Ada Louise Huxtable (1921 - 2013)

Ada Louise Huxtable started writing architecture criticism for the New York Times in 1963, becoming the first full-time critic at a U.S. publication and thereafter defining the genre. In her 18 years as critic at The Times she earned a Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism (1970) and a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship. The latter, in 1981, led her to step down from her post and take up her cause full time without the pressure of deadlines. She wrote 11 books and probably influenced a hundred more, if the numerous statements of admiration in print and online after her January 7 passing are any indication. Until her death she contributed articles to the Wall Street Journal, the last one one December 3, 2012, about the New York Public Library's Central Library Plan.

Critics that succeeded her at the New York Times include Paul Goldberger, Herbert Muschamp, Nicolai Ouroussoff, and Michael Kimmelman, the paper's current architecture critic. Kimmelman had this to say in his appraisal: "Patrician, old-school, tough but softhearted, she never wrote as if she owed anything to anyone except her readers, treating her beat as a mix of aesthetics and public policy, art and advocacy, technology and politics, because to write about architecture as anything less would be to shortchange its complexity and significance. [...] Like many others who grew up reading her, I gained a sense of the central role of architecture and urbanism in civic life and culture from the urgency of her writing, which came down to meditations on how we live and what kind of legacy we wish to leave."