Ada Louise Huxtable
Ada Louise (Landman) Huxtable (born March 14, 1921, in New York, NY) is an architecture critic and writer on architecture. In 1970 she was awarded the first ever Pulitzer Prize for Criticism for "distinguished criticism during 1969."
Her father, Michael Landman, was co-author (with his brother, Rabbi Isaac Landman) of the play A Man of Honor.
Ada Louise Landman received an A. B. (magna cum laude) from Hunter College, CUNY in 1941. In 1942, she married industrial designer L. Garth Huxtable, and continued graduate study at New York University from 1942 to 1950. She served as Curatorial Assistant for Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from 1946 to 50. She was a contributing editor to Progressive Architecture and Art in America from 1950 to 1963 before being named the first architecture critic at The New York Times, a post she held from 1963 to 1982. She has received grants from the Graham Foundation for a number of projects, including the book Will They Ever Finish Bruckner Boulevard?.
She is currently the architecture critic for The Wall Street Journal.
John Costonis, writing of how public aesthetics is shaped, used her as a prime example of an influential media critic, remarking that "the continuing barrage fired from [her] Sunday column... had New York developers, politicians, and bureaucrats, ducking for years." He reproduces a cartoon in which construction workers, at the base of a building site with a foundation and a few girders lament that "Ada Louise Huxtable already doesn't like it!"[1]
Carter Wiseman writes, "Huxtable's insistence on intellectual rigor and high design standards made her the conscience of the national architectural community."[2]
She has written over ten books on architecture, including a 2004 biography of Frank Lloyd Wright for the Penguin Lives series.
[edit] Selected works
- Frank Lloyd Wright: A Life (2008)
- On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change (2008)
- The Unreal America: Architecture and Illusion (1999)
- The Tall Building Artistically Reconsidered (1993)
- Will They Ever Finish Bruckner Boulevard? (1989)
- Kicked A Building Lately? (1989)
- Architecture, Anyone? Cautionary Tales of the Building Art (1988)
- Goodbye History, Hello Hamburger: An Anthology of Architectural Delights and Disasters (1986)
[edit] References
- ^ Costonis, John J (1989). Icons and Aliens. University of Illinois Press. p. 53. ISBN 0-252-01553-3.
- ^ Wiseman, Carter (2000). Twentieth-Century American Architecture. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-32054-5.
[edit] External links
- Tribute to Ada Louise Huxtable, a speech by Paul Goldberger, architecture critic for The New Yorker.
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