Ada Louise Huxtable Might Have Liked This Q&A

The architecture world celebrates critic and writer Ada Louise Huxtable’s 100th birthday on March 14. She won’t be there to see it, having died at 91, after spending her career changing the way we think about architecture. For Huxtable, architecture was not just about how a building looked, but about how it affected the city around it. And as one of the most influential and avidly read architecture writers in the U.S., she made others see it that way, too. She spent 20 years as the New York Times’ first full-time architecture critic. She won the first-ever Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism in 1970. She won a Fulbright, a Guggenheim, and a MacArthur Fellowship. She served as the first woman on the jury for the Pritzker Prize. Huxtable also won the love of a popular audience, who looked forward to her weekly column about architecture, which pulled no punches. A 1968 New Yorker cartoon showed a worker at a construction site telling the architect “Ada Louise Huxtable already doesn’t like it.” When Huxtable died in in 2013, the Getty Research Institute was just about to announce its acquisition of her archive. Sadly, the announcement was hastily rewritten as an obituary. I sat down with Maristella Casciato, senior curator of architecture and design, and research assistant Gary Riichirō Fox to talk about Ada Louise Huxtable, her archive, and her legacy.

By Julie Jaskol

Mar 12, 2021