Archinect - News

The BWAF's 'New Angle: Voice' audio series continues with a look at the lives of Ada Louise Huxtable and Amaza Lee Meredith

2023-04-28T18:37:00-04:00

The Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation (BWAF) is continuing its ‘New Angle: Voice’ audio documentary series with a look at two early female pioneers of architectural criticism and design education.

The new season premiered last week with an episode highlighting the late writer Ada Louise Huxtable, the New York Times’ first-ever architectural critic and important mentor to Paul Goldberger, Christopher Hawthorne, and other journalists who have shaped the landscape for architecture criticism as it embraces the new digital age.

The next episode, which is set to premiere in mid-May, will focus on the life of Amaza Lee Meredith, a Black woman born in 1895 and credited with establishing Virginia State’s School of Fine Arts Department. Meredith designed several structures in the state and Sag Harbor, New York (including historic Azurest South which she and her partner called home) after 1939, and enjoyed a dual career as an educator in addition to her pursuits as a painter, which are al...

New audio documentary on Ray Eames to launch on International Women’s Day

2023-02-27T11:46:00-05:00

The Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation is set to launch the second season of its award-winning audio documentary series New Angle: Voice. Debuting on March 8th to coincide with International Women’s Day, the first episode in the series will explore the story of Ray Eames (1912–1988), with future episodes exploring other influential female figures in design.

The introductory episode on Ray Eames will present a history of her contributions to the arts, architecture, graphic design, textile design, and furniture innovation. The narrative will also be informed by interviews with figures spanning art history, curation, design, the Eames Foundation, and the Library of Congress.

“Our original story about Ray Eames draws on new research of her years as a painter in New York, from archival footage and audio of her media appearances as well as interviews with Eames family members and employees of Eames Office, their design studio in Venice, California,” explained Cynthia Phifer Kracauer A...

Yamasaki's posthumous critique of the new World Trade Center

2015-06-25T14:07:00-04:00

I must ask myself if we want to design buildings for people to fit some preconceived idea of a glass world. Is this really the future of cities?" – Minoru Yamasaki

While the critical response to the new 1WTC has been, at best, one of resigned acceptance, the original Twin Towers didn't receive much fanfare either when they first opened in 1973. Ada Louise Huxtable, then architecture critic for The New York Times, wasn't much of a fan of Minoru Yamasaki's design: "I, for one, am not in thrall to size; build very big and you can build very bad—and the very bad will be inescapable."

Yamasaki responded, defending his monoliths of slitted windows with an attack on the very concept that characterizes the new 1WTC and Manhattan's skyline today – glass: "As for mirror glass, I detest it, because buildings with it look to me as if they have cataracts, showing no live within. On the interior, it produces strange reflections of lights, objects and people which gives me a feeling I can only describe as eerie."

Yamaski's complete letter was published in CLOG's 2014 "World Trade Center" issue. For more news on the World Trade Center:

Foster's Out, Ingels' In: ...

Dreams Built and Broken...

2013-04-22T15:00:00-04:00

Analysis, rather than the promotion of starchitects, was her aim, and a prodigious amount of research underlies her early, punchy pronouncements as well as her late, magisterial style...Her death removes a passionate and particular voice from the shrinking ranks of full-time architecture critics, but also represents a loss of institutional memory for architecture culture...She didn’t offer compromise positions

In the May 6th edition of magazine Alexandra Lange authored a paean, in which she explores the legacy of Ada Louise Huxtable. Ms. Lange identifies how Ada Louise Huxtable's life and career make the case for architecture criticism "as an essential beat for a metropolitan newspaper" as well as for an appreciation of architecture.

Image via Laurie Olin's tribute to Ada Louise Huxtable here

Architecture Critic Ada Louise Huxtable Dies

2013-01-07T19:22:00-05:00

Ada Louise Huxtable, the dean of American architecture critics, died Monday at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan. She was 91.

The "Golden Age of the concert hall"?

2012-05-10T12:05:00-04:00

Victoria Newhouse - "aesthetically I think they are greatly improved from what we had before...they're smaller and more intimate...more inviting...they are acoustically improved...and many of them have the ability to be reconfigured...all of this leads to a very exciting scene"

Victoria Newhouse author of The Architecture and Acoustics of New Opera Houses and Concert Halls along with Daniel Libeskind, Michael Kaiser and Renee Fleming were on Charlie Rose last month, to discuss the current explosion of "literally hundreds" of new opera houses and concert halls under construction. In a recent review for the Wall Street Journal, Ada Louise Huxtable summing up the lesson of the book wrote "But Ms. Newhouse has learned that ideal acoustics are not even necessary for a hall to succeed. The essential factor is ambience".