Volume 32, Number 19 · December 5, 1985
Tall Stories
By Martin Filler
The Tall Building Artistically Reconsidered: The Search for a Skyscraper Style
by Ada Louise Huxtable
Pantheon, 127 pp., $21.95
Ada Louise Huxtable: An Annotated Bibliography
by Lawrence Wodehouse
Garland, 276 pp., $36.00
When Ada Louise Huxtable retired from The New York Times in 1982, she concluded nearly two decades as America's only architecture critic with a truly national constituency among the lay public. Her greatest predecessor was Lewis Mumford, who ceased writing the column 'The Sky Line' in The New Yorker in 1963, the same year Mrs. Huxtable took up her Times position. But that chronological elision was not quite so neat as it might seem, for Mrs. Huxtable's contribution has been rather different from Mumford's. She has possessed neither his penetrating social insight and broad cultural vision nor his command of several disciplines, which have elevated his criticism far above the descriptive and anecdotal approaches of most of their colleagues. If Mumford can be seen as a latter-day avatar of John Ruskin and William Morris, it is no slight to say that Mrs. Huxtable has been the finest architectural journalist of her generation.
Review, 5440 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |