Her New York

By Philip Lopate, The New York Times

November 7, 2008

Ada Louise Huxtable, hands down, the dean of American architectural criticism. In her many books and columns for The New York Times, The New York Review of Books and The Wall Street Journal (where she continues to serve as architecture critic), Ms. Huxtable has brought a sharp, skeptical, receptive eye and a nuanced writing style to the task.

Her latest book, “On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change,” being published this month by Walker & Company, is a hefty collection of keepers from the past five decades of criticism. It tells the story of revolutionary upheavals in taste, from the triumph of an austere modernism to an often frivolous postmodernism to the menu of choices that exist today. 

Ten days ago, in her sunny penthouse apartment on the Upper East Side, Ms. Huxtable talked about the changing face of the city, the state of its architecture, why Times Square dazzles and why an economic downturn may not be the worst thing to happen to New York.

Phillip Lopate: How did you get started as an architecture critic?

Ada Louise Huxtable: I was a graduate student in architectural history at the N.Y.U. Institute of Fine Arts, and working at the Museum of Modern Art part time. I decided after two years that I didn’t want to keep working at MoMA forever. I had been studying Italian modern architecture at school. So I applied for a Fulbright to go to Italy. When I came back home, I started writing a few pieces for ARTnews on New York architecture. 

Lopate: How old were you at that point?

Huxtable: I was in my 30s. I was a late bloomer. Aline Saarinen had been The New York Times’s chief art critic, but when she married Eero Saarinen, she thought she should not write about architecture anymore. The Times’s editors were upset; they said they needed to get someone else, and so she recommended me. I went in all dressed up with my clippings, and I remember saying: “All you’ve been doing is printing the developers’ P.R. releases in your real estate section. You have nobody covering this very important field.” So they created the post for me of architecture critic.

Lopate: You grew up in New York.

Huxtable: Yes, I’m a native New Yorker. I grew up mostly at 89th Street and Central Park West, in one of those Beaux-Arts buildings. I went to Hunter College — all my schools were in New York. 

Lopate: How do you think it has changed since your childhood? Is it the same city?

Huxtable: The same, but different. That was a quieter, safer, more secure time. The city was more a bunch of small-town neighborhoods. There wasn’t the same greed, ambition, drive, short attention span. 

Lopate: I think of the ’50s and ’60s as a period of great corporate architecture.
 
Huxtable: Yes, that was when the great corporate headquarters were built in New York and Connecticut, which we’re now trying to save.

Lopate: It’s ironic that for so long architectural critics, including yourself, lambasted New York for being timid, being caught in an Art Deco time warp, not having the guts to hire the international star architects who were making waves elsewhere. 

Huxtable: And now the developers have learned that they can make more money by hiring a name architect. It’s the law of unintended consequences. They build these hugely expensive oversized condos and the star architect is supposed to make it palatable. The architects are delighted to be used by the developers because they want to build, but it’s the same money game. Still, I think it’s good, on the whole. 

Lopate: Well, now we have Gehry’s IAC Building on the Hudson River. 

Huxtable: I love it. I love it.

Lopate: I like it, too. We have the LVMH Building by Portzamparc on Madison Avenue, a new Nouvel, a Norman Foster and so on, but I wonder if it really makes such a difference to the life of the city. You suddenly have all this undulating forms, but they still have to hew to the street wall. 

Huxtable: I like the size and elegant subtlety of the Portzamparc. I am not happy with a lot of what is going on, and I am not happy with the way the critics are assessing it.

Lopate: How so?

Huxtable: My view of architecture has not changed. It’s the current scene that has changed. Architecture is a very real and important art; it affects us all so directly. You must judge it in terms of problem-solving in this uneasy, difficult combination of structure and art. My feeling is that criticism is not looking at this — it is treating architecture as eye candy. When you combine new technologies with loosening all the dogmatic rules of modernism, you have opened the world wide to greatness and horror. And that’s what we’re producing now. It’s a terribly mixed bag.

Lopate: What do you mean by “eye candy”?

