Building a Soviet “Architectural Sputnik”: Behind the Scenes in the Ada Louise Huxtable and L. Garth Huxtable Papers

Abstract

In 1967, architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable embarked on an investigative journey to the USSR with a group of fourteen New York Times journalists. Upon her return, she published numerous writings on Soviet architecture and its protagonists, including newspaper articles, a report for Architectural Forum, and a book essay. The present article reconstructs the circumstances that led to the formulation of these stories and examines how the critic tailored them to a North American readership. By tracing the untold negotiations between public and personal expectations and individual perceptions that led to the final narrative through the documents held in her husband’s archive, that of industrial designer L. Garth Huxtable, this article explores the gray areas surrounding the critic’s assessment of the Soviet “architectural Sputnik.”