Ada louise huxtable biography definition
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Although she recognized the beauty of new constructions such as the Seagram Building and Lever House, she criticized the Pan Am Building (later, MetLife) for the devastating effect the “behemoth-sized” structure would have on the scale of Park Avenue, and the burden its 25,000 daily office workers would have on the already overtaxed pedestrian and transportation facilities in the Grand Central Station area.
Huxtable began her career in journalism as a reporter for the New York Times in 1963, and in 1968 she became the newspaper's first full-time architecture critic. Disillusionment with the growing preservation movement set in quickly, however, and by 1966 she was already voicing concern that the city was turning into a moribund museum filled with ersatz brand-new “old” or “reconstructed” buildings and phony look-alikes.
She was also an advocate for preserving historic buildings, earning her a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. An earlier essay on the “Rothscaping” of Park Avenue, her first in the Times, pointed out what the city was losing as the old, gracious boulevard lined by elegant masonry hotels and apartments was rapidly being transformed into a corridor of modernist office towers, a good many of them by Emery Roth & Sons, a firm known for its pragmatic approach to design and adherence to the bottom line.
She strove to preserve masterworks and was a driving force behind the creation of the Landmarks Preservation Commission for New York City in 1965. In their work, she saw exemplified the enduring values of architecture: form, space, and light, manipulated to create places that mattered as much for what they did as how they looked, places that provided that extra measure of dignity or delight, the “elevated sense of self” that the art of building can provide.
Approaching her eighties and recognizing that the world of architecture was changing, radically, yet again, she spent several years in the New York Public Library studying the use of the computer as a new design and production tool.
By this time, her own definition of architecture was clear: aesthetics were essential but only part of the equation.
Although she wrote on other things—architects, buildings, other cities—Manhattan was her favored terrain.
Early Life and Education
Born in 1921 and raised on the Upper West Side, she grew up an only child in a comfortable, middle-class Jewish family. This choice of topic was telling, not only of her determination to define her own direction, but also of her interest in seeking out new, unexplored areas of study.
As architecture critic of TheNew York Times in the 1960s and ’70s, she carried enormous weight, securing or sinking many an architectural reputation, christening or thwarting many a project, and shaping the tastes and values of the public throughout the United States. Grounded in painstaking research, and informed not just by matters architectural but also real estate, developers, urbanism, local commercial interests, and, of course, politics, she backed up her views with solid fact and sound reasoning while voicing opinions she acknowledged were subjective.
In 1970, she received a Pulitzer Prize for her distinguished criticism, the first ever awarded to a writer in her field.
(1976).
In 1981, after close to two decades as a columnist for the Times, she received a MacArthur grant, which freed her to step down from the grueling day-to-day, deadline-driven pace of the daily newspaper and to address subjects of her choice in depth.
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Later, she became a contributing editor to Progressive Architecture and Art in America (1950-63), and then became The New York Times’ first full-time architecture critic (1963-82) – a position that was created for her.The library’s stacks were slated for demolition, which she asserted would be a desecration. In her New York Times Magazine article “The Art We Cannot Afford to Ignore (But Do)” of 1958, she pointed out the profound effect architecture had in shaping the environment. This, too, was an invaluable experience, as it not only gave her a chance to prove her writing skills but also provided her with an opportunity to understand and appreciate the structural logic of building that she believed basic to good architecture.
After reading her essays—including those that fend off the criticism heaped on modernist glass boxes that she saw as “the breathtaking essence of New York,” whose “soaring, faceted, reflective mass gives the city both its hard-edged brilliance and its powerful poetry”—one cannot walk the streets of New York the same way again.
As Paul Goldberger, her successor at the Times, so simply and eloquently put it, she made architecture matter to us all.
Ada Louise Huxtable
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A decade and a half later saw the publication of TheUnreal America, in which she voiced her concern for the turn architecture had taken toward postmodernism, a trend she found shallow, without substance, bogged down in fashionable literary theory and “seductively appealing revolutionary obscurantism,” and which she predicted would be short-lived.
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