Ada Louise Huxtable was born in New York City and studied at Hunter College and the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. She was for many years the architectural critic for The New York Times, and was the first writer to receive a Pulitzer Prize for criticism. Among her books are Classic New York, Will They Ever Finish Bruckner Boulevard?, and The Tall Building Artistically Reconsidered. Her new book, Architecture Anyone?, will be published by Random House in 1986. In 1981, she was named a MacArthur Prize Fellow. She now divides her time between New York and a home in Massachusetts.
Unlike the visual or performing arts in New York, architecture is not nurtured in the city’s studios or ad hoc spaces; its location is the city’s streets. There is no way to discover or develop talent in the sense that New York has generated new ideas and radical departures in those increasingly rare alternative accommodations that have been the city’s traditional aesthetic incubators. It is virtually impossible for the young architect to design or build here, except for what might be called the incubator loft or apartment, and certainly not on the city’s Brobdingnagian scale. Architecture in New York is a big-name, big-money, big-deal phenomenon tied inexorably to the leverage calculations of builders, the manipulative skills of lawyers, the gambling instincts of bankers, the accommodating principles of elected politicians, and the boom-and-bust cycles of real estate. Above all, it is big business—bigger than
