Remembering Ada Louise Huxtable

A steady procession of mourners in dark suits on a summery afternoon all but traced the history of modern American architecture as they arrived on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Richard Meier, followed by Kevin Roche, followed by David Childs, followed by Frank Gehry. And many more.

They came on Tuesday to honor Ada Louise Huxtable, who died Jan. 7 at 91. Ms. Huxtable was regarded as the first full-time architecture critic at an American newspaper when she was named to the post by The New York Times in 1963. Fifty years later she was still writing criticism for The Wall Street Journal and, as ever, mincing no words.

“Ada Louise did not want a memorial service,” Robert N. Shapiro, her lawyer and co-executor, told more than 200 listeners as he opened the gathering in the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium at the Met. “So we’re not having one.” Instead, he said, the event was simply a “memorial tribute,” composed of a “coalition of the disobedient” â€" friends, subjects, colleagues and readers â€" who couldn’t imagine not saying farewell.

“What she cared about was authenticity,” said Mr. Shapiro, the president of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass. As a critic, Ms. Huxtable was unbothered by fashionable consensus. She did not hesitate to champion such authentically American architectural forms as the low-slung, single-story ranch house. In fact, she owned a ranch house in Marblehead, Mass., where she spent much of her time.

At the lectern, Mr. Gehry, perhaps the most widely recognized contemporary American architect, recalled his early days in Los Angeles, wondering when or if Ms. Huxtable would notice. “Even though I wished for her attention,” he said, “I was scared of it.”

On Aug. 24, 1980, Ms. Huxtable counseled her readers in The Times to keep watch for Mr. Gehry, “whose work veers from the outrageous to the extraordinary and promises to loom large in the confusions and contributions of the season and on into the ‘80s.”

Her praise was cherished, but her tart dismissals were relished. More than one speaker quoted Ms. Huxtable’s assessment of the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington on March 30, 1965. “Its empty aridity and degraded classical details are vulgarization without drama,” she wrote, “and to be both dull and vulgar is an achievement of sorts.”

Almost every speaker quoted from Ms. Huxtable’s columns, suggesting that she pulled off the rare feat of producing durable prose on a daily deadline and that her combination of passion, conscience and erudition was still the last word in architectural criticism.

Paul Goldberger, Ms. Huxtable’s immediate successor at The Times and now a contributing editor of Vanity Fair, said, “We’re all, in a sense, her progeny.” No one claimed to be her equal.