Huxtable, everlasting. (Getty)

“Whatever Philip Johnson’s legacy turns out to be, it will not rest on his buildings,” Ada Louise Huxtable wrote in her obituary of “the king’s architect” in The Wall Street Journal eight years ago. Mr. Johnson had once told Ms. Huxtable of his desire to work for royalty. Not finding any, Ms. Huxtable concluded, he crowned himself king and kingmaker. In his way, he reshaped the world, and so too has she.

Ms. Huxtable, who died in Manhattan on Monday at the age of 91, may not have set out to be the people’s writer, but that is what she became. She just wanted to share her ideas about the city where she was born, what was wrong with it and how it ought to be made right, but probably never would be.

“She was extraordinarily proper and quiet and dignified,” said Paul Goldberger, her protégé and successor as the Times’s architecture critic, a job she created and held for two decades, winning the first Pulitzer for criticism along the way. “She loved to get together and talk, and she was not above a certain amount of gossip, but at the end of the day, what you remember her for was her writing, which is how she wanted it to be. She was not a sort of quirky, unusual character about whom you would tell stories until the end of time. She wanted to be remembered by her work, and she is.”

Yet whatever Ada Louise Huxtable’s legacy turns out to be, it will not rest on her writings. Thanks to her tender heart and often-biting words, Ms. Huxtable played perhaps a bigger role than any scribe before or after—and bigger than most politicians, planners and town elders, too—in the shaping of New York over the past half-century. She taught us how to read the city the same way she did.

Regarded as the inventor of architecture criticism and reportage as it is practiced today, she was heralded for her ability to spot a trend, though she never hewed to them. The one thing she did stand by was the city, celebrating what came before and what was yet to come. She had as sure a hand as her contemporary Jane Jacobs in launching both the preservation and the modern urbanism movements, standing up to modernism and urban renewal as it attempted to bulldoze everything in its path. Still, this never prevented her from celebrating the new.

"I think her greatest interests were preservation, not so much for the sake of saving old buildings but for the sake of saving the texture of the city," said Robert Stern, the Yale architecture dean and celebrated architect. "She thought that the texture of the city, as I do, and I think many do, was the concatenation of many different things from many different periods and many different scales."

Like every New Yorker, she was never satisfied by what the city had become, but she was always enlivened by what it could be, and she fought to make it so.

Mr. Stern had actually met Ms. Huxtable back in 1963, just as she was joining the Times, when the then-Yale dean Paul Rudolph gave Mr. Stern the keys to his car. "He instructed me to drive her around and show her all the new buildings, the Art and Architecture Building had just opened, and we had a grand old time," Mr. Stern said.

The two did not always agree—she was generally not a fan of the referential (she might say kitschy) post-modern architecture often associated with Mr. Stern and late-period Philip Johnson (there was a certain sense of betrayal there)—but all the same, Mr. Stern and Ms. Huxtable remained cordial. "She would let you know when a building or a conversation had run its course," Mr. Stern said.

Even as the times changed, and not just the buildings but the means of writing about them, Ms. Huxtable remained engaged. She might not have written as much as we wanted, or needed, her to. "But when something big happened, there she was, showing us how it is done," said critic Alexandra Lange, who was inspired by first reading Ms. Huxtable at 16 to go into the field. She has been an inspiration to countless female writers.

Up until the end, she was writing, and writing so well. It has been much remarked upon that she penned a clarion rebuke to the New York Public Library for its pending plans to redesign the landmark building on 42nd Street, a proposal from the ballyhooed British Pritzker winner Lord Norman Foster. Ms. Huxtable rebuked the library, for "it is about to undertake its own destruction," in her view. I had thought the proposal quite exciting, given that I rarely went to the Schwartzman Building, spending more time in the Mid-Manhattan Library across the street, but upon reading Ms. Huxtable's challenge, I felt converted, if also a little foolish for being wooed by a sexy fly-through.

"She read every article, tracked remote blogs, engaged in discussions about the need to consider the implications of some new zoning code in emails sent at 2:00 am.," recounted Julie Iovine, a fellow critic for the Journal and former editor of The Architect's Newspaper. The two got to know each other over an acerbic article about another greatly hyped designer, Santiago Calatrava, that Ms. Iovine had written for the Times in 2004.

Yet for all Ms. Huxtable's apparent taste for red meat, as both chef and connoisseur, she was in person a quiet presence. Everyone recalls being invited over for tea to her stately apartment on Park Avenue, where she might show off a piece of dinnerware her late husband—an industrial designer who also photographed many of her eight books—had designed for the Four Seasons.

Kent Barwick, the long-time director of the Municipal Art Society, on whose board Ms. Huxtable had served, recounted how upon being honored with the society's greatest prize, she refused the typical thousand-dollar-a-plate fête that came with it. Instead, an intimate party with friends and MAS board members was held at the old Urban Center, where the society used to have its headquarters. "It was little more than a potluck, and still, of all those dinners, it remains one of the most memorable," Mr. Barwick said.

While her work may not have always made it plain—the work itself certainly was never plain—Ada Louise Huxtable was concerned with the intimacies of life. The city has a way of forcing such closeness on us, but she taught us all that it ought to be embraced, an embrace made all the easier by a beautiful building or a well planned street. She was always striving to make the city better, warts and all, and so must we strive in her absence. For the city and for the future.

Tis a far, far better thing I do... (PriceTower.org)

There are two great thrones in American architectural criticism, that of The New Yorker and The New York Times. It was at these two journalistic institutions that the practice was born, at the hands of its king and queen: Lewis Mumford, that great champion of public works and technics, and Ada Louise Huxtable, still the dean of the design press.

Paul Goldberger has been in the fortunate, indeed unique, position of wearing both crowns. After graduating from Yale, he would find himself at The Times in 1973, a young buck roaming the city he loved, engaged to write just about whatever he thought of the buildings and street life therein. He was, quite literally, heir to Ms. Huxtable, who had not yet been pushed out of the paper for her obstreperous ways, and the two of them shared the job of architecture critic for nearly a decade. Two years after she left in 1982, Mr. Goldberger won the Pulitzer for his efforts.

Thirteen years later, in 1997, he would himself depart one side of Times Square for the other, joining The New Yorker, restoring the Sky Line column begun by Mumford half a century earlier at the behest of Tina Brown. "When I went there, I thought it was as perfect a life as you could have," Mr. Goldberger told The Observer in an interview Sunday evening, "to spend half your career at The Times, half at The New Yorker."

But like so many landmarks, from the Parthenon to Penn Station, few endure. Starting today, Mr. Goldberger will board the notorious Condé Nast elevator, but instead of getting off on the 20th floor, he will report to work two floors up, where Graydon Carter has finally poached Mr. Goldberger for Vanity Fair.

"I've known Graydon a long time, and this is something he has talked about for awhile," Mr. Goldberger said. "When he heard I might be leaving the critic's post at The New Yorker, he called again, and things sort of progressed from there."

An unofficial announcement has been making the rounds, as first reported by The Architect's Newspaper, and Mr. Carter praises his latest acquisition as unparalleled, according to a copy obtained by The Observer. “This is an appointment that thrills me profoundly,” Mr. Carter says in the release. “Paul is about as gifted a commentator on architecture, urban planning and design as anyone you’re going to find these days—in other words, he’s just a brilliant writer.” An interview request to Vanity Fair was not immediately returned.

While Mr. Goldberger acknowledged he will miss The New Yorker in some ways, he said it was his decision to leave the magazine, in part so that he would have more time to tackle a biography of Frank Gehry. He said he is very much looking forward to the new possibilities presented by his new publication, for which he has written in the past, "on a one-off basis" starting five years ago. His first effort was a profile of Ralph Lauren, followed by one of Robert A.M. Stern, who had just finished his magisterial 15 Central Park West. (Mr. Goldberger is quick to point out that he reviewed the building for The New Yorker before he wrote about it for the in-house rival.)

