#ada louise huxtable

[eliezersaul]

“Nothing was more up-to-date when it was built, or is more obsolete today, than the railroad station.” - Ada Louise Huxtable

Nikon F100/Nikon AF NIKKOR 50mm F/1.4/Kodak Gold 200

Photos by Linda Varno

- - - Plain awesome. Made me remind a not-so-long-ago past where I used to be heavily into photographing graffitis ... Where that "old me" went to?

F. Need to move.

[gnatswatting]

• My judgments have all been made in the immediate context of their time, measured against some pretty timeless standards -- something hindsight, with its rewriting of history, often prefers to ignore. Simply put, I was there; I know what happened. —Ada Louise Huxtable

On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change (at Internet Archive)

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Every generation tailors history to its taste.

- Ada Louise Huxtable

Crimean Coldstream Guards Officers Uniform - Lt The Honourable William Amherst.

[tail-feathers]

"The skyscraper is Olympian or Orwellian, depending on how you look at it... It romanticizes power and the urban condition and celebrates leverage and cash flow. it's less romantic side effects are greed and chaos writ monstrously large."

-Ada Louise Huxtable (1921-2013), awarded the first ever Pulitzer Prize for Criticism

[serpentinesheldonserpentine]

@victoriansword

[architecturefiles]

"Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately deserves. Even when we had Penn Station, we couldn't afford to keep it clean. We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tin-horn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed."

― "Farewell to Penn Station", The New York Times, 1963

[celebratingamazingwomen]

Ada Louise Huxtable (1921-2013) was the recipient of the first ever Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, awarded to her in 1970. She was an architecture critic who had a significant contribution in bringing the art into the public dialogue.

She worked for the MoMA as Curatorial Assistant for Architecture and Design, and was later the first architecture critic at The New York Times. She wrote numerous books in the field and was one of the main driving forces behind the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, founded in 1965.

[davidbrussat]

The College Hill Study, cont.

The College Hill Study, cont.

Illustration of proposed modernist infill development on College Hill. (Author’s archives) Here is the second half of Chapter 16, “The College Hill Study,” from Lost Providence. The study’s proposals, released in 1959, would have replaced much of the fabled district’s historical houses with modernist infill, although most of the houses condemned as examples of “blight” were eminently salvageable,…

[campaignoutsider]

Boston City Hall: 'A Building People Love to Hate But Shouldn't'

Boston City Hall: ‘A Building People Love to Hate But Shouldn’t’

The other day the hardworking staff stumbled upon this Architectural Digest post headlined “10 Buildings People Love to Hate but Shouldn’t: Reconsidering Brutalism, architecture’s most argued-over style.” Immediately we thought, Boston City Hall has got to be one of them. And bingo – number three with a bullet. Boston City Hall was created by the masterful principals of Kallmann McKinnell &…

[universitybookstore]

Born this day, 14 March 1921, Ada Louise Huxtable, renowned Architecture critic and the first person to win the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism (1970). She wrote for both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, and is widely considered to be the person to popularize her discipline. "Before Ada Louise Huxtable, architecture was not a part of the public dialogue," her colleague Paul Goldberger once said of her. A lifelong New Yorker, she was an outspoken critic of the city’s decision to demolish the original Penn Station in 1963, which became a catalyst for landmark preservation within the city and around the country.

“Until the first blow fell, no one was convinced that Penn Station really would be demolished, or that New York would permit this monumental act of vandalism against one of the largest and finest landmarks of its age of Roman elegance. Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves. Even when we had Penn Station, we couldn’t afford to keep it clean. We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tinhorn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed.”

[streetsofsalem]

Mansard Mania!

So the developers of a large lot on Norman Street, a major artery in Salem which connects the downtown to one of the city’s major residential/historic districts and also serves as a primary gateway, have come up with their third schematic rendering for the site. We first saw a rather brutalist box, then an industrial-esque box, and now we have a mansard box. I wrote about their challenge here,…

[classicisminmodernity]

‪"Style is an instrument for dramatising the facts of the case" Ada Louise Huxtable, from The Tall Building Artistically Reconsidered 90 West Street, New York City, Cass Gilbert, 1905

[stuffbin]

‪Ada sticking the knife in again, with deadly elegance‬

[1five1two]

Pennsylvania Station which was demolished under heavy protest in 1963 to make way for Madison Square Gardens.

The architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable said of its demise..

"We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tinhorn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed".