From Scandinavian satellite towns to new towns in the desert: Ada Louise Huxtable’s overseas reportages, 1965-1969. A traveling architecture critic's perspective for cultural mediation.

The paper examines a series of writings authored by North American architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable on the occasion of a series of investigative journeys overseas she took while working for The New York Times in the second half of the Sixties. It focuses on her reports following the European Planned Community Tour around central Europe (1965), a journey to the Soviet Union (1967), and one to Israel (1969). By intertwining the archival material retrieved in the Ada Louise and L. Garth Huxtable Papers at the Getty Research Institute with published writings, the study addresses the expedients and implications of translation processes across different geographical, linguistic, cultural, and institutional contexts. These narratives are not interpreted just as surrogates for travel, as the paper proposes a reflection, starting from her writings, on the role of architecture - and architecture journalism - as instruments of cultural mediation.