"Graydon's eager to do a broad range of things on design and I'm excited to be doing that," Mr. Goldberger said. "And I'm not being coy, we haven't figured out exactly what the parameters are yet, but there will certainly be stories that are design-oriented, not strictly architecture."

That eagerness is not a small reason for Mr. Goldberger decision to leave The New Yorker for Vanity Fair. "David has, I think it's fair to say, mixed feelings about the architecture column," Mr. Goldberger said of New Yorker editor David Remnick. It is a complaint he has aired before, most recently at a panel hosted by the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects. Getting stories into a magazine, especially one that has shrunk considerably in size over the past decade, has become more and more difficult.

Four Times Square, an architectural masterpiece outside and in. (REW)

Indeed, there has not been a single Sky Line column since September 19 of last year, followed by two blog posts over the next week, and nothing since. Of the 14 pieces written last year, out of a total of 178 (according to The New Yorker's online archive) over a 15 year career, only six made it into the magazine—five columns and one Talk piece. Never mind that when you google either "architecture critic" or "architecture criticism," Mr. Goldberger's author page at The New Yorker is the second result, after Wikipedia.

Mr. Goldberger professes no animosity toward his former boss, and indeed said this has been one of his best and most productive working relationships. "David was great, just great," Mr. Goldberger said. "But change is good, too. I love The New Yorker, I like Vanity Fair, and I like the possibilities, which seem a lot broader than at The New Yorker."

Much of this is to do with the changing nature of publication, at Condé and beyond, the wealth of opinion online, the dearth of magazine pages, and so on. When was the last time you read a Joan Acocella review? And no, not one of those frivolous Critics Notebook pieces in the front of the book—which Ms. Acocella is at least fortunate enough to have to keep her busy every week or two. The answer is mid-January. Alex Ross is a little more lucky, managing a review of classical music at least once a month, plus regular blogging.

Mr. Goldberger is not alone in this, as his chief rival, The Times' newly coronated Michael Kimmelman, has been a less regular feature in the newspaper's pages than many had hoped. But at least The Times, which was criticized for appointing a non-expert to this important post, has not given up on the beat entirely. The New Yorker just may have, as there is no apparent replacement lined up for Mr. Goldberger. Any design writing, be it on IKEA, America's next top starchitect or tiny houses is likely to appear in the well of the magazine, not the back of the book. As of this publication, Mr. Remnick could not be reached for comment.

The absence of an architecture critic from the hallowed halls of Eustace Tilley Inc. is not actually as wretched as it sounds. Despite the prominence of Mr. Goldberger and Mumford before him, that is nearly the extent of architecture criticism at the magazine. Sure, New Yorker icon Brendan Gill took up the mantel near the end of his career, in the 1980s and '90s, but like Mr. Kimmelman (and Mumford) he was more of an enthusiast than a professional, like Mr. Goldberger, who has also taught architecture for years and briefly served as the dean of Parsons.

For his part, Mr. Goldberger said he is looking forward to his new gig and the flexibility being a Vanity Fair contributing editor will afford him, particularly to work on that biography of Frank Gehry. "It's a shitload of work," Mr. Goldberger said. "I've never written anything like this before, and I'm quickly realizing that writing a biography is going to take up a lot of time and energy."

That said, he still expects to write a number of things for Vanity Fair this year. But with the April issue already on newsstands, and production so many months in advance, how long will we actually have to wait for Mr. Goldberger to file his first piece?

In his first proper review for The Times, a piece on the then-new One Police Plaza published on October 27, 1973, Mr. Goldberger opened dramatically, as he often does: "Designing a building for the city of New York is the sort of nightmare that makes architects wonder why they didn't go into some easier profession, like neurosurgery."

The same might be said in some way about the business of architecture criticism these days.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Glowing reviews.

Much as we have been enjoying the work of Michael Kimmelman lately, no one stokes the critical fires like Ada Louise Huxtable. The grand dame of the business, Ms. Huxtable writes all too infrequently for The Journal—only six times a year, but not because that is all the paper will give here but instead it is all she will offer them.