Huxtable: The “wow” buildings. Don’t blame it all on Frank Gehry. Gehry is legit; what he did at Bilbao is superb. He showed us how to marry all the arts in our time. But the lesson taken away from it was: We need something that looks “iconic,” that’s going to put our city on the map. 

Lopate: A building that will knock your socks off. And probably not a rectangle. 

Huxtable: Yes, computers can produce these endlessly repeating, beautiful curving, sculptural forms. Now we’re finally reaching the stage where we begin to recognize, “Aha! Right off the computer!” and we don’t accept it as readily. For a while the novelty was very great. It doesn’t necessarily solve the problem of functioning well for people who use it. On the other hand, if it doesn’t take us to another place, it’s nostalgia, and there’s an awful lot of nostalgia operating out there today. 

Lopate: You’ve been both a preservationist and a critic of that movement.

Huxtable: I believe in reality, in the real world, and I think the real world is constantly evolving. I think it needs vigilance, because you can do terrible things with architecture. But without changing, growing, developing, what kind of a city would we be? 

Lopate: For instance, in the South Street Seaport they tried to preserve all those lovely old structures, but they cleaned them up a bit too much, whereas the little brick buildings just to the north kept a funkier character.

Huxtable: They’re real. I remember too much, and I know what a fiasco that South Street Seaport plan turned out. I remember when they actually tore down the most important part of the seaport, Peck Slip, which had the oldest and most wonderful buildings. And those were demolished to make way for some Con Edison industrial addition. 

Then they decided the heart of the seaport was Schermerhorn Row. Then they brought in the Rouse corporation to tie the place together with a shopping center. And Rouse said you have to have so many contiguous feet of shopping or it doesn’t work. So that meant that things had to be moved, torn down, adjusted, and look what we ended up with. I am exceptionally grateful for every inch that got saved. My basic preservation philosophy is: Change it but don’t destroy it. 

Lopate: Jane Jacobs always advocated a respect for the piecemeal. So can’t we plan for the piecemeal? 

Huxtable: It’s very tough. You know one example of planning, maybe not for the piecemeal but for context and character, is Times Square. The first plan was for four huge towers by Philip Johnson; thank God they never happened. But even in their later form, the idea was to move the lawyers and the finance firms in there. 

Of course everyone who loved New York and Times Square, we didn’t like quite so much porn, but we wanted to keep the lights, the action. Zoning mandated those signs on the buildings. Fortuitously, the zoning that mandated signs coincided with enormous advances in the technology of light. So now you have a show down there that is fabulous and thrilling.

Lopate: New York used to be able to build these beautiful cities-within-a city, like Rockefeller Center. Why do you think it’s so hard to do that now? 

Huxtable: If you look at Rockefeller Center in detail, it’s a very elegant plan: higher and lower levels that lead you from one to the other, streets cut through to keep the human scale. You always feel you’re going around a corner, not around a wind-swept plaza, into some other area that has an inviting activity. 
First of all, Rockefeller Center was privately planned. It was planned for profit; it was a hard-nosed thing, and of course during the Depression it had to be rejiggered completely because it lost its anchor tenant, the Metropolitan Opera. But while Rockefeller insisted on a certain return of profit, he did hire the best architects and let them alone, and they combined Beaux-Arts and modernist principles into a really complex, humanistic urban plan. 
We don’t have that kind of development now. Everything in this city is totally developer driven. You do not get Rockefeller Center-type development unless you have some kind of leadership that will commit to it; and these developers are so powerful and so wealthy and so sure of what they want that you’re starting from a different premise. We’ve had, I think, a very good mayor, who has done good things for the city, but he doesn’t know the difference. Bloomberg’s a businessman: he thinks development is planning. 

Lopate: You say in your book, “Here we practice the art of the deal, not the art of the city.”

Huxtable: Exactly. It’s your urban development corporations, state and city, that are in charge of these things, not the planners. There’s nobody in there that has any of this city-making programmed in their heads; they have dollars and cents and time frames. It’s pure business.

Lopate: Not to get us too depressed, but can we talk about ground zero?

