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.

Reviews

Starred Review. Pulitzer Prize–winner Huxtable (Frank Lloyd Wright)—architecture critic for the Wall Street Journal and formerly for the New York Times—presents her penetrating and tough-minded criticism spanning half a century, including several pieces never before published. Centering largely on modernism, its masters and its discontents, the volume opens with an overview of the past four decades, including startlingly powerful pieces on the late '60s urban decay and the '90s reinvention of architecture by Alvaro Siza, Frank Gehry and Christian de Portzamparc. Subsequent sections cover such architectural icons as the new Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris (the most awesomely perverse building I have ever seen) and the new MoMA (where there is no repose). Huxtable's highly influential essays on the cultural history of the skyscraper and the World Trade Center site are remarkable. Three charming, short pieces on the critic's personal landmarks, from the Beaux Arts building she grew up in to the Colt Firearms Building near Hartford, Conn., conclude this collection of learned analyses, fluent and exuberant. 25 b&w illus. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

*Starred Review* America’s premier architectural critic values the architecture of a good sentence as much as that of a well-made building. Drawing on her fluency in architectural history and guided by firmly held convictions and high standards, Huxtable has been responding to architectural masterpieces and misadventures for more than four decades in prominent newspapers and a dozen books. Expert witness to the twentieth century’s “architectural revolution,” she cites “discipline, restraint, and rigor” as the key elements of modernism, qualities intrinsic to her criticism, whether she is writing about the New York beaux-arts buildings she loved as a child, the complex tragedy of the World Trade Center, or a weekend stay at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. This thoughtfully structured retrospective collection reprints pieces for the first time and offers quotable lines and arresting observations on every page as Huxtable considers the works of Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Alvar Aalto, and Louis Kahn, and skewers today’s “Skyscrapers Gone Wild.” 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. --Donna Seaman

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