Today Ada Louise offers an especially intriguing look at the Empire State Building and its resurrection, an assessment really only she could offer as few others have the same lens through which to view it, having seen both its grandeur and its decay.

But by 2006 the Empire State Building was part of a money-losing package of buildings of steadily declining value and appeal that simply could not compete with the sleek new towers. An older building, even a celebrated older building, must pay its way. They were controlled by the estate of Leona Helmsley and W&H Properties, now Malkin Holdings LLC. The Malkin family supervises the properties and manages the Empire State Building through its Empire State Building Company LLC. (Don't ask—New York's byzantine real estate investment syndicates defy simple, or any, explanations.) Anthony Malkin, a third-generation member of a family long involved in the industry, believed that the older buildings had "good bones." But he was faced with the decision of whether to cut the losses by selling the entire portfolio, including the star property, or whether to invest heavily in bringing the buildings up to code and up to date. He decided to invest.

[snip]

Real estate is all about risks and rewards, and by any measure Mr. Malkin's ambitious and expensive gamble paid off. The restored and revitalized Empire State Building has some of the highest rents and most sought-after office space in the city. Its new tenants include leading financial, law and communications firms. Preservationists see it as a win for the city's architectural heritage. Mr. Malkin views it with enormous personal pride. "I'd rather be known for making the building a great success than to be known for selling it as a failure."

Jaded New Yorkers, join the international tourists—go. Don't miss the plaques identifying the workers who constructed the building in the 1930s and those who have re-created it for the 21st century. Stop for a quick pizza, or stay for a late cocktail at a cool, upscale bar; both are behind redesigned storefronts in the refurbished side corridors. You might even have your picture taken next to the illuminated model below the celestial celebration of the Industrial Age. Enjoy it all. It is our building, and still the most famous office tower in the world. It is New York.

Goosebumps! (Is it any coincidence this reporter asked his wife to marry him the first and only time they have been up to the tower's imperial heights?)

But what really struck us was Ms. Huxtables thoughts on the Twin Towers, and how inferior they were.

I, for one, am not in thrall to size; build very big and you can build very bad—and the very bad will be inescapable. I always felt that the twin towers disrupted New York's scale and skyline without compensating grace. They were more a sign of the Port Authority's zealous desire to enter the city's high-stakes real-estate game—while overreaching its transportation mandate—than an indicator of New York's greatness.

If they symbolized anything, it was the personal ambition of the Port Authority's then-director, Austin J. Tobin, to construct the world's tallest buildings, something he was free to do because the Port Authority's independent status allowed it to override the city's zoning, code and height regulations. Designed by Minoru Yamasaki, whose forte was delicacy on a small scale, the result was the world's daintiest, most characterless big buildings until disaster restored the city's more familiar skyline. Symbolism was conferred on them posthumously by death and destruction.

The Observer has a thing for Yamasaki, if only because we have only seen his smaller scale projects in person—the gravity-defying Rainier Tower in Seattle is one of our favorites, though if it really qualifies as small we're not sure. Regardless, who but Ada Louise Huxtable could so succinctly cause us to question our stirring thoughts about these two New York City icons? Your move, Mr. Kimmelman.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Davidson and Goliath. (SVA)

Our colleague Jonathan Liu has a nice appraisal in this week's culture pages of what it means to be the architecture critic at The Times and whether Michael Kimmelman is up to the task. Mr. Kimmelman replaces the oft-maligned Nicolai Ourousoff, who stepped down last month, and over here at the real estate desk we have been hearing much the same thing: It is borderline offensive that The Times promoted an arts writer to cover architecture, but let's hold out hope because he can't be much worse than his predecessor.It's true, in the age of Twitter and blogs and what have you, who really needs any critic, let alone one writing about architecture? Still, Mr. Liu does a fine job explaining why:

Since 1963, there have been seven mayors of New York City, eight governors of New York State, nine U.S. presidents and four architecture critics at The New York Times. The longevity of its incumbents hints at the singularity of the office: they’ve shaped what counts as architecture to the masses—housewives and students, investment bankers and construction workers—who don’t consciously think about architecture until it shows up on their block. Like a Japanese emperor or the most imperial of those aforementioned pols—think Rockefeller Era, Giuliani Time, Reaganomics—the name of the reigning Times critic is easy shorthand for the fashions and passions of the epoch, and not just in buildings.