Huxtable: The first piece I wrote predicted what was going to happen. People thought I was clairvoyant. No, I’d just been watching the city for a long time. We all knew! The strange thing that came along was this small group of bereaved families, who really knew how to operate, and who did not speak for the rest of the group at all, but who began to roll over the politicians. 
If there’s anything a politician will roll over for, it’s this kind of grief. After all the good things they vetoed or interfered with, cultural institutions like the Freedom museum because they were worried something unpatriotic might be exhibited there, they now have this memorial, and nobody has any concept how overscaled it is. A huge memorial, and these profit-making towers. Daniel Libeskind’s original architectural inspiration has been stripped away, and the developer, Larry Silverstein, got everything he wanted. 
It is a horrible failure, as far as I’m concerned. We missed the chance to make a 21st-century Rockefeller Center. 

Lopate: One problem is that we’re too Manhattan-centric in our planning. I sometimes feel that there’s not enough emphasis on the other four boroughs.

Huxtable: In one sense they’re lucky they were left alone. But in another sense it’s not fair at all. This takes me back again to the Lindsay administration, which established special planning offices in every borough. They were doing very interesting work. At that time we attracted the best and the brightest into city planning. You had wonderful Ed Logue running the state’s Urban Development Corporation, and he put through Roosevelt Island and other worthy affordable-housing schemes.

Lopate: You’ve lived long enough to see many times when New York was counted out. In the ’70s and ’80s, there was much talk about the death of New York.

Huxtable: Roger Starr had this idea of “planned shrinkage.” Remember that? He thought you should let parts of the city die.

Lopate: From my perspective, there’s been a healthy shift from seeing cities as basically dying to essentially buoyant, yet still requiring help. 

Huxtable: We’ve seen a reversal. Years ago there was white flight to the suburbs, the inner cities were crime-ridden, there was a lot of poverty. We still have poverty, but people started moving back to the cities. 

Lopate: There’s also been a shift in attitude regarding density. 

Huxtable: Yes, urban renewal tried to get rid of density. It was viewed as concentrating poverty and disease. Now there’s the awareness that density is more energy-efficient and less destructive of the environment than urban sprawl. 

Lopate: I take it you’re for density but not for overbuilding.

Huxtable: How can I be against density? I’m a New Yorker! I grew up with density. Still, in a way I’m glad for this downturn in the economy. Because so much bad stuff was being built. This will give us a chance to think, to take stock. I am so weary of these stupid alliances between developers and cultural institutions in which the cultural institution is given a block of space and the developers overbuild the rest and make an enormous profit. 
The Museum of Modern Art has become a real estate operation. I admit a certain amount of nostalgia: I remember a street that was once one of the best streets in New York, 53rd Street. Watching it change over the years, I can’t help but view their new Nouvel tower as the last destructive nail. 

Lopate: You were fairly skeptical about Lincoln Center when it opened. Do you feel more warmly toward it now? 

Huxtable: Yes, of course I feel warmer towards it; it’s become such a part of New York. As the city has changed, it’s become an anchor. At the time it was built, many of us thought that it would make more sense to spread your cultural facilities, which would strengthen different neighborhoods. So much is changed that even though a complex like Lincoln Center is static, it in a sense changes, too. 

Through its functioning, it’s become a beloved institution, and one reason is that open space. Whenever you go there on a night with different events, or the spring festival, with the kids dancing, it’s terrific. It’s still not great architecture, but by now it has acquired a nostalgic quality of a certain kind of romanticized, popularized modernism. 

Lopate: Whenever your name comes up, what I hear is: How old is she?

Huxtable: And that will be the first line of this piece, which I think is so unfair. It’s O.K. to mention it, but don’t make it in the first line! It makes me into this strange curiosity: “She’s still alive. How old is she?” Yes, she’s old! And she’s cooking with gas. And she has strong opinions, and she’s still writing because they want her to. As long as they ask me to do it, I’ll do it.

Lopate: So how old are you?

Huxtable: I’m 87. I’m not ashamed of my age. But I don’t want to be judged by my age. Fair?

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