• Author: Ada Louise Huxtable
• ISBN-13: 9780802717078
• Format: Hardcover, 496pp
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Pub. Date: October 2008

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.

(Source: Publishers Weekly)

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

(Source: Booklist)

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