[...]

His successors, [former critic Paul] Goldberger noted, may have simply followed the general trend at The Times—that to survive, it would have to be a national, or international, paper. It’s perhaps a sign both of the success of that effort and of the prestige Ms. Huxtable’s original creation still commands that people in Beijing and Bilbao and Dubai and Detroit care what a critic in New York thinks about their built environment.

The problem remains that we New Yorkers wind up neglected.

Even if Mr. Kimmelman can surpass Mr. Ouroussoff, well, it seems hard to believe he will. Not only is he not trained in architecture, but his last posting was as a roving European art critic. His column was called "Abroad." If you're looking for a critic who "has been to Brooklyn," as architecture writer Alexandra Lange puts it to Mr. Liu, this does not seem like a promising start.

If you want to find that critic, one who cares about "indomitable knowledge of zoning laws, block-level history and City Council minutiae," as Mr. Liu puts the qualifications of the Times' first critic Ada Louis Huxtable, turn not to the paper of record but New York magazine. That is where Justin Davidson has been opining in Ms. Huxtable's persnickety tradition for four years now.

Just the other day, he wrote about something as banal as a single city block on Broadway and the tragedy of its impending loss.

Lately, a new wound has opened on the east side of Broadway, between 77th and 78th Streets. One of the last full hodgepodge blocks of low-rise buildings and small shops has that familiar ghost-town look that precedes obliteration. Once, the restaurant Ruby Foo’s, the Manhattan Diner, a Così sandwich bar, a Tae Kwon Do school, the Curl Up & Dye hair salon, a watch-repair service, a travel agency, a jewelry­making school, a pizza joint, a Subway, the World of Nuts & Ice Cream, and a jewelry shop were all crammed into 200 feet of frontage. A dozen businesses, catering to vanity, hunger, creativity, and the pursuit of health, have vanished. It’s a common tale, and the ending is almost always the same: a teeming commercial ecosystem gives way to a pair of vast establishments, stretching from corner to mid-block.The new building is planned “as of right,” meaning that it requires no special permission, and will almost certainly be approved. If the developer, Friedland Properties, had to apply for a variance, a tax break, a change in zoning, or approval to build in a historic district, it would have to negotiate and compromise, but there’s no need for that here. Friedland hasn’t released plans and doesn’t return calls, and the Department of Buildings application is sketchy, so preparations for dismemberment will likely be under the radar, at least until the jackhammers start.

There are two compelling reasons to mourn this block’s destruction. The first is that Broadway’s small businesses are being choked out not by inexorable Darwinism but because landlords and developers almost always prefer to sign a long-term lease with a clean, quiet, stable, and heavily capitalized corporation rather than risk renting to an amateurishly run boutique or a potentially odoriferous diner.

Now that's architecture, and without even a boldface name or a fanciful design (guilty as charged) to carry the day. Sure, he dips into this territory, too, but always with care and conscience. If you haven't already, go read him now.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

To date, the outside of the building has gotten most of the attention. Local residents have opposed its size and said its hulking waves are out of context for the neighborhood. Lately, its exterior rises doubled as a BMX ramp and a slide.

But the Journal's critic, the esteemed Ada Louise Huxtable, is more interested in the interior. Ms. Huxtable compares the staircase at the building's center to "some wildly updated, indoor version of Rome's Spanish steps or a more rational and cheerful Piranesian invention, it is a knockout, an überstair for the 21st century."

Oh, she's not done. The last three paragraphs are all about the stairs, and she ends with this little ode.

