Ada Louise Huxtable

Ada Louise (Landman) Huxtable (b. March 14, 1921, in New York, NY) is an architecture critic and writer on architecture. In 1970 she was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for "distinguished criticism." Her father, Michael Landman, was co-author (with his brother, Rabbi Isaac Landman) of the play "A Man of Honor."

Ada Louise Landman received an A. B. (magna cum laude) from Hunter College, CUNY in 1941. In 1942, she married industrial designer L. Garth Huxtable, and continued graduate study at New York University from 1942-50. She served as Curatorial Assistant for Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from 1946-50. She was a contributing editor to "Progressive Architecture and Art in America" from 1950-63 before being named the first architecture critic at "The New York Times", a post she held from 1963-82. She has received grants from the Graham Foundation for a number of projects, including the book "Will They Ever Finish Bruckner Boulevard?".

She is currently the architecture critic for "The Wall Street Journal".

John Costonis, writing of how public aesthetics is shaped, used her as a prime example of an influential media critic, remarking that "the continuing barrage fired from [her] Sunday column... had New York developers, politicians, and bureaucrats, ducking for years." He reproduces a cartoon in which construction workers, at the base of a building site with a foundation and a few girders lament that "Ada Louise Huxtable already doesn't like it!" (Costonis,1989)

Carter Wiseman writes, "Huxtable's insistence on intellectual rigor and high design standards made her the conscience of the national architectural community." (Wiseman, 2000)

She has written over ten books on architecture, including a 2004 biography of Frank Lloyd Wright for the "Penguin Lives" series.

References

*cite book | title = Icons and Aliens | first = John J | last = Costonis | publisher = University of Illinois Press | year = 1989 | id = ISBN 0-252-01553-3 | pages=53
*cite book | title = Twentieth-Century American Architecture | first = Carter | last = Wiseman | publisher = W. W. Norton & Company | year = 2000 | id = ISBN 0-393-32054-5

External links

* [http://www.paulgoldberger.com/speeches.php?speech=TributetoAdaLouiseHuxtable Tribute to Ada Louise Huxtable]
**A speech by Paul Goldberger culture editor of the New York Times.