num_pages: 496
description: The architectural revolution of the twentieth century as witnessed by America's preeminent architecture critic. Known for her well-reasoned and passionately held beliefs about architecture Ada Louise Huxtable has captivated readers across the country for decades in the process becoming one of the best-known critics in the world. Her keen eye and vivid writing have reinforced to readers how important architecture is and why it continues to be both controversial and fascinating. In her new bookwhich gathers together the best of her writing from one of her first pieces in the New York Times in 1962 on le Corbusier's Carpenter Center at Harvard to essays in the New York Review of Books  to more recent writing in the Wall Street Journal Huxtable bears witness to some of the twentieth century's bestand worstarchitectural masters and projects. With a perspective of more than four decades Huxtable examines the century's modernist beginnings and then turns her critic's eye to the seismic shift in style function and fashion that occurred midcenturyall leading to a dramatic new architecture of the twenty-first century. Much of the writing in On Architecture has never appeared in book form before and Huxtable's many admirers will be delighted to once again have access to her elegant impassioned opinions insights and wisdom. Looking back I realize that my career covered an extraordinary period of change that I was writing at a time in which architecture was changing slowly but radicallya time when everything about modernism was being incrementally questioned and rejected as we moved into a new kind of thinking and building. And while it was a quiet nearly stealth revolution it was a absolutely a revolution in which the past was reaccepted and reincorporated periods and styles ignored by modernism were reexamined and reevaluated. History and theory once considered irrelevant became central to the practice of architecture again.
language: English
title: On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change
publisher: Walker Books