Ada Louise Huxtable

Ada Louise Huxtable (née Landman; March 14, 1921 – January 7, 2013) was an American architecture critic and writer on architecture. Huxtable established architecture and urban design journalism in North America and raised the public's awareness of the urban environment. In 1970, she was awarded the first ever Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. In 1981, she was named a MacArthur Fellow. Architecture critic Paul Goldberger, also a Pulitzer Prize-winner for architectural criticism, said in 1996: "Before Ada Louise Huxtable, architecture was not a part of the public dialogue." "She was a great lover of cities, a great preservationist and the central planet around which every other critic revolved," said architect Robert A. M. Stern, dean of the Yale University School of Architecture.

Early life Huxtable was born on March 14, 1921, in New York City to Leah Rosenthal Landman and Michael Louis Landman. In 1981, she left The Times after receiving a MacArthur Fellowship. and a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1989. In 1996, she received the $24 Award from the Museum of the City of New York for her contributions to the city.

Huxtable was the architecture critic for The Wall Street Journal from 1997 until 2012. Her final article in the paper was published one month before she died in 2013.

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!"

Carter Wiseman wrote, "Huxtable's insistence on intellectual rigor and high design standards made her the conscience of the national architectural community."

She wrote eleven books on architecture, including a 2004 biography of Frank Lloyd Wright for the Penguin Lives series. She was credited as one of the main forces behind the founding of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1965. At the same time, she was a severe critic of addressing the city's past, writing in 1968: Nothing beats keeping the old city where it belongs and where its ghosts are at home. [But] please, gentlemen, no horse-drawn cars, no costumes, no wigs, no stage sets, no cute-old stores, no 're-creations' that never were, no phony little-old-New York.... That is perversion, not preservation.

Huxtable's oral biography, by Lynn Gilbert, is included in Particular Passions: Talk With Women Who Shaped Our Times.

Huxtable was invited to be involved in numerous juries and committees. She served as a juror for the Pritzker Architecture Prize and Preamium Imperiale of Japan. She was also a member on the Architectural Selection and Building Design Committees for the Getty Center, Getty Villa.

Death and archive Huxtable died on January 7, 2013, at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan, New York City.

Publications Goodbye History, Hello Hamburger: An Anthology of Architectural Delights and Disasters (1986) Architecture, Anyone? Cautionary Tales of the Building Art (1988) Kicked a Building Lately? (1989) (first published in 1976) Will They Ever Finish Bruckner Boulevard?, a collection of material appearing in The New York Times (1989) The Tall Building Artistically Reconsidered, a history of the skyscraper (1993) The Unreal America: Architecture and Illusion (1999) On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change (2008) Frank Lloyd Wright: A Life (2008)