Ada Louise Huxtable

Ada Louise ( Landman ) Huxtable, nee Landman, ( born March 14, 1921 in New York City; † January 7, 2013 ibid ) was an American architecture critic and author. It was considered one of the most important and influential architecture critics in the United States.

Career

She was the doctor Michael Landman, who is also his brother Rabbi Isaac Landman author of a play (A Man of Honor ) was the daughter. Huxtable studied at Hunter College of the City University of New York ( CUNY ) with a Bachelor 's degree (BA ) in 1941 ( magna cum laude). She married in 1942 the industrial designer L. Garth Huxtable and studied simultaneously to 1950 continued at New York University and was from 1946 to 1950 under Philip Johnson Assistant Curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art From 1950 she wrote for Progressive Architecture and Art in America, 1963, she hired the New York Times, where a site for architectural criticism has been set up specially for them. After more than three decades in the New York Times, where she worked as part sharp critic cemented her reputation with high aesthetic and intellectual standards and was the editorial board, she went in 1997 to the Wall Street Journal.

Huxtable became the first voice of the American architectural criticism and was one of the first critics who not only turned to the newly built, but also the existing architecture. She was known among other things, the vehement, but unsuccessful battle against the demolition of Pennsylvania Station, one of the greatest buildings of the U.S. neo-classicism. In 1963 he was destroyed in favor of the construction of Madison Square Garden stadium, which Huxtable compared with an outline of the Parthenon for the construction of a large pizza parlor. Huxtable was one of the driving forces in 1965 at the founding of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. Her last article protested against the planned conversion of the New York Public Library according to the plans of Sir Norman Foster.

Huxable among other things wrote biographies of Frank Lloyd Wright and Pier Luigi Nervi, on architecture in New York and published several volumes of their reviews.

In 1981, she was MacArthur Fellow. In 1970 she won the first Pulitzer Prize for Art Criticism.

Writings

  • The tall building artistically reconsidered: the search for a skyscraper style, University of California Press 1984, 1992
  • Architecture of New York. A history and guide, Anchor Books 1964
  • Four walking tours of modern architecture in New York City, Doubleday 1961
  • Architecture anyone?, University of California Press, 1988
  • Unreal America. Architecture and Illusion, Norton, 1997
  • Kicked a building lately?, New York Times Book / Quadrangle 1976
  • Goodbye history, hello hamburger. An Anthology of Architectural Delights and disaster, Preservation Press, Washington DC 1986
  • On Architecture: collected reflections on a century of change, 2008
  • Pier Luigi Nervi, New York 1960
  • Frank Lloyd Wright, Lipper, Viking 2004
Architecture criticism Pennsylvania Station (New York City) The Washington Post Berliner Zeitung Frankfurter Rundschau Integrated Authority File
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