Daylight pours down from a skylight at the top. This is high architectural drama, a luminous and exhilarating invitation into the structure's life and use. It is not building as bling. It is how architecture turns program and purpose into art. And it perfectly expresses the creative energy of New York.

I think she likes them.

- Tom Acitelli

Ms. Huxtable, who is now the architecture critic for The Wall Street Journal and who essentially invented the field of architecture criticism for a general audience, isn’t looking for extra opportunities to impress others with what she knows about the art of building. At 84, she delivers a takedown as well as anybody, but she’s more selective in her targets. She does fewer of them, for one, and doesn’t feel compelled to save every good building and tear down all the bad ones. “Often, I would do things because I thought I should do them, out of a sense of responsibility,” she said. “Now my philosophy is, ‘Look, you young people, it’s your responsibility. I’m going to do what I want to do.’“

In 1968, Ms. Huxtable—only five years into her official tenure as architecture critic for The New York Times—was already so well-known for her sharp tongue that The New Yorker ran a cartoon, by Alan Dunn, showing two construction workers in hard hats with the skeleton of a new building going up behind them. One of them, reading the newspaper, says to the other of the unfinished building, “Ada Louise Huxtable already doesn’t like it.” Punch Sulzberger, the Times publisher, bought the original cartoon and gave it to Ms. Huxtable. A friend stitched the quote on a needlepoint cushion that the critic keeps on the sofa of her study.

The study is a compact room for a compact person, with books crawling up to the ceiling, an old-fashioned rug, and a pen-and-ink drawing of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple in Oak Park, Ill., perched on a credenza. Ms. Huxtable herself, attired in a black suit and with a crown of white hair, is much friendlier in person than in print, but just as frank. Her large penthouse apartment sprawls out behind her and, at first glance, appears unexceptional, as if its inhabitant has more on her mind than her most immediate surroundings. That patrician-populist perspective leads her to upbraid the star-chitects who have invaded New York recently, concentrating on expensive condos rather than on civic projects or affordable housing. “And Richard Meier’s buildings—to tell you the truth, if I had the money, I wouldn’t want to live there.”

These days, Ms. Huxtable is steamed with what she has, in a way, wrought herself. She was at the forefront of the historic-preservation movement—she began writing at a time when chunks of New York were being torn down wholesale—but now she thinks that it has gone bonkers. Exhibit A is 2 Columbus Circle, recently the subject of a splashy preservation attempt by such luminaries as Robert A.M. Stern and Tom Wolfe. Its current owner, the Museum of Arts and Design, is now cutting windows into the windowless concrete façade designed by Edward Durrell Stone. Ms. Huxtable panned the building when it opened in 1964, and she panned it again two years ago in The Journal. It is, she said, an example of the city’s landmarking instinct devolving into “chaos.”

“When it opened as the Huntington Hartford Museum,” Ms. Huxtable said, “I thought it was one of Ed Stone’s very poor buildings, when he became very commercial and was giving a screen formula to any client. I reviewed it and said it was a ‘die-cut Venetian palazzo on lollipops,’ and it stuck. It’s now simply referred to everywhere as ‘the lollipop building.’ I also knew Ed Stone—who became Edward Durrell Stone— and I knew his work, and people who were there at the same time agreed. But today they don’t listen. I don’t think they listen in any field.”

On the other hand, the preservation process didn’t work at all for the Austin Nichols & Co. warehouse building on the Williamsburg waterfront. Earlier this fall, the City Council overturned the Landmarks Preservation Commission’s decision to protect the 1915 structure, with the local Councilman, David Yassky, calling it “a nondescript white box of a building.”

Now, now, Mr. Yassky.

“Of course it should be landmarked. It’s by Cass Gilbert, one of our great architects,” Ms. Huxtable said. “You have people who absolutely know nothing making outrageous statements about the architectural value of the building.”

