deserve tin-can architecture in a tin-horn culture"). She hated "building big" without purpose and "colonial Williamsburging" without thought. And, oddly enough, she even hated the renovation of the New York Public Library.
But she loved Penn Station (the old one, obviously). She loved the Empire State Building. She loved watching cities evolve and grow and build around older structures. She loved how renovation and preservation created a new, diverse, living metropolis. And most of all, she loved when people took architecture seriously — as her colleague Paul Goldberger remembered, "She has made people pay attention. She has made people care. She has made architecture matter in our culture in a way that it did not before her time."
In 1963, Ada became the first full-time architecture critic at an American newspaper, first writing for The New York Times and later for The Wall Street Journal. She was the first writer to ever win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism — not just for architectural criticism but for any criticism.
Add to your library list:
The Unreal America: Architecture and Illusion (Ada Louise Huxtable)
Kicked a Building Lately? (Ada Louise Huxtable)
Architecture, Anyone? Cautionary Tales of the Building Art (Ada Louise Huxtable)
Read more:
Lover of Cities was Dean of Architectural Critics (The Wall Street Journal)
The Ada Louise Huxtable Archive (The Iris)
Rereading Ada Louise Huxtable: Five Essential Pieces (Hyperallergic)
A critic of the curb and corner (The New York Times)
Dreams Built and Broken: Ada Louise Huxtable (The Nation)
Architecture Immemorial: Ada Louise Huxtable (The New York Observer)
Ada Louise Huxtable, Champion of Living Architecture (The New York Times)
Ada Louise Huxtable, Pulitzer-winning architecture critic, dies at 91 (The Washington Post)
Her critical judgments were built to last (The Wall Street Journal)
Hear more:
What the Critic Sees: Ada Louise Huxtable and Her Work (Getty Research Institute)
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