RIP, an extraordinary American woman from the world of architecture

From the New York Times tribute to the first woman to win a pulitzer prize for criticsm, in 1972, while she was at the 'gray lady'.

A Critic of the Curb and Corner
The great architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, who died on Monday at 91, started writing for The New York Times in 1963 and just a few weeks ago was still making the most of her bully pulpit for The Wall Street Journal, railing against proposed changes to the New York Public Library building at 42nd Street.

 She cared about public standards, social equity, the whole city. When I wrote some months back about branch libraries in Queens and elsewhere that have opened lately, thanks to the city’s Design Excellence Program, she shot me an e-mail: “These projects are clear, visual demonstrations, which people need in order to understand how a high standard of architectural design and the refusal to go with hack work can have very real and sometimes unanticipated social, human, environmental and neighborhood consequences, often in parts of the city that need it so badly and that we hear so little about.”

This was a woman of tremendous aesthetic influence, understanding and appreciation.  She changed our world.  She is one of those women who should serve as an example to those who were contemporaries and who came after her as to what women can accomplish in their own right.