The woman who created the Architecture Beat: Ada Louise Huxtable dies at 91

Ada Louise Huxtable, the women who created the very idea of newspaper architecture critic when she took on that role for the New York Times in 1963, died Monday in the Manhattan she shaped with her vivid writings.  Huxtable was 91, and active to the end.  Just last month, she wrote an account of the controversy over Norman Foster's plans for the New York Public Library that was a model of reporting, concision, impassioned advocacy and clear, elegant writing . 
It begins  . . .

There is no more important landmark building in New York than the New York Public Library, known to New Yorkers simply as the 42nd Street Library, one of the world's greatest research institutions. Completed in 1911 by Carrère and Hastings in a lavish classical Beaux Arts style, it is an architectural masterpiece. Yet it is about to undertake its own destruction .  . .

Huxtable slammed the Library's “deplorable” communications, and called on Foster and the Library to end months of keeping the public in the dark and release the renderings of the Foster's design.  Within two weeks, they did.  As she anticipated, Foster's work is “functional and handsome”, but falls far short of being a valid modernist counterpoint to Carrère and Hastings' masterful original 1911 design.  Foster's depiction of the new Great Room that is to replace the Library's legendary stacks has widely been described as possessing all the charm of a swollen Barnes and Noble.

Ada Louise Huxtable championed the best in modern architecture and made the guilty sweat.  She was one who gave the vanity museum Edward Durrell Stone designed by Huntington Hartford at Columbus Circle a nickname - “the lollipop building” - that would cling to it like a derisive albatross down through the decades.  When the big-box high-culture superstore that is the Kennedy Center opened in Washington in 1971, Huxtable caught its stolid mediocrity on knifepoint.  “Albert Speer,” she wrote, “would have approved”

In our age of hyperbole, the word "great" flows like ketchup on the great, unwashed mass of the barely “ok”.  Ada Louise Huxtable was far beyond "ok".  She was the best.

Read a 2008 interview with the  New York Times' Phillip Lopate here.

Weekend Reading: Lady Gaga gets Fryed, Groupon's gag writers, Bikini Waxes, Kissinger's murderous sycophancy, Hunt Lieberson's sublime Berlioz

Some great weekend reading:

Not-So-Odd Couple - This weekend's Financial Times' Lady Gaga Takes Tea with Mr. Fry offers an engaging and enlightening account of the inimitable Stephen Fry's visit with the unsinkable chanteuse.

Kissinger's China - also in the FT, the last British governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten, reviews Henry Kissinger's new book On China, and paints a portrait of a brilliant man devoid of any moral sense. In his latest work the chronic enabler of blood-soaked tyrants offers up a whitewashing of Mao's crimes, to which Patten provides an sobering rebuttal.

Over at Business Week, there's a portrait of New Royalist Torquemada Grover Norquist. When even Tom Coburn thinks someone's a dangerous extremist, you know you're dealing with a real piece of work. Also in Business Week, there's a discussion of the relationship of the bikini wax to Brazil's measure of inflation.

On the music front, The Financial Times finds Glyndebourne's Meistersinger flavorless mush, and reports that, after a slew of cancellations of dates earlier this year, including Chicago, Maurizio Pollini was back in top form at a Royal Festival Hall recital that included Chopin, Schumann, and Stockhausen Klavierstücke.

Over at the Sunday New York Times, David Streitfield's Funny or Die: Groupon's Fate Hinges on Words suggests that Groupon's continued success may hinge on its gagwriters - "musicians, poets, actors and comedians" who write the copy that keeps subscribers clicking coupons.

Elsewhere, Zachary Woolfe has a glowing review of the new live recording from 1995 of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's sublime acount of Berlioz's Les Nuits d'Ete , plus a selection of Handel arias, a must-have release that has been topping out my iPod for the past few weeks.

Sunday Reading: Joyce and Svevo in Trieste, Kristoff on China; FT's Andrew on Citizen Kane

It's a new month, and you still have all of your 15 free accesses before the New York Times disappears behind the paywall, so check out Adam Begley's great travel piece on Trieste which recounts the story of the city's greatest writer, Italo Svevo, to whom James Joyce, while tutoring Svevo in English, would read the emerging chapters of Dubliners, and whose great novel Zeno's Conscience was rescued from neglect by the energetic support of Joyce, who is also speculated to have drawn freely on Svevo's character for the creation of Leopold Bloom. Elsewhere, in a single column Nicholas Kristof covers the massive contradictions of China, from brutal repression to astonishing development, and the grave challenges - and opportunities - they present to the United States. Over at the Financial Times, Nigel Andrews eloquently covers the singular achievement of Orson Welle's Citizen Kane.