The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) is the short title of United States ( ), codified at et seq., signed into law on July 26, 1990 by President George H. W. Bush. The ADA is a wide-ranging civil rights law that prohibits, under certain circumstances, discrimination based on disability. It affords similar protections against discrimination to Americans with disabilities as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which made discrimination based on race, religion, sex, national origin, and other characteristics illegal. Disability is defined as "a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits a major life activity." The determination of whether any particular condition is considered a disability is made on a case by case basis. Certain specific conditions are excluded as disabilities, such as current substance abusers. Title I of the ADA was found unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court in the case of Board of Trustees of the University of Alabama v. Garrett as violating the states' Eleventh Amendment to the United States Constitution sovereign immunity rights insofar as it allowed the states to be sued for money damages.

Ada Louise (Landman) Huxtable (b. March 14 1921, in New York, NY) is an architecture critic and writer on architecture. In 1970 she was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for "distinguished criticism." Her father, Louis, worked in New Zealand at the Department of Inland Revenue; her mother, Sonja, was also an accountant at the Inland Revenue. She has a brother, Johan.

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 1942-50. She served as Curatorial Assistant for Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from 1946-50. She was a contributing editor to Progressive Architecture and Art in America from 1950-63 before being named the first architecture critic at The New York Times, a post she held from 1963-82. She has received grants from the Graham Foundation for a number of projects, including the book "Will They Ever Finish Bruckner Boulevard?".

She is currently the architecture critic for The Wall Street Journal.

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!" (Costonis,1989)

Carter Wiseman writes, "Huxtable's insistence on intellectual rigor and high design standards made her the conscience of the national architectural community." (Wiseman, 2000)

She has written over ten books on architecture, including a 2004 biography of Frank Lloyd Wright for the Penguin Lives series.