The world lost a legend this month with the passing of Ada Louise Huxtable (1921-2013), one of the most revered architecture critics. A MacArthur Fellow, among countless other accolades, Huxtable “pioneered modern architectural criticism in the pages of The New York Times, celebrating buildings that respected human dignity and civic history–and memorably scalding those that did not.”
Beginning in 1963, as the first full-time architecture critic at an American newspaper, she opened the priestly precincts of design and planning to everyday readers. For that, she won the first Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism, in 1970. More recently, she was the architecture critic of The Wall Street Journal. “Mrs. Huxtable invented a new profession,” a valedictory Times editorial said in 1981, just as she was leaving the newspaper, “and, quite simply, changed the way most of us see and think about man-made environments.”
Click here to read “Ada Louise Huxtable: Champion of Livable Architecture,” online at NYTimes.com. Caption: Huxtable with Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, in 1970, when she won the first Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism. Photo by Librado Romero for The New York Times.
