Ada = Architecture in New York

She has been a vociferous proponent of preservation when it means saving the worthwhile stuff; and an advocate of the new when the new means progress. Her new book, "On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change," chronicles the best of her writing. It's being published this month by Walker Books.

The book begins with one of her first pieces in the Times: a review of Le Corbusier's 1962 Carpenter Center at Harvard, continued by an essay on modernism through the decades. The reader in effect has the opportunity to trace the roots of modernism and the movement's evolution through its post-modern phase, observing these phenomena through Huxtable's feisty yet elegant prose about not only architecture, but the well-planned world to which the profession aspires.