On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change - Hardcover

Huxtable, Ada Louise

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0802717071 ISBN 13: 9780802717078

Publisher: Walker Books, 2008

Synopsis

The architectural revolution of the twentieth century as witnessed by America's preeminent architecture critic.

Known for her well-reasoned and passionately held beliefs about architecture, Ada Louise Huxtable has captivated readers across the country for decades, in the process becoming one of the best-known critics in the world. Her keen eye and vivid writing have reinforced to readers how important architecture is and why it continues to be both controversial and fascinating.

In her new book―which gathers together the best of her writing, from one of her first pieces in the New York Times in 1962 on le Corbusier's Carpenter Center at Harvard, to essays in the New York Review of Books, to more recent writing in the Wall Street Journal―Huxtable bears witness to some of the twentieth century's best―and worst―architectural masters and projects.

With a perspective of more than four decades, Huxtable examines the century's modernist beginnings and then turns her critic's eye to the seismic shift in style, function, and fashion that occurred midcentury―all leading to a dramatic new architecture of the twenty-first century. Much of the writing in On Architecture has never appeared in book form before, and Huxtable's many admirers will be delighted to once again have access to her elegant, impassioned opinions, insights, and wisdom.

"Looking back, I realize that my career covered an extraordinary period of change, that I was writing at a time in which architecture was changing slowly but radically―a time when everything about modernism was being incrementally questioned and rejected as we moved into a new kind of thinking and building." And while it was a quiet, nearly stealth revolution, it was a absolutely a revolution in which the past was reaccepted and reincorporated, periods and styles ignored by modernism were reexamined and reevaluated. History and theory, once considered irrelevant, became central to the practice of architecture again."

About this title

About the Author

Ada Louise Huxtable, former New York Times critic, winner of the first Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism, and MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellow, is currently the architecture critic for the Wall Street Journal. She is recognized as the founder of contemporary architectural journalism. Her books include The Unreal America: Architecture and Illusion, Kicked a Building Lately? and, most recently, a short biography of Frank Lloyd Wright for the Penguin Lives series. She served for many years on the juries of the Pritzker Architecture Prize and the American Committee of the Japanese Praemium Imperiale. She lives in New York City and Marblehead, Mass.

Review

“On Architecture, a career-spanning collection of articles and essays, demonstrates that she has always pursued her mission with reason, elegance and wisdom. Huxtable's work remains the gold standard of criticism--and not just the architectural variety--because she brings to the job a rare combination of aesthetic certitude and roving curiosity ... Review by review, essay by persuasive essay, she erects an impressive structure supported by the force of sheer reasonableness. She applauds economy but detests cheapness, appreciates expressivity but abhors showiness, and above all demands that a building make sense. For a colleague less than half her age, it is awesome to observe her pronouncing judgment on elements of New York City that have come to seem immemorial.” ―New York Times Book Review

“For all of Huxtable's palpable love of the art of design, she never loses sight of architecture's uniquely high stakes. Whether the topic is tall towers or building ornamentation, Frank Gehry or Donald Trump, the backdrop is the real-world implications of what takes shape. Huxtable never played the role of detached observer, the intellectual who looks with contempt on how and where most Americans live...From the start, Huxtable has expressed this better than anyone else. If we're lucky, she'll do so for some time to come.” ―San Francisco Chronicle

“She can not only make us feel a great loss when a fine building is demolished, she can make us see how valuable it is when a fine new building goes up. To her readers she conveys her own sense of architecture's fundamental importance: ‘Architecture is remaking our world. Its rewards are personal and universal in a way no other art can match. Its joys are common to us all.'” ―American Scholar

“The release of On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change by Ada Louise Huxtable is cause for joy. As a crusading architecture critic for The New York Times in the 1960s and '70s, and the first full-time architecture critic at any newspaper in the United States, Ms. Huxtable invented architecture criticism as we know it. In the process she brought architecture out into the public consciousness with articles that were invested with an unflappable moral authority. Read here, they seem as sharp and piercing today as ever.” ―New York Times

“Open almost any page and you may be amazed that architecture can excite such passion, such righteous indignation and such sassy turns of phrase.” ―Dallas Morning News

“America's premier architectural critic values the architecture of a good sentence as much as that of a well-made building...Having defined architecture as the quest to unite efficiency with beauty, Huxtable follows suit in her gracefully incisive essays, enriching our understanding of how architecture embodies our dreams and defines our world.” ―Booklist (starred review)

“Pulitzer Prize-winner Huxtable presents her penetrating and tough-minded criticism spanning half a century, including several pieces never before published...[A] collection of learned analyses, fluent and exuberant” ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Edition details

• Publisher: Walker Books
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0802717071
• ISBN 13: 9780802717078
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 496