"A disaster where marble has been substituted for imagination." -- Ada Louise Huxtable
Ada Louise (Landman) Huxtable (b. March 14, 1921, in New York, NY) is an architecture critic and writer on architecture. In 1970 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism for "distinguished criticism during 1969".
Her father, Michael Landman, was co-author (with his brother, Rabbi Isaac Landman) of the play "A Man of Honor."
Ada Louise Landman received an A. B. (magna cum laude) from Hunter College, CUNY in 1941. In 1942, she married industrial designer L. Garth Huxtable, and continued graduate study at New York University from 1942-50. She served as Curatorial Assistant for Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from 1946-50. She was a contributing editor to Progressive Architecture and Art in America from 1950-63 before being named the first architecture critic at The New York Times, a post she held from 1963-82. She has received grants from the Graham Foundation for a number of projects, including the book "Will They Ever Finish Bruckner Boulevard?".
She is currently the architecture critic for The Wall Street Journal.
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!" (Costonis,1989)
Carter Wiseman writes, "Huxtable's insistence on intellectual rigor and high design standards made her the conscience of the national architectural community." (Wiseman, 2000)
She has written over ten books on architecture, including a 2004 biography of Frank Lloyd Wright for the Penguin Lives series.
"An excellent job with a dubious undertaking, which is like saying it would be great if it wasn't awful.""Nothing was more up-to-date when it was built, or is more obsolete today, than the railroad station.""Summer is the time when one sheds one's tensions with one's clothes, and the right kind of day is jeweled balm for the battered spirit. A few of those days and you can become drunk with the belief that all's right with the world.""The age of Lincoln and Jefferson memorials is over. It will be presidential libraries from now on.""Washington is an endless series of mock palaces clearly built for clerks."