Ada Louise Huxtable, who 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 — died on Monday in Manhattan. She was 91.
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.”
At a time when architects were still in thrall to
blank-slate urban renewal, Ms. Huxtable championed preservation — not because
old buildings were quaint, or even necessarily historical landmarks, but
because they contributed vitally to the cityscape.
“I
wish people would stop asking me what my favorite buildings are,” Ms. Huxtable
wrote in The Times in 1971, adding, “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.”
From The New York Times. Image at top: Ada Louise Huxtable, with Arthur Ochs Sulzberger,
in 1970, when she won the first Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism; via
The New York Times.
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