Ada Louise Rene' (Landman) Huxtable (b. Born March 14, 1921, in New York, N.Y) is an architecture critic and writer on architecture. She received a Pulitzer Prize for "distinguished criticism" in 1970, the first such prize ever awarded. March 14 is the 73rd day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar (74th in leap years) with 292 days remaining in the year. ... 1921 (MCMXXI) was a common year starting on Saturday (see link for calendar). ... The gold medal awarded for Public Service in Journalism The Pulitzer Prize is an American award regarded as the highest honor in print journalism, literary achievements, and musical compositions. ...

Ada Louise Landman was the daughter of Louis Landman, a Tax accountant, and Sonja Landman. She 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 Assistant Curator for Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from 1946-1950. She was a contributing editor to Progressive Architecture and Art in America from 1950-1963 before being named the first architecture critic at The New York Times, a post she held from 1963-1982.

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

Costonis (1989), 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 a few girders lament that "Ada Louise Huxtable already doesn't like it!"

Wiseman (2000) credits her as an influence in the rise of postmodernism: "Not the least of the reasons for the preeminence of the Postmodernists was the attention lavished on them by the popular press. The phenomenon began with the appointment in 1963 by the New York Times of Ada Louise Huxtable as ... architecture critic.... Huxtable's insistence on intellectual rigor and high design standards made her the conscience of the national architectural community." Andy Warhols iconic Marilyn Monroe // Postmodernism is an idea that has been extremely controversial and difficult to define among scholars, intellectuals, and historians, as it connotes to many the hotly debated idea that the modern historical period has passed. ...

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

References

• Costonis, John J (1989). Icons and Aliens. University of Illinois Press, 53. ISBN 0-252-01553-3.
• Wiseman, Carter (2000). Twentieth-Century American Architecture. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-32054-5.