On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change

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 United States. Her brilliance over so many years is unmatched, and her range has always been vast-from a plea to save a particular architectural treasure to an ongoing discussion about whether modern architecture is dead. Her keen eye and vivid writing have reinforced to readers how important architecture is and why it continues to be both controversial and fascinating. Since so much of her writing has been in newspapers, it has quickly become unavailable to her many fans. On Architecture will bring together her best work from the New York Times, New York Review of Books, her more recent essays in the Wall Street Journal, and her various books. She is personally selecting and organizing the pieces into sections like "Art and Culture" and "The Art of Architecture," and is revising them as needed to bring them up to date. Whether you love modern architecture or desire a return to Beaux Arts design, this book will give you insight into the mind and heart of a critic who has artfully brought the discussion of architecture, architects and our environment to readers for five decades.

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 :
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. As she puts it in the book's introduction, her authority derives simply from having been there-as a chronicler of the 20th century's revolution in architecture, Ms. Huxtable never had the luxury of deciding whether a building or style or architect was worth thinking about. She processed it all, in real time, and the result is prose as self-assured as it is unadorned with the peacock feathers of architectural theory. Pulitzer Prize-winner Huxtable - 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....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. A crash course on the architecture of the 20th century, written by a master.