Ada Louise Huxtable

Career

She served as Curatorial Assistant for Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York from 1946 to 1950. She received a Fulbright Scholarship, which enabled her to travel in Italy and research Italian architecture and engineering. Given this opportunity, she left MoMA. In 1958, she also received a Guggenheim Fellowship to research the structural and design advances of American architecture. She was a contributing editor to Progressive Architecture and Art in America from 1950 to 1963 before being the first architecture critic at The New York Times from 1963 to 1981. Huxtable became the second woman named to The Times editorial board in 1973. Her architectural writings were about the humanistic meaning and artistic power that also involved her displeasure for projects that were missing civic engagement. She made architecture a more prevalent part of the public dialogue by appearing on the front page of The New York Times. From 1968 to 1971, her public opinion was found so successful that it was commemorated in New Yorker cartoons. She received grants from the Graham Foundation for a number of projects, including the book Will They Ever Finish Bruckner Boulevard?. In 1981, she left The Times after receiving a MacArthur Fellowship. Huxtable was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1974 and a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1989. In 1996, she received the $24 Award from the Museum of the City of New York for her contributions to the city.

Huxtable was the architecture critic for The Wall Street Journal from 1997 until 2012. Her final article in the paper was published one month before she died in 2013.

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!"

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

She wrote eleven books on architecture, including a 2004 biography of Frank Lloyd Wright for the Penguin Lives series. She was credited as one of the main forces behind the founding of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1965. At the same time, she was a severe critic of addressing the city's past, writing in 1968:

Nothing beats keeping the old city where it belongs and where its ghosts are at home. [But] please, gentlemen, no horse-drawn cars, no costumes, no wigs, no stage sets, no cute-old stores, no 're-creations' that never were, no phony little-old-New York.... That is perversion, not preservation.

Huxtable's oral biography, by Lynn Gilbert, is included in Particular Passions: Talk With Women Who Shaped Our Times.

Huxtable was invited to be involved in numerous juries and committees. She served as a juror for the Pritzker Architecture Prize and Preamium Imperiale of Japan. She was also a member on the Architectural Selection and Building Design Committees for the Getty Center, Getty Villa.

Death and archive

Huxtable died on January 7, 2013, at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan, New York City.

Shortly after her death, the Getty Research Institute announced its acquisition of the Huxtable archive, which spans 1921 through 2013 and includes 93 boxes and 19 file drawers of Huxtable's manuscripts and typescripts, reports, correspondence, and documents, as well as research files full of notes, clippings, photocopies, and, most notably, original photographs of architecture and design by contemporary photographers.