(Host) One of the most important figures in American architecture died
this month – but, as commentator Donald Kreis explains, she wasn’t an
architect.
(Kreis) Kicked a building lately?
That’s
not a rhetorical question – it’s a book title, specifically, the title
of a collection of columns written by the architecture critic Ada Louise
Huxtable, who died this month at the age of 91.
Like a lot of
Vermonters, I actually grew up in the New York area. Like a lot of New
Yorkers, I grew up reading the Times. And like a lot of Times readers in
the 60s and 70s, I headed straight for the arts section on Sundays to
see what Huxtable had to say about how the built world was doing.
Usually, it was sinking back into the primordial ooze as the result of greed, stupidity, ineptitude and just plain bad taste.
People
remember Huxtable best for having skewered a tacky building on Columbus
Circle as a "die-cut Venetian palazzo on lollipops." Or the time she
compared the Kennedy Center in Washington to the work of Hitler’s
architect, Albert Speer. But apart from her irreverence and willingness
to speak truth to power, two things made Huxtable a personal hero of
mine.
First, although Huxtable was trained in art history, her
Times columns weren’t about entablatures and pilasters or any other
specialized vocabulary. Her criticism was of the people – if a building
oppressed or delighted its users, she said so. I’m an amateur
architecture critic because I learned from Ada Louise Huxtable that you
don’t have to be an architect to opine about architecture. You’re an
expert if you spend your life in or near buildings.
Second,
although Huxtable was a staunch proponent of historic preservation, she
could get as rapturous as anyone about contemporary architecture.
Huxtable deplored the senseless destruction of New York’s Penn Station
in all its beaux arts glory, but she also loved the Ford Foundation
building on 42 nd Street – a lush hanging garden within the crisp
framework of the midcentury modernism typical of the 1960s.
Boy could we use an Ada Louise Huxtable here in Vermont.
For
instance, she would not have hesitated to excoriate Middlebury College,
whose campus features an iconic row of three 19 th Century buildings
clad in stone. Foolishly, the school put up a big science building in
the 1960s that obscured the view of these beautiful signature buildings
— then thought better of it and tore it down – but THEN – and here’s
what would have driven Ada Louise batty – they let a few years go by and
hired a celebrity architect to build an even bigger and uglier library
in the exact same place and blocking the exact same view. Talk about a
building worth kicking!
Conversely, Huxtable would have loved
the new Brattleboro Food Co-op, not because the co-op breaks new ground
architecturally, but because it replaced a banal shopping plaza with a
lively mixed-use building that creates new streetscape and buzz in a
thriving but challenged downtown.
So, fellow architecture
experts, I’d say it’s high time to get out there and kick a few Vermont
buildings. And we can thank the late Ada Louise Huxtable for our license
to do so.