Ada Louise Huxtable, the Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic who celebrated socially responsible buildings and excoriated designs she thought were loud or profit-driven, died on Monday in her native Manhattan at age 91. The Real Deal’s architecture critic remembered her here. The Real Deal looked at 10 New York City buildings that attracted Huxtable’s attention over her long career at the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. In the Times, Huxtable described New York as being like “no other city in time or place. Visitors and even natives rarely use the words urban character or environmental style, but that is what they are reacting to with awe in the presence of massed, concentrated, steel, stone, power and life.”
Ada Louise Huxtable’s take on 10 Manhattan addresses: PHOTOS
January 10, 2013 04:30PM
By Hiten Samtani
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Gallery of Modern Art, 2 Columbus Circle (Midtown) This 12-story modernist structure, now substantially redesigned and occupied by the Museum of Arts and Design, was designed by Edward Durell Stone for Huntington Hartford, heir to the founder of A&P Supermarkets, to display his art collection. Huxtable, not impressed wrote in Times that it “resembles a die-cut Venetian palazzo on lollipops.”
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Ford Foundation Building, 320 East 43rd Street (Midtown) Designed in 1963 by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Kevin Roche and his engineering partner John Dinkeloo, this building won universal acclaim, not in the least from Huxtable, who in her Times column wrote that it was “an object lesson in the possibilities opened by fresh thought and a creative approach to the city’s most important commercial building problem: the provision of ample and impressive headquarters for large corporations or equivalent organizations, in structures that have some civic conscience as well.”
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The Marine Midland Building, 140 Broadway (Financial District) Built in 1967 and designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill architect Gordon Bunshaft, the 51-story Marine Midland Building, also known as the HSBC Bank Building, was described by Huxtable in the Times as “New York’s ultimate skin building. The quiet assurance of this building makes even Chase look a little gaudy.”
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New Amsterdam Theatre, 214 West 42nd Street (Theater District) Built in 1902, this theater was renovated by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer in 1997 with support from the Walt Disney Corporation, which used the space to stage productions of the Disney Theatrical Group. “What Disney has given back to New York is a lushly rich and superbly crafted theater that was structurally and aesthetically radical in its day,” Huxtable wrote in the Journal shortly after the renovation.
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Cooper Union addition, 41 Cooper Square (East Village) Completed in 2009 for an estimated $111.6 million, the nine-story, 175,000-square-foot building houses the college’s engineering center and occupies a full block on Third Avenue from East 6th to East 7th streets. In her Journal column, Huxtable wrote that the building — known for its contoured and stainless-steel screen — has a “visual and physical power that pulls you across the street to see more.”
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Hilton New York, 1335 Avenue of the Americas (Midtown) Built in 1963 and designed by William B. Tabler, this 46-story, 1.4 million-square-foot building’s look was described by Huxtable in the Times as something that “suggests that one might put change in at the top and get something out of the bottom.”
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CBS Building, 51 West 52nd Street The 38-story, 817,095-square-foot was designed by Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen and is also known as Black Rock for its dark granite cladding. In the Times, Huxtable wrote that it “does not look like a cigar lighter, a vending machine, a nutmeg grater. It is a building, in the true, classic sense: a complete design in which technology, function and aesthetics are conceived and executed integrally for its purpose.”
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General Motors Building, 767 Fifth Avenue (Midtown) This 50-story, 1.8 million-square-foot tower was completed in 1968 and designed by Edward Durell Stone. Stone’s style never quite sat well with Huxtable, who described the building like so in her Times column: “Behind the marble cladding and bay windows, architecture, like the proverbial thin man in the fat man’s body, is signaling wildly to get out.”
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Restructuring of the New York Public Library, Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street (Midtown) The library’s main branch, also known as the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building was opened in 1911 and declared a national historic landmark in 1965. In 2012, a $300 million restructuring that would demolish the seven floors of stacks below the Rose Reading Room was announced. Huxtable, in one of her final columns for the Journal described the proposed restructuring as an “architectural masterpiece” about to “undertake its own destruction.”
