ON ARCHITECTURE
Collected Reflections on a Century of Change
By Ada Louise Huxtable
Illustrated. 478 pp. Walker & Company. $35.

Huxtable was the architecture critic for The New York Times from 1963 to 1982 and still, at 87, writes occasional essays for The Wall Street Journal.“On Architecture,” a career-spanning collection of articles and essays, demonstrates that she has always pursued her mission with reason, elegance and wisdom. Her aesthetic was forged by the austerities of high modernism. Huxtable’s work remains the gold standard of criticism — and not just the architectural variety — because she brings to the job a rare combination of aesthetic certitude and roving curiosity.
Huxtable responds to the destruction of 9/11 with a far-seeing suite of essays. “I do not believe for a moment that we are no longer capable of building great cities of symbolic beauty and enduring public amenity,” she writes. “What ground zero tells us is that we have lost the faith and the nerve, the knowledge and the leadership, to make it happen now.”