ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE (1921–2013)

Ada Louise Huxtable, the first architecture critic of the New York Times, who championed buildings that celebrated civic history and whose writing forged a place for architecture in the daily press and mainstream public dialogue, has passed away at the age of ninety-one. Huxtable began her post at the New York Times in 1963. Before that, Huxtable had acted as assistant curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art and was also a Fulbright and a Guggenheim fellow. She quite simply, changed the way most of us see and think about man-made environments. Even though knowledgeable about architectural styles, Huxtable often seemed more interested in social substance. She invited readers to consider a building not as an assembly of pilasters and entablatures but as a public statement whose form and placement had real consequences for its neighbors as well as its occupants.” Among many awards, Huxtable won the first Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism in 1970. She has written several books and was most recently the architecture critic of the Wall Street Journal. Said Huxtable in 1971: “I wish people would stop asking me what my favorite buildings are. I do not think it really matters very much what my personal favorites are, except as they illuminate principles of design and execution useful and essential to the collective spirit that we call society. For irreplaceable examples of that spirit I will do real battle.”