THE UNREAL AMERICA: Architecture and Illusions.<i> By Ada Louise Huxtable</i> .<i> The New Press: 188 pp., $30</i>

Ada Louise Huxtable loathes the uninspired. During the ‘60s and ‘70s, the petite, sharp-eyed critic terrorized corrupt developers and greedy architects as the New York Times’ first architecture critic. But her relentless fight against the shoddy and the second-rate was coupled with a giddy faith that around the corner lurked something truly heroic. Huxtable was--and remains--an optimist.

The battle is not over. Recently, Huxtable signed on to write a bimonthly column on architecture for the Wall Street Journal--her first since leaving the New York Times in 1982. Her current book--”The Unreal America: Architecture and Illusion”--is a crisp study of the future of the megalopolis--that shapeless, sprawling body that once was simply called the city. It is her first book in nearly a decade. Our cities, it seems, are no better off than they were when she started writing.

“The Unreal America” is really two books: a chronicle of the disturbing rise of the fake, theme park-inspired designs that are casting an artificial gloss over America and a celebration of an emerging revolution in architecture, one that has replaced the naive utopianism of the Modernists and the facile eclecticism of the ‘80s with a more tempered--and difficult--vision of reality. The problems are familiar. The solution is not.

Huxtable has always been stubborn. While a student at the Institute of Fine Arts in 1946, she studied low-income housing in New York’s East Village instead of more typical academic subjects like gothic French cathedrals; she refused to write about buildings she had never seen. Her pluckiness so impressed architect and curator Philip Johnson that he offered Huxtable a job as an art historian at the nascent Museum of Modern Art.

Her life as a critic began in 1962, when she met legendary New York Times Magazine Editor Lester Markel. At the time, preservationists did not exist. The catch phrase among greedy Manhattan developers was “the highest use of the land,” which meant cheap high-density towers. There were no discussions about “the quality of the urban fabric.” Huxtable arrived with a mission: to be the great defender of the urban landscape. She handed Markel a list of what needed to be done. Within a year, Huxtable was the first full-time architecture critic in the United States. As Huxtable puts it: “There was an awful lot to be done.”

At the time, Mayor John Lindsay was New York’s version of a young J.F.K. Lindsay campaigned by buzzing over Manhattan in a helicopter with the architect Philip Johnson. Careful urban planning and civic design became part of the new liberal agenda. Tucked away in an apartment on upper Park Avenue with her husband, Garth, Huxtable became the city’s conscience.

Huxtable’s best work was driven by a deep sense of civic responsibility, by the conviction that architecture can elevate--or diminish--our everyday lives. Observing the renovated Penn Station in May 1968, she wrote: “Kafka or Sartre never said it better. That single human figure, equally isolated in a crowd, proceeds through the chill, bleak anonymity of the 20th century transit catacombs . . . in a setting of impersonal, ordinary sterility that could just as well be a clean functional gas chamber. The human spirit and human environment have reached absolute zero.”

Eventually, however, the heady crusades of the ‘60s gave way to the malaise of the ‘70s--when the city nearly went broke--and finally to the money-grubbing ‘80s. A series of choices and tragedies temporarily took Huxtable away from writing. In 1982, she gave up her column and a position on the New York Times’ editorial board to take a MacArthur fellowship. Several years later, Garth--her husband and ethical sounding board--died.

“The Unreal America” is a sudden leap forward into a changed world: The hopeful dreams of John Lindsay’s New York are now seen as small victories at best. The threat is now Disney, not Trump. Everywhere, civic architecture has taken a back seat to projects whose value is defined by the amount of money they can generate for a city’s depleted coffers.

To Huxtable, this is a recurring nightmare. In the preface to one of Huxtable’s first books, “Will They Ever Finish Bruckner Boulevard?” U.S. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) describes her as a chronicler of “the deterioration of public architecture over the past half century,” adding, “on no single point is Huxtable more poignant--or implacable.”

That role has not changed. Zipping along from Times Square to Las Vegas to San Diego’s Horton Plaza to Disney’s Celebration Village--a prepackaged residential town in Orlando, Fla.--Huxtable discovers an increasingly sterile world, one cleansed of all of the deep complexities of the urban condition.

