Ada Louise Huxtable
1921-2013

News: the American architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, who won the first Pulitzer Prize for criticism, has died aged 91.

Huxtable became the first full-time architecture critic at an American newspaper when she started at the New York Times in 1963, and her writing was crucial in bringing debate about the built environment to a popular audience.

“Before Ada Louise Huxtable, architecture was not a part of the public dialogue,” wrote architecture critic Paul Goldberger in a tribute on his blog. “She has been the most important figure in communicating the urgency of some kind of belief in the values of the man-made environment.”

As well as her post at the New York Times, where she worked until 1982, Huxtable wrote more than ten books including a biography of Frank Lloyd Wright. She was awarded the very first Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1970.

Huxtable became the Wall Street Journal’s architecture critic in 1997, a post she held until her death. Her final piece for the newspaper, published last month, was an interrogation of Foster + Partners’ planned renovation of the New York Public Library, which we also reported on in December.

Photograph by L. Garth Huxtable.

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