ARCHITECTURAL

CRITICISM
New York public library
Ada Louis Huxtable Takes On The New York Public Library
 Architectural Criticism

■ Architecture criticism is the critique of architecture. Everyday criticism relates to

published or broadcast critiques of buildings, whether completed or not, both in
terms of news and other criteria.
■ In many cases, criticism amounts to an assessment of the architect's success
in meeting his or her own aims and objectives and those of others. The
assessment may consider the subject from the perspective of some wider
context, which may involve planning, social or aesthetic issues. It may also take
a polemical position reflecting the critic's own values.
■ At the most accessible extreme, architectural criticism is a branch of lifestyle
journalism, especially in the case of high-end residential projects.
Ada Louise Huxtable (née Landman; March 14, 1921
– January 7, 2013) was an architecture critic and
writer on architecture. In 1970 she was awarded the
first ever Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. Architecture critic
Paul Goldberger, also a Pulitzer Prize-winner (1984)
for architectural criticism, said in 1996: "Before Ada
Louise Huxtable, architecture was not a part of the
public dialogue. "She was a great lover of cities, a
great preservationist and the central planet around
which every other critic revolved," said architect
Robert A. M. Stern, dean of the Yale University School
of Architecture.
ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE WORKS:
 Ms. Huxtable was the author of 11 books. “Four Walking Tours of Modern Architecture in New York City”
(1961), included a characteristic critique of the Pan Am Building, which was then being built directly
behind Grand Central. (It is now the MetLife Building.)

 Rather than aesthetics, Ms. Huxtable focused on how the tower would alter the scale of Park Avenue,
adding “an extraordinary burden to existing pedestrian and transportation facilities.” She continued, “Its
antisocial character directly contradicts the teachings of Walter Gropius, who has collaborated in its
design.”

 When The Times named her a critic, Ms. Huxtable was working on a six-volume series on New York City
architecture. Only the first volume, “Classic New York: Georgian Gentility to Greek Elegance,” was
published, in 1964.

 In it, she extolled not just lovely Greek Revival temples but also mongrelized houses from the early 1800s.
“They rank as ‘street architecture’ rather than as ‘landmarks,’ ” she said. “Their value is contrast,
character, visual and emotional change of pace, a sudden sense of intimacy, scale, all evocative qualities
of another century.”
 Her interest in preservation did not make her an enemy of modernity. In “The Tall Building Artistically
Reconsidered: The Search for a Skyscraper Style” (1984), Ms. Huxtable said the glass curtain-wall skyscraper,
epitomized by the work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, offered “a superb vernacular, probably the handsomest
and most useful set of architectural conventions since the Georgian row house.”

 What infuriated her were “authentic reproductions” of historical architecture and “surrogate environments” like
Colonial Williamsburg and master-planned communities like the Disney Company’s Celebration, Fla. “Private
preserves of theme park and supermall increasingly substitute for nature and the public realm, while nostalgia
for what never was replaces the genuine urban survival,” she wrote in “The Unreal America: Architecture and
Illusion” (1997).

 Ms. Huxtable’s last book, in 2008, was “On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change.” And
her last column, published in The Journal on Dec. 3, 2012, concerned the impending reconstruction of the New
York Public Library eliminating the central stacks. Typically enough, it was titled, “Undertaking Its Destruction.”

 Ultimately, however, what animated and sustained her were not the mistakes but the triumphs. As she said of
New York City in The Times in 1968:

 “When it is good, this is a city of fantastic strength, sophistication and beauty. It is like no other city in time or
place. Visitors and even natives rarely use the words urban character or environmental style, but that is what
they are reacting to with awe in the presence of massed, concentrated, steel, stone, power and life.”
 The New York Public Library

■ The New York Public Library has a plan to

save millions of dollars, improve efficiency,
and reverse the cutbacks that have been
plaguing it.
■ By sending little-used resources off-site
(after all, most people use the library for its
online resources these days), the Library will
consolidate three libraries into one Mid-
Manhattan branch, renovating the building
with a streamlined, efficient design -
courtesy of Foster + Partners - to create "the
largest combined research and circulating
library in the country."
THE FIRST ARGUMENT, which many critics have made, is that
the plan robs the library of its primary purpose: making
resources readily accessible. As Ms. Huxtable points out, it’s a
question not of the quantity of people using resources, but of
the quality of resources available:
“The library's embrace of the future is commendable; it has
been on the frontiers of change in technology and practice for
some time. But some of these numbers are misleading. A
research library is devoted to the acquisition, maintenance and
availability of collections of amazing range, rarity and depth,
much of which will not be consulted for decades, have not
been digitized and probably never will be. If we could estimate
how many ways in which the world has been changed by that
6%, the number would be far more meaningful than the traffic
through its lion-guarded doors.
The library's own releases, while short on details, consistently
offer a rosy picture of a lively and popular "People's Palace."
But a research library is a timeless repository of treasures, not
a popularity contest measured by head counts, the current
arbiter of success. This is already the most democratic of
institutions, free and open to all. Democracy and populism
seem to have become hopelessly confused.”
The NY Public library - a New York institution and
architectural icon designed by Carrere and
Hastings in 1911 -plans to demolish seven
floors of stacks (sending 2 to 5 million volumes
to New Jersey) in order to consolidate three
separate libraries and make room for a new
state-of-the-art, computer-centered facility,
designed by Foster + Partners.