At each stop, she relentlessly laments the theme park mentality of our age. “There are, in fact, generations for whom the mall is the substitute urban experience,” she writes. “Thus the ultimate absurdity is achieved: an edited and appropriated version of exactly those distinguishing, organic and most interesting features of a city that characterize it, reduced to a merchandising theme--the city as sales promotion.”

Of course, some malls are better than others. Universal CityWalk has the complexity that many of these themed environments lack: It has the edge of urbanity, the social mix, that Disney usually avoids in favor of cleaner “family- friendly” entertainment. As such, Universal CityWalk now passes for the public realm in the same way that Central Park did a century ago.

But the bottom line is the same. “What is gone are options--those qualities of chance, the unusual, the unpredictable, the offbeat--and the constant revisions that have always given cities their renewable, changing, variable, cosmopolitan, living character,” Huxtable writes. “In no way does this controlled set of enterprises supply the interest, excitement and products for which the city is the traditional entrepreneurial incubator.”

All of this has been said before. Michael Sorkin, for one, wrote incisive articles on the potential extinction of communal spaces in his columns for the Village Voice during the ‘80s. It is Sorkin who coined the term “Disney-fication.” (One of the wittiest and most incorruptible writers of his generation, Sorkin recently left criticism to see if he can do better, opening his own architectural office.)

And others have pointed out the seeming inevitability of the changes: As urban economics increasingly shift from manufacturing and business to tourism, cities will become more and more like Venice--nostalgic urban ruins. (Few cities, of course, have the virtues Venice has to evince a nostalgic beauty once their original significance fades.)

The difference is Huxtable’s dogged search for a way out--for an option to the crass commercialism that is choking our cities. In a 1996 article Huxtable wrote for the New York Review of Books, she tentatively identifies three architects who offer that alternate vision: the Portuguese architect Alvaro Siza, France’s Christian Portzamparc and Los Angeles’ Frank Gehry. The last section of her current book is an expansion of this search.

What each of these architects shares is a deep concern for the tensions in their work: between public and private, inside and out, man and city. Portzamparc’s Cite de la Musique--which sits at the edge of Paris’ Parc de la Villette--is organized around an enclosed, curling street. An oval concert hall sits at the center, while a small museum, a library and apartments wrap around its outer edge. The building is literally woven into the city.

If this architecture is revolutionary, that revolution has largely gone unnoticed. There are no manifestoes here. The work does not have the universal pretensions of early Modernism. Instead, the work is a deep criticism of that false utopianism, one that is perhaps more sensitive to its surroundings. Modernism here has been altered to fit its context, both social and physical.

As Huxtable puts it: “Unlike the modernist revolution, this radical work does not build its strengths by breaking with the past, but, more like the Renaissance, transforms its sources through a brilliant synthesis, with far-reaching influence and effect.”

There are, of course, enemies along the way. Some architects--seemingly troubled by their own marginality--have descended into a sort of self-indulgent nihilism. Of those, Peter Eisenman is the most conspicuous: His obscure aesthetic exercises--where corridors lead nowhere and columns support nothing--are meant to shock and confuse. In the end, he simply makes himself more marginal and irrelevant.

For Huxtable, the point is not that the work is obscure but that it shuns everything that makes architecture important. “We are being told,” Huxtable writes, “that it has become more important for architecture to be than to serve, to send messages than to fill needs, to exist as an art object in itself than to be integrated through its art into the rich and complex totality of life and use that makes this the most far-reaching art of all.”

Of course, Eisenman--nihilist or not--is not the only architect feeling marginal these days. The real question is how deep a cultural impact the new architecture will have. Architects increasingly feel pressure to compete with the theatrics of our new virtual world, with Disney’s animation shops. They work in a field that demands patience and that can be understood only over time. And they are faced with a public that is rarely willing to take the time to make these distinctions.

Huxtable has no answer here. She is simply determined--like a Labrador puppy with a slipper in its mouth--to hold on. Tirelessly, she takes you back to the buildings themselves: to the reasons they work or fail. And that, in the end, is the point. That she can continue at all is a testament to a deeply optimistic spirit, a spirit that refuses to accept that we cannot do better. Read it and hope.