by Michael J. Crosbie

When she died on January 7, Ada Louise Huxtable, America's first full-time architecture critic to write for a newspaper, went out the way she came in. She joined the New York Times in 1963 and a half-century later she continued to write intelligent and at times lacerating architectural criticism for the Wall Street Journal. In her last published piece, she heaped scorn upon architect Norman Foster's scheme to gut the stacks of the landmark New York Public Library. It was published three weeks before her death at the age of 91.

Huxtable made architecture a household word. While earlier writers had written about architecture on an occasional basis in newspapers and in elite outlets such as the New Yorker, Huxtable made it part of daily conversation.

In the decade following her arrival at the Times, newspapers around the country began to hire their own full-time architecture critics—such as Paul Gapp at the Chicago Tribune. In 1970, Huxtable won the first Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism, and went on to win a MacArthur "genius" Fellowship in 1981.

Huxtable viewed architecture not just in terms of style and aesthetics, but as a living, breathing manifestation of what a culture valued. No single building really mattered to Huxtable — she was interested in how groups of buildings, urban spaces, street life, neighborhoods, sunlight, air, and materials came together to create a place. She wrote about how politics and money shaped architecture. Huxtable approached architecture not as a refined art above the fray of the everyday, but as the spice that gave the built environment its flavor.

Huxtable came of age as a writer as Modern architecture became the style of the corporate establishment after World War II. But several Modern architects wished they had never picked up a pencil after Huxtable was through with them. Edward Durell Stone, designer of the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington, was one of them.

Huxtable pronounced the Kennedy Center "a great marble sarcophagus in which the art of architecture lies buried," a building that only Albert Speer could love. According to architecture writer Suzanne Stephens, who teaches architectural criticism at Barnard and Columbia, Huxtable was careful not to become pals with the designers whose work she wrote about. She kept a professional distance and was independent in her criticism. This was a shock to architects such as Stone, who thought they could charm her into less stinging assessments of their work.

Huxtable was an early and vocal supporter to historic preservation, and wrote passionately condemning the destruction of architectural landmarks such as the old Pennsylvania Station in New York.

In one Times piece, "The Art of Expediency" she compared a photo of a beautifully carved stone angel from Penn Station's facade, dumped in the New Jersey Meadowlands, with a photo of a grimly banal subway entrance in the new Penn Station.

Huxtable's message is not that it's a shame that we're willing to throw out the architecture of the past in exchange for something functional yet uninspired. She cautions that you cannot create the values or the reality of the past simply by re-creating the architecture of the past.

Huxtable is alarmed that we are willing to accept the esthetics of economics, that architecture no longer has a role in lifting our spirits, in celebrating our humanity. She warns the reader that we get the cities we deserve, cities with a "landscape of alienation" that we are willing to build and live in.

Ultimately, the promise of the art of building, for Huxtable, "…is not in the individual structure as traditionally designed, but in the relationships of people, land, and buildings for life and use—it is in the esthetic and human ferment that is currently called architecture."

Huxtable was one of the few (along with earlier writers about architecture, such as Lewis Mumford) who never lost sight of architecture's ultimate purpose: to edify, to inspire, to make whole, along with accommodating the scope of everyday life, both domestically and civically.

This is Huxtable's most important legacy as an architecture critic. She made her readers want better architecture, even if they often didn't get it. It's still worth writing about.

Discuss this article in the Architecture Forum...