Goodbye History, Hello Hamburger: An Anthology of Architectural Delights and Disasters

by Ada Louise Huxtable

1986, 206 pages, 7 by 10"

Genres: Architecture

206 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1986

About the author

Ada Louise (Landman) Huxtable (b. March 14, 1921, in New York, NY) is an architecture critic and writer on architecture. In 1970 she was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for "distinguished criticism." Her father, Michael Landman, was co-author (with his brother, Rabbi Isaac Landman) of the play "A Man of Honor."

Ada Louise Landman received an A. B. (magna cum laude) from Hunter College, CUNY in 1941. In 1942, she married industrial designer L. Garth Huxtable, and continued graduate study at New York University from 1942-50. She served as Curatorial Assistant for Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from 1946-50. She was a contributing editor to Progressive Architecture and Art in America from 1950-63 before being named the first architecture critic at The New York Times, a post she held from 1963-82. She has received grants from the Graham Foundation for a number of projects, including the book "Will They Ever Finish Bruckner Boulevard?".

She is currently the architecture critic for The Wall Street Journal.

John Costonis, writing of how public aesthetics is shaped, used her as a prime example of an influential media critic, remarking that "the continuing barrage fired from [her] Sunday column... had New York developers, politicians, and bureaucrats, ducking for years." He reproduces a cartoon in which construction workers, at the base of a building site with a foundation and a few girders lament that "Ada Louise Huxtable already doesn't like it!" (Costonis,1989)

Carter Wiseman writes, "Huxtable's insistence on intellectual rigor and high design standards made her the conscience of the national architectural community." (Wiseman, 2000)

She has written over ten books on architecture, including a 2004 biography of Frank Lloyd Wright for the Penguin Lives series.

Reviews

[Cheryl Walsh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very enjoyable collection of Huxtable's work, mostly published in the New York Times during the 1960s and 1970s when she was the paper's architecture critic and a member of its editorial board. She was an early MacArthur Fellow and her writing on architecture, urban planning, and historic preservation is astute, erudite, and witty. You always know where she stands and she doesn't pull punches, but she isn't catty or snide like some critics of arts and culture get. I may not always agree with her, but I always understand her point of view and what informs it. This is staying on my shelf.

[Slagle Rock · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an entertaining collection of the author’s architectural columns published in the New York Times from the early-1960s to the mid-1970s. They are consequently quick reads covering a range of architectural and preservation efforts in the Big Apple as well as other American cities and abroad.
This was a period that saw a lot of landmarks bulldozed in the name of urban renewal and the author is at her best when she is casting a critical eye on the greed and fast=buck operators who contributed to that (yet ongoing) destructive trend. Her articles hailing other building efforts tended to be less interesting, at least to me.
Overall, I found this good companionship reading to works I’ve read by urban preservationist Jane Jacobs, though not as enlightening, due primarily to the brevity of the selections.