Huxtable was born and died in New York City, New York. Her father, the physician Michael Landman, was co-author (with his brother, Rabbi Isaac Landman) of the play A Man of Honor. Ada Louise Landman received an A. B. (magna cum laude) from Hunter College, CUNY in 1941.  In 1942, she married industrial designer L. Garth Huxtable, and continued graduate study at New York University from 1942 to 1950.

She served as Curatorial Assistant for Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from 1946 to 1950. She was a contributing editor to Progressive Architecture and Art in America from 1950 to 1963 before being named the first architecture critic at The New York Times, a post she held from 1963 to 1982. She has received grants from the Graham Foundation for a number of projects, including the book Will They Ever Finish Bruckner Boulevard?. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1974.

She was the architecture critic for The Wall Street Journal, a position she took up in 1997.  John Costonis, writing of how public aesthetics is shaped, used her as a prime example of an influential media critic, remarking that “the continuing barrage fired from [her] Sunday column… had New York developers, politicians, and bureaucrats, ducking for years.” He reproduces a cartoon in which construction workers, at the base of a building site with a foundation and a few girders lament that “Ada Louise Huxtable already doesn’t like it!”

Carter Wiseman writes, “Huxtable’s insistence on intellectual rigor and high design standards made her the conscience of the national architectural community.”  She wrote over ten books on architecture, including a 2004 biography of Frank Lloyd Wright for the Penguin Lives series. She was credited as one of the main forces behind the founding of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1965.Ada Louise Huxtable’s papers have been acquired by the Getty Research Institute.  Ada Louise Huxtable’s oral biography is included in “Particular Passions: Talk With Women Who Shaped Our Times.”.”