“As its basic fact and most critical element, it is structure that is at the heart of the tall building’s design.”

-Ada Louise Huxtable, American architecture critic, 1921-2013.

Ada Louise Huxtable was a legendary architecture critic. One of her best known works, The Tall Building Artistically Reconsidered, dealt with the subject of skyscrapers and their relationship to the city. In the passage including the above quote, she’s exploring the skyscraper design, and where the biggest opportunities for innovation are within the process:

Inevitably the technology of the skyscraper is the most evident of these special features; height is primarily a function of technology. The engineering development of the tall building is one of the truly remarkable chapters in the history of architecture, and it has been well documented in the standard texts. Structure is what the tall building is about, even if this seems like belaboring the obvious; as its basic fact and most critical element, it is structure that is at the heart of the tall building’s design. It becomes the architect’s most powerful expressive tool, by the very nature of the constructive art.[1]


[1]: Huxtable, Ada Louise. The Tall Building Artistically Reconsidered: The Search For A Skyscraper Style. New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1984. 98.