For  many years, along with Melville and Proust, Ada Louise Huxtable has languished on my need-to-read list.  This highly accomplished architecture critic, who wrote many years for the New York Times and now writes, occasionally, for the Wall Street Journal, is beloved by both design types and lay people.

Well, last week I picked up a compilation of her work, “On Architecture,” and I simply fell right inside of it.  Huxtable is a dazzling voice.  A building is so many things: art object, infrastructure, civic space, machine, mythology.  More so than any other contemporary critic I know, she can get at a building at all these levels all at once, and in the relatively short format of a newspaper column.  She has a vast knowledge of architecture and history and New York.  And she’s a savvy, supple writer.  She dips into both vernacular and literary language and, as much as it is possible when writing sanely about architecture, she lets it fly.  I’ve always held Paul Kael and Peter Schjeldahl in the highest esteem as critics because their passion for what they are writing about is matched by their passion for language.  Now I’m adding Huxtable to that list.