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For more than half a century, Ada Louise Huxtable's keen eye and vivid writing have reinforced to readers how important architecture is and why it continues to be both controversial and fascinating-making her one of the best-known critics in the world. On Architecture collects the best of Huxtable's writing from the New York Times , New York Review of Books , Wall Street Journal , and her various books. In these selections, Huxtable examines the twentieth century's most important architectural masters and projects, cataloging the seismic shifts in style, function, and fashion that have led to the dramatic new architecture of the twenty-first century.

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Library Journal Review

This important new anthology features more than 100 short essays spanning the career of noted and influential architecture critic Huxtable. Most of the pieces originally appeared in the New York Times when Huxtable was its architecture critic, but there are also more recent essays from the New York Review of Books and the Wall Street Journal. What makes this volume important is Huxtable's retrospective organization. The theme that runs throughout is the "transformation of modernism." Opening chapters on each decade from the 1960s to the 1990s reflect the architectural Zeitgeist of the times. In the second half, Huxtable assembles essays examining iconic buildings and the works of the masters of modernism-Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Alvar Aalto, Louis Kahn, Walter Gropius, and Frank Lloyd Wright. She devotes a whole section to essays about the World Trade Center, and her 1966 piece is all the more prescient given our historical perspective. Although the essays span a career lasting more than 35 years, none of them seems dated. If your library does not own any of Huxtable's work, this is the one to add to your collection. Highly recommended.-Herbert E. Shapiro, Empire State Coll. of the SUNY, Rochester (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly 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 BibliothEque 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.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

*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.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2008 Booklist

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

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.