On Architecture
Collected Reflections on a Century of Change
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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 Biblioth que 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.
