Critiquing the Critic: Was Ada Louise Hunxtable on the mark or even fair to 2 Columbus Circle?
This was an unpublished letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal
To the Editor:
Ada Louise Huxtable was an early influence on my developing sense of urbanism, so I am dismayed to have to contest her column on 2 Columbus Circle (“Setting the Record Straight about Ed Stone and Brad Cloepfil,” 12/10/08). Ms. Huxtable conflates two issues: the preservation of Edward Durell Stone’s original, and criticism of Brad Cloepfil’s design. In the process, she claims preservationists acted like irresponsible children denying the authority of the adults, and comes dangerously close to an ad hominem attack on Stone by introducing his alcoholism and offering implicit criticism of the wife who brought him out of it.
As a colleague in preservation once said, “Ada Louise couldn’t hate that building more if it was an ex-boyfriend.” Seeking to reestablish the preeminence of her decades-old pronouncement on its questionable merits, she denies the right of a later generation, one that grew up with the building, to define architectural value on its own terms. Labeling efforts to understand the building and its heirs as “revisionist” simply shuts down debate. And there is certainly more to debate about Stone’s design than stained marble and rusting metal fasteners. Arguing for its preservation, Robert A.M. Stern described the building as a challenge to the International Style. Ms. Huxtable may disagree with that interpretation, but she cannot simply dismiss it as “specious history.”
Finally, Ms. Huxtable omits entirely the sorry failure of the Landmarks Preservation Commission to hold a public hearing on the controversial building’s worth, blaming only the understandably frustrated preservationists. But to set the record straight, preservationists were not demanding a designation, only a hearing, and the LPC rejected every plea from a chorus that included the National Trust, the Preservation League of New York State, the Municipal Art Society, the Historic Districts Council, and many, many architects and critics. It is the Landmarks Commission’s dereliction of duty in this instance that poisoned the conversation, not the honest efforts of preservationists.
Dr. Jeffrey A. Kroessler
Dr. Kroessler is a NYC historian and Director of HDC