For almost fifty years, Ada Louise Huxtable has been one of America’s preeminent architecture critics. First for the New York Times, then for the New York Review of Books, and now for the Wall Street Journal, she has written about large-scale developments and minor design details with a light touch and a balanced mind. Her taste skews modern and minimalist: Mies van der Rohe, Alvar Aalto, and Frank Lloyd Wright, all artists of sharp line and balanced form, are among her most beloved designers. But her incisive orientation toward architecture as an art rather than an industry caused her to reject arch-minimalists like Le Corbusier and Robert Moses. Postmodernists have not found much favor with her either, as her brutal criticism of Phillip Johnson’s AT&T Building and the original 2 Columbus Circle prove.

Huxtable’s nuanced perspective has caused her to be both celebrated and vilified, as she herself acknowledges in the introduction to her latest collection, On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change (Walker & Company). With many articles appearing in book form for the first time, On Architecture provides an overview of the decades Huxtable has spent nurturing our aesthetic appreciation for the built environment. As our urban landscape has transformed from a midcentury forest of sleek glass boxes to today’s wild jungle of provocative showpieces, Huxtable has championed and derided, always asking how new designs will affect us as human beings. With the credit slump forcing us to ask ourselves how we build, it’s a comfort to know Huxtable is still there to fight for us.

KEYWORDS: architecture, books

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