Archinect - News

Rowan Moore declares an aversion to Heatherwick’s London BT Tower hospitality makeover

2024-02-27T20:05:00-05:00

Its sale, for £275m, by BT to a hotel group, if it gives the tower a secure future, is welcome. I’m more troubled by the reports that the designer Thomas Heatherwick is to “repurpose” the building. His past work shows that he’s not one to leave well alone, but rather festoon structures with over-sized flower-pots and look-at-me swirling shapes. One can only hope that he discovers some restraint. The BT Tower is already an icon. It’s perfect. Let it be.

Readers will remember the critic's jabs at Heatherwick last fall after the publication of his new treatise on architecture and mental health, wherein Moore declared “an outbreak of shallow wannabe Gaudís” will follow in tow should the call-to-action be adopted.

That provocation isn't the first or even second time Moore has harshed the Vessel designer's creative schemes for the capital. In its defense, Heatherwick Studio has yet to detail any of the architectural extravagances Moore is lamenting after the project's February 22nd announcement.

Previously on Archinect: London’s BT Tower to be converted into a hotel by Heatherwick following MCR purchase

The conservation group C20 Society has offered its support for the £275 million project. If history is any guide, MCR's previous re-use of the TWA Hotel at JFK should steer the project away from any gauche gesturing and towards the Swinging London era anachronisms Moore champions nostalgically as "hopeful futurism."

...

‘A spectacle of reform’: Rowan Moore throws cold water on NEOM's motivation and sustainable claims

2023-12-05T11:49:00-05:00

Conceivably, as one architect speculates, The Line will be “a Noah’s Ark for the happy few”, a privileged AI-controlled citadel set in an inhospitable desert. Otherwise it will be clickbait visible from space, two vast and pointless lines of glass whose colossal construction cost would defeat the Vision 2030 plan to reduce dependency on oil revenues. What’s more likely is that it will never be completed.

The Observer architecture critic blasts The Line as nonsensical, poorly conceived, a youthful self-promotional tool of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and ultimately mocking the leader’s claims that it is “designed to protect and enhance nature” before predicting much of it will never be completed.

NEOM has recently unveiled a trio of resort concepts for the Gulf of Aqaba, bringing the total number of planned developments to seven. As Moore points out, many of the projects’ realization dates remain unpublicized — hazy as though a desert mirage.

Christopher Hawthorne goes 1-on-1 with Peter Zumthor in LACMA makeover preview

2023-10-06T13:12:00-04:00

Zumthor describes the wing as “a concrete sculpture,” with floors, walls and ceilings of exposed concrete. There will be bronze surrounds on the window and door openings throughout the building. When I visited Haldenstein, he and his colleagues were weighing final choices for the color palette of the walls at the base of the new wing, inside the various legs. “Lively, not dark colors, to give identity to different spaces,” he said. “And then you come up into this world of concrete.”

Ahead of next year’s anticipated completion, Peter Zumthor says his sculptural new David Geffen Galleries at LACMA will be bereft of the most recognizable traces of his Pritzker-winning design signature — a claim the museum's director Michael Govan then refuted. The man who once said, “the real core of all architectural work lies in the act of construction,” pointed to a faulty concrete pour at the outset and difficulties with the site’s foundation as factors that forced his design to be streamlined. The paring down of the overpass-like wing connector that covers Wilshire Boulevard was another point of contention.

Critics like Mimi Zeiger have described the project as “environmentally tone-deaf.” Hawthorne has thus far withheld any criticisms of his own, preferring to cover the project through a more explanatory journalism.

Construction on the new building is now 65% complete as of October 1st. The article mentioned the new wing may not be fully opened to the public until 2026.

...

Nordic 'citizen design critics' are gaining influence thanks to their online popularity

2023-08-07T18:07:00-04:00

Founded in Sweden in 2014 as a public Facebook group, [Architectural Uprising] is a collective of citizen design critics who object to what organizers call the “continued uglification” of developments in Nordic cities, and push for a return to classically informed design. [...] The movement’s size and persistence, however, has earned it a seat in the discourse. “When [historians] talk about architecture during these years, [the Architectural Uprising] will be part of that history”

A new report in Bloomberg tells of the staying power of social media-driven architectural criticism. Projects lambasted by the popular (mostly) Scandinavian group include Oslo’s new National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design by architect Klaus Schuwerk and estudio Herreros’ Munch Museum, which Oliver Wainwright also panned.

