On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change (Hardcover)

by Ada Louise Huxtable (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
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.)
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From Booklist
*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

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 496 pages
• Publisher: Walker & Company; 1 edition (October 28, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802717071
• ISBN-13: 978-0802717078
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #39,671 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Clear Window on the Built World, December 2, 2008

By	G. Bestick (Dobbs Ferry, NY USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Architecture is notoriously difficult to write about. Buildings demand to be seen, and, more importantly, experienced. Descriptions of them often swerve into jargon or lurch into hyperbole. Neither of these problems afflicts the writing of Ada Louise Huxtable. In this collection of her essays and newspaper columns she comes across as clear-eyed, tough-minded and thoroughly grounded in the history of twentieth century architecture.

The book organizes the critical opinions of five decades into seven sections. If there is an overarching theme, it's the emergence of modernism as the dominant architectural style of the twentieth century and the inevitable Thermidorian reaction against the modernist revolution. While Huxtable appreciates the way modernist masters such as Gropius, van der Rohe, Aalto and Le Corbusier gave form to the twentieth century, she also understands why their rigid insistence on functionality over beauty, disregard for history, and indifference to the environments surrounding their buildings led to a revolt against their tenets. Still, you only have to look around any American city to see how much we owe Mies and other modernist masters of the skyscraper.

She gives the architects who came after modernism their due. She's a big fan of Frank Gehry, for instance. But she also takes the Phillip Johnsons and Robert Venturis to task when their built work falls short of their theories or witty critiques. Huxtable also casts a backward glance at modernism's antecedents, including a fond reminiscence of the Beaux Arts New York (Grand Central, the 42nd Street Library, the Metropolitan Museum of Art) she grew up in.

In her introduction, Huxtable tells us that she is generally satisfied with her first impressions and stands by her published opinions. This is even true of the piece praising Boston City Hall. Given the chance to recant her admiration for this brutalist concrete monstrosity, she declines. In general, though, she has a keen eye for what is valuable and enduring, and the wit and tart tongue to take to task what is silly or meretricious. This is particularly evident in her columns on New York City, where she came of age working for Phillip Johnson at the Museum of Modern Art, fought preservationist battles, and continues to cast a loving but skeptical eye on new development schemes.

Since the articles are arranged by topic rather than chronology, this is a book to be sipped rather than gulped. I wish the publisher had included more pictures. One solution is to read next to your computer and google the building under discussion. Part of the fun of this book is watching a world class critical sensibility forming, re-forming, and refining itself in reaction to the built world and to the theoretical foundations, be they shaky, solid or transient, upon which those buildings were erected.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Essential Reading, December 29, 2008

By	Plancentric - See all my reviews

On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change, by Ada Louise Huxtable, the architecture critic of The Wall Street Journal (and formerly of The New York Times) is an essential addition to any library. It brings together her columns from both papers along with essays from other sources. She writes with immense knowledge, perception, wit, and verve about the key structures and design debates of the last forty years. Her essays are timeless -- though all about moments in time. Included are personal reminiscenses of growing up in Manhattan, her first job working for Philip Johnson when he was the design curator at the Museum of Modern Art, and spending the night at Frank Lloyd Wright's iconic Fallingwater. No-one can turn an architectural phrase better than she, as in her description of the Kennedy Center in Washington. D. C.: "It is a cross between a concrete candy box and a sarcophagus in which the art of architecture lies buried." I found it hard to put down.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars On Architecture, May 25, 2009

By	Mary G. Lundy (Sherwood, Oregon) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

My husband, the architect, and I have both found this book to be highly informative and, often, quite amusing. Ms Huxtable is so knowledgeable and wise, and explains things so that the average lay person GETS her criticisms. She does not cower before giants.