Revisiting Ada Louise Huxtable’s Walking Tours of Modern Architecture, #1

This tour will celebrate the seminal architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable (1921-2013). Her pocket guide “Four Walking Tours of Modern Architecture in New York City,” was jointly published by the Municipal Art Society and the Museum of Modern Art in 1961. Retracing the route of one of those midtown tours, we will consider Huxtable’s analysis and discuss subsequent changes to the buildings she examined and their surroundings. Highlights include the iconic Seagram Building designed by Mies van der Rohe with Philip Johnson, and three major works by Gordon Bunshaft: the currently threatened former Union Carbide Building, Lever House and the former Pepsi-Cola Building.

When she was appointed architecture critic for the New York Times in 1963, a position she held until 1982, Ada Louise Huxtable became the first full-time architecture critic at an American newspaper. She received the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism in 1970. Tour guide John Arbuckle is President of the New York/Tri-State Chapter of DOCOMOMO, an international organization dedicated to preserving Modern architecture.