The Library reasons that since their has been a

41% decrease in the use of collections over the
last 15 years, and an increase of use of online
resources, that the $300 million project will
eliminate substantial, unnecessary operating
costs (saving the libraries somewhere between
$7 and $15 million dollars).
The SECOND ARGUMENT, unique to
Ms. Huxtable, is that the plan will
involve overly complex and expensive
engineering. After having studied the
system of stacks, which according to
Huxtable “literally hold [the reading
room] up,” she states that
demolishing this “engineering
landmark” would be a huge mistake:
“After extensive study of the library's
conception and construction I have
become convinced that irreversible
changes of this magnitude should not
be made in this landmark building.
Restoration and retrofitting would be
easier and cheaper than supporting
the reading room with the enormously
complex and expensive engineering
needed during demolition and
reconstruction.”
ARGUMENT #3
Moreover, Ms. Huxtable claims that the architectural/cultural importance
of the building is undervalued by the plan. If the New York Library needs a
state-of-the-art facility, why not let Fosters Partners create their own new
structure, rather than for ever altering the existing building?
“This is a plan devised out of a profound ignorance of or willful disregard
for not only the library's original concept and design, but also the folly of
altering its meaning and mission and compromising its historical and
architectural integrity. You don't "update" a masterpiece. 'Modernization'
may be the most dangerously misused word in the English language."

There are better options than turning the library into a hollowed-out hybrid
of new and old. The radically different 21st-century model deserves a
radically different style of its own, dramatically contemporary and flexible
enough to accommodate rapid technological change. Sell the surplus Fifth
Avenue property at 34th Street. Keep the Mid-Manhattan building; the
location is perfect. Let Foster Partners loose on the Mid-Manhattan
building; the results will be spectacular, and probably no more costly than
the extravagant and destructive plan the library has chosen.”
INTERIOR VIEWS
“The circular plan is not only clear, but also
provides a pleasant processional sequence
Hirshhorn
that goes a long way…. The fortress quality of museum and
the Hirshhorn suggests some rather obvious
thoughts about the nature of housing art in sculpture garden
our time. But the building’s architecture… is
less the product of a desire to make a
statement… than it is a logical progression in
esthetic development….” Paul Goldberger, The
New York Times, October 2, 1974.
It is known around Washington as the bunker
or gas tank, lacking only gun emplacements or
an Exxon sign… It totally lacks the essential
factors of esthetic strength and provocative
vitality that make genuine ‘brutalism’ a
positive and rewarding style. This is born-dead,
neo-penitentiary modern. Its mass is not so
much aggressive or overpowering as merely
leaden.” Ada Louise Huxtable, The New York
Times, October 6, 1974.
“The whole complex has been designed as one
composition… Bun shaft's design is not concerned
with the grandeur of the Mall. It is concerned with
the greater grandeur of his museum and it gives
us an awful lot of beaux-arts pavement and
pomposity that no longer seem to suit the taste
and style of our times.”
Bun shaft's concrete cylinder ‘fails as
architecture.’
In response to critical protest and design
review, the sculpture garden was lowered 14
feet. However, it would have been an act of
civility beyond this change if some gesture
had been made toward the immediate
surroundings, either in simple recognition or
in character of design. The unbending
rigidity of this open space design is
surprisingly insensitive to anything except its
own didactic aspirations. (One reaches the
sculpture garden from the building either by
tunnel under Jefferson Drive or by walking
across the. street.) It has not only been
lowered; the original plan called for it to
intrude twice far into the Mail.
INTERIOR VIEWS
THANK YOU
SWATHI K- RA16112010095
AADIITHYA- RA1611201010045
MEGHA TANWAR- RA1611201010060
REFERENCE:
WWW.GOOGLE.COM
WWW.ARCHDAILY.COM
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/08/arts/design/a
da-louise-huxtable-architecture-critic-dies-at-
91.html?pagewanted=all