Huxtable, Ada Louise (née Landman)

Date born: 1921

Place born: New York, NY

Date died:

Place died:

Architectural historian and first architecture critic for the New York Times. Ada Louise Landman was the daughter of Michael Louis Landman, a medical doctor in New York and Leah Rosenthal (Landman). She attended Waldleigh High School (the arts school in Manhattan) and received an A. B. (magna cum laude) from Hunter College, CUNY in 1941, continuing graduate study at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, in architectural history. She withdrew from NYU when her advisor would not allow a thesis on 19th and 20th-century Italian architecture. Taking a temporary job at Bloomingdales, she met the industrial designer L. Garth Huxtable (1911-1989), whom she married in 1942. She joined the Museum of Modern Art in 1946 as Assistant Curator for Architecture and Design. Huxtable wrote freelance articles on architecture for a variety of professional and popular magazines. She secured a Fulbright fellowship to Italy in 1952 to study architecture which led to a position as Contributing Editor for Progressive Architecture and Art in America the same year. Her first book, the result of her fellowship research, was Pier Luigi Nervi published in 1960. Huxtable's position with the journal led to an offer by assistant managing editor of the New York Times E. Clifton Daniel, Jr. (1912-2000), which she accepted, to join the Times in 1963 as their architecture critic, the first full-time architecture critic for an American newspaper. In 1964 she issued the first of what she planned to be a series on NY architecture, Classic New York. However, the project was thereafter abandoned. At the Times, she exerted considerable weight in architectural judgment. She crusaded during the years of urban renewal for conservation of the cities monuments. Huxtable famously criticized the Lincoln Center Towers as a series of soulless uninteresting slabs. For this and other writing, she was awarded the first Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism in 1970. The same year her collected criticism was issued as Will They Ever Finish Bruckner Boulevard? Huxtable resigned her architecture critic assignment in 1973 when she was appointed to the editorial board of the Times, continuing to contribute architectural pieces to the Sunday edition and also reviews to the New York Review of Books beginning the same year. She retired from the Times in 1983 was part of the team involved in the selection of Richard Meier to be the architect of the Getty Museum in 1984. She was a grant recipient from the Graham Foundation for several projects, including the book Will They Ever Finish Bruckner Boulevard?. She wrote architecture criticism for The Wall Street Journal. She continued to write books on architecture, including Unreal America, 1997 and Frank Lloyd Wright in 2004.

Huxtable wrote that she felt akin to the early critic Montgomery Schuyler (1843-1914) who often wrote about architecture. She maintained a friendship and professional respect for Lewis Mumford (q.v.) as well. Huxtable had her critics. Nikolaus Pevsner (q.v.) accused her of rejecting the International Style altogether, and odd comment given her praise of Mies van der Rohe in the United States. Peter Blake's 1974 suggestion, not without justification, that she carried a vendetta against architect Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore Owens Merrill drew a stout denial. Her biggest feud was with Edward Durrell Stone for his Kennedy Center in Washington, DC and the reactionary modernist art museum founded by Huntington Hartford (-2008), the Gallery of Modern Art, which she termed, "a die-cut Venetian palazzo on lollipops."

Home Country: United States

Sources: Current Biography 1973: 196-199; Who's Who in American Art 22 (1997-98): ; Wodehouse, Lawrence. Ada Louise Huxtable: an Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1981, pp. xi-xxvii.

Bibliography: [bibliography to 1980:] Wodehouse, Lawrence. Ada Louise Huxtable: an Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1981; Pier Luigi Nervi. New York: G. Braziller, 1960; Classic New York: Georgian Gentility to Greek Elegance. Volume 1 of, The Architecture of New York: a History and Guide. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1964 [no more issued]; Kicked a Building Lately? New York: Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co., 1976; The Tall Building Artistically Reconsidered: The Search for a Skyscaper Style. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984; Architecture, Anyone? New York: Random House, 1986; The Unreal America: Architecture and Illusion. New York : New Press/W.W. Norton, 1997; Frank Lloyd Wright. New York: Lipper/Viking, 2004.