On architecture : collected reflections on a century of change / Ada Louise Huxtable

Includes index.

"Known for her well-reasoned and passionately held beliefs about architecture, Ada Louise Huxtable has captivated readers across the country for decades, and in the process has become one of the best-known critics in the world. Her keen eye and vivid writing have reinforced to readers how important architecture is and why it continues to be both controversial and fascinating." "On Architecture gathers together the best of Huxtable's writing, from one of her first pieces in the New York Times in 1963 on Le Corbusier's Carpenter Center at Harvard, to lengthy essays in the New York Review of Books, to her current writing in the Wall Street Journal. With a perspective of more than four decades, Huxtable bears witness to some of the twentieth century's best - and worst - architectural masters and projects from around the corner and around the world: buildings, museums, houses large and small, and iconic structures by Mies van der Rohe, Aalto, Kahn, and Wright." "Huxtable examines the century's modernist beginnings, then turns her critic's eye to the seismic shift in style, function, and fashion that occurred midcentury - all leading to a dramatic new architecture of the twenty-first century. Much of the writing in On Architecture has never appeared in book form before, and one of the recurring joys in these pages - for readers who have loved Huxtable's prose and for those who will encounter it here for the first time - is the ability to read and reread one of the most elegant, impassioned, and insightful voices of our time."--BOOK JACKET.