Upon her death on January 7, 2013 at the age of 91, Ada Louise Huxtable (1921-2013), a pioneering architecture critic, writer and historian, left her entire estate and her archives to the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. The bequest also included an apartment in New York City, a house in Marblehead, MA, and the archives of Huxtable’s husband, industrial designer, Garth Huxtable (1911-1989). Huxtable served as the architecture critic for the New York Times from 1963 to 1982 (she was the first full-time architecture critic at an American newspaper) and as a writer for the Wall Street Journal.
The Huxtable Archives, which include notes, correspondence, research files, manuscripts, drawings, and photography, will become part of the Getty’s Special Collections holdings. Huxtable, a proponent of historic preservation, will have her own groundbreaking work conserved for the benefit of the public and the field of architecture thanks to her partnership with the Getty.