The City Council even overrode Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s veto of the Austin Nichols decision, but the fact he got involved in an architectural fight—and took Ms. Huxtable’s side—has redeemed him in her eyes after his futile attempt to put a football stadium on the West Side. “I think it shows he is not afraid of doing something. I think he has more of a sense of what’s good for the city than other people do.”

Her commitment to The Wall Street Journal is light enough—contractually, just six pieces a year—that she can pick and choose among the big topics about which she feels people must listen. Lately, she has focused on what she has called the “betrayal” of architect Daniel Libeskind’s master plan for rebuilding Ground Zero, of which she was a big fan. First there was developer Larry Silverstein’s insistence that he get to rebuild 10 million square feet of office space in order to receive his full insurance payments. Then there was the architectural do-over of the Freedom Tower by David Childs, “an awkwardly torqued hybrid” that “speaks more of ego and arrogance than of art.” And finally, she wrote, the success of a small, vocal group of victims’ relatives in pushing aside cultural institutions proves that “the entitlements of loss and grief are the third rail of the rebuilding effort.”

Her insistence on which topics must be discussed is the hallmark of her career. Forty-six years ago, Ms. Huxtable got her first assignments by walking into New York Times Sunday editor Lester Markel’s office and telling him everything he was missing.

“They would simply print the puff pieces,” she said, “and they would show architects’ renderings, and I would get so upset. I would say, ‘That terrible thing?!’ I do believe in entitlement. I do believe we all are consumers of architecture, and that we are all entitled to something good, and that this garbage was being foisted on us by developers. I came out from the belief that architecture is a social art. It’s a great art, but it’s a social art. It has to work. It has to serve people.”

Shortly thereafter, The Times created a new job for her: architecture critic, the first one at a daily newspaper in this country. She became an influential voice for the ordinary man in an age of organization men, and an advocate for architecture over real-estate development. In 1970, she won the first Pulitzer Prize for criticism.

Some of what Ms. Huxtable would learn about buildings in practice—she studied architectural history at Hunter College and was, from 1946 to 1950, an assistant curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art—came from her husband, L. Garth Huxtable, an industrial designer she had met at the end of college, during a chance encounter at Bloomingdale’s. She was working at a special sale of modernist furniture staged in conjunction with a show of new designs at MoMA. (“He was furnishing his bachelor apartment and I sold him a piece of furniture, and he got me!”) Later, when he began designing the conference rooms at the United Nations building, he took her along to see the progress.

When she started at The Times, Ms. Huxtable was terrified, and she balked at Clifton Daniel’s offer to take her on full-time as the newspaper’s first-ever architecture critic—until he said that he would hire someone else if she refused. One would never expect, reading her elegant, confident prose or hearing her speak, that Ms. Huxtable ever felt that she didn’t know what she was doing. (“I never handed in a piece that had a correction on it, because I didn’t want anybody else to make a correction.”) She took on cause after cause, and whether it was because of her or her megaphone or the broader preservation movement, at least some of those buildings got saved.

Ms. Huxtable left The Times in 1982, aided by a MacArthur Fellowship that permitted her to work on books full-time. (She is now fishing for a new project.) Her husband died in 1989, and she now spends half of the year on the north shore of Massachusetts, near cousins and other relatives from her mother’s side of the family.

Age has been on her mind lately. Last year, she finished a biography of Frank Lloyd Wright for the Penguin Lives series in which she took the architect—one of her favorites—to task for lying about his birth date, making himself appear two years younger than he actually was. It was, she wrote, “the sort of small, white vanity lie usually embraced by women but common also among men.”

Ms. Huxtable would never do that—“My age is on the record, and I know perfectly well that no one will ever write anything about me without giving it”—but the peace she has made with the age question is a prickly, uneasy one. She is bothered by the idea that she will be treated “as some sort of freak show,” she said.

“I often get these letters that say, ‘I want to do what you do,’ this kind of business, and I try to be tolerant, because I never set out to do this. I set out to learn as much about architecture as I could,” she said. “In other words, you’ve got to have a sense of purpose and interest in something, and that will always lead you somewhere.”