Ada Louise Huxtable, the famed New York Times and Wall Street Journal architecture critic who won the first-ever Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1970, has died. She was 91. Times editor Sam Sifton broke the news on Twitter: 

Ada Louise Huxtable, the Times architecture critic who was awarded the first Pulitzer Prize for criticism, has died at 93.

— Sam Sifton (@SamSifton) January 7, 2013

Huxtable, who changed architecture reviews from a niche beat into a kind of critical art form, worked at the Times from 1962-1983 and was the architecture critic for the Journal before she died. "The grand dame of the business, Ms. Huxtable writes all too infrequently for The Journal—only six times a year, but not because that is all the paper will give her but instead it is all she will offer them," wrote The New York Observer's Matt Chaban in 2011. And "in her often trenchant writings she followed the path from modernism to postmodernism and contributed to the preservation movement," reads her biography from PBS. Buildings were her life, and she lived that life in New York City, writing about the beauty of the city's buildings. "Buildings change; they adapt to needs, times and tastes." Huxtable wrote in her last piece for The Journal, which seems eerily prescient now that she has passed. "Nothing, not even buildings, stands still."

Want to add to this story? Let us know in comments or send an email to the author at aabadsantos at theatlantic dot com. You can share ideas for stories on the Open Wire.
Alexander Abad-Santos