This research spotlights Ada Louise Huxtable, a transformative yet understudied intellectual figure who helped establish architectural journalism in the United States. Bringing critical attention to Huxtable’s criticism, historical scholarship, advocacy, and impact on architectural practice within and outside of the United States, this project has potentially significant ramifications for architectural, cultural, and media histories.

• An annotated facsimile edition and edited volume attesting to the scope of Ada Louise Huxtable’s expansive and influential practice, highlighting largely unpublished forms of critical engagement (forthcoming)
• A digital humanities project that advances novel methods for engaging Huxtable’s written corpus, including named-entity recognition, georeferencing, and geospatial analysis (forthcoming)

Instrumental in positioning architecture as a form of public discourse, Ada Louise Huxtable’s writing appeared in numerous publications including Architectural Forum, Progressive Architecture, and Wall Street Journal. In 1963, Huxtable became the first full-time architecture critic at the New York Times, a role that garnered her the first Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism in 1970. At the forefront of transformations in architectural discourse, Huxtable’s multivalent production came to define the work of the professional architecture critic.

Project Co-Lead
Gary Riichirō Fox
gfox@getty.edu