General
Pilar Viladas Dies at 70; Journalist Chronicled Trends in Design
Schooled in art history, she brought both authority and a human perspective to her writing and editing for Architectural Digest, HG, The Times and other publications.
Pilar Viladas, a veteran writer and editor whose human touch and encyclopedic knowledge of architecture, design and art history gave her work a quiet authority, died on March 15 at a hospital near her home in Southbury, Conn. She was 70.
The cause was amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, her sister Luisa Viladas said.
Starting at Interiors magazine, a trade publication, in 1979, Ms. Viladas’s decades-long career traced the whipsaw design trends of the past half-century, including the arch whimsy of the Memphis movement in early 1980s Italy, the gilded excesses of late-1980s interiors, the minimalism of the ’90s and the swaggering era of star architects at the turn of the last millennium.
Ms. Viladas was an editor at Progressive Architecture, HG and The New York Times Magazine, and a contributor to Town & Country and Architectural Digest, among many other magazines that documented, with anthropological zest, the totems of privilege and lives well lived. But Ms. Viladas wasn’t interested in fads or fetishes, although she noted them with amusement. Her taste was for enduring expressions of good design.
Holly Brubach, a former style director of The Times Magazine, hired her in 1997, after Ms. Viladas had completed a Loeb Fellowship in advanced environmental studies at Harvard.