Its presence has apparently spurred Norwegian firm MAD Arkitektur’s concessions on the Sandakerveien 58 B/C renovation and other projects. Politicians in Norway have even begun reaching out for tacit endorsements in a turn mirroring the "ugly" debate in America concerning the design of federal buildings that has become a charge of late for Republicans in love with the concept of classicism in spite of its racist underpinnings and widely-critiqued past.

Michael Kimmelman looks for signs of hope in Penn Station’s proposed renewal

2023-07-07T13:17:00-04:00

The only thing everyone seems to know for certain is that nothing meaningful ever really happens to improve North America’s busiest and most miserable train hub, despite decades of demands and promises. Hope has long gone to die on the 6:50 to Secaucus. But now may actually be different.

Kimmelman complimented the new PAU/HOK/ASTM North America P3 plan as “the disruption needed to get Albany moving", and one that “lets daylight, dignity and circulatory logic replace the rat’s maze beneath Madison Square Garden.”

“ASTM’s architecture at this early stage is a little stiff and self-serious but it clearly conveys the all-important point that a gateway worthy of New York, and of the millions of working people who rely on it, needs to offer more than high ceilings, clear signage and hot bagels. It needs to be a source of public pride," he added.

Juxtaposed to this is the more bland but Albany-backed MTA plan (with drawings from FXCollaborative) whose full details won’t be unveiled until next year. The West Side native says the scheme presents a vexing problem over the involvement of Madison Square Garden, which he predicts would lead to crippling lawsuits if the MTA's adversarial position remains unchanged.

Kate Wagner goes from McMansion Hell to critic at The Nation

2023-07-03T12:41:00-04:00

The Nation, America’s leading source of progressive politics and culture, today named Kate Wagner (@mcmansionhell) to its masthead as architecture correspondent. Best known as the brains behind the brilliant and satirical architecture blog, “”McMansion Hell,” and following a wildly successful stint as a Nation guest columnist earlier this year, Wagner will contribute monthly commentary on architecture and the built environment—but not as always conventionally understood.

Wagner succeeds Michael Sorkin, who died in 2020. The new correspondent said the post is “an ideal perch for me to explain how everything we see and everything we build is political.” She is now one of a select coterie of dedicated critics writing for American publications, including Michael Kimmelman, Lee Bey, Carolina A. Miranda, Ingra Safron, and Robert Campbell. Wagner's personal account of her ascent from the widely-acclaimed blog, which she founded in 2016, can also be found here via The Baffler.

Previously on Archinect: Bro, Do You Even Quoin? A conversation with McMansion Hell's Kate Wagner

Here’s what the critics had to say about Lina Ghotmeh's Serpentine Pavilion

2023-06-17T04:00:00-04:00

Reactions in the UK are pouring in after the opening week of Lina Ghotmeh's 2023 Serpentine Pavilion in London’s Kensington Gardens.

The annual installation’s 22nd overall edition features the Lebanese-born Parisian designers palm leaf-shaped timber À table pavilion, which encases a café and communal dining table that references Malian Toguna huts while "inviting us to convene, sit down, think, share, and celebrate exchanges."

Oliver Wainwright got the press’ first crack on June 5, calling it a “symphony of timber” and “one of the most modest, low-lying pavilions of the programme so far" before complimenting its delicate site-responsiveness and the apparent lightness of its materials. “From the aerial vantage point of a drone, it is an elegant sight. It floats like a paper parasol, unfurled in a clearing between the trees, its sharply creased zigzag roof making it look as if it could be folded up and carried off at any minute,” he wrote. “It conjures all the metaphors of palm leave...

'Whats the point of all this?' Patrik Schumacher's blistering critique of the Venice Architecture Biennale stirs debate

2023-05-23T17:51:00-04:00

A new Facebook post from Patrik Schumacher critical of the newly-opened 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale is gaining traction after the Zaha Hadid Architects Principal expressed his concerns over the apparent lack of architectural content in the Lesley Lokko-curated exhibition, whose theme touches on Afrofuturism, the environmental crisis, and identity.

In a fourteen-paragraph invective titled “Venice Biennale Blues,” Schumacher decried the Biennale as being “mislabeled,” claiming that “What we are witnessing here is the discursive self-annihilation of the discipline.”

Schumacher, who is himself a co-curator of this year's Venice Virtual Pavilion, claimed to visit twelve total pavilions without seeing anything related to architecture before lamenting the pavilions and themed exhibitions as being awash in “documentary-style intellectual-artistic allusions to moral issues, garnished with pretentious critical-speak.”

Perhaps controversially, Schumacher lambasted the American pavilion a...

Kate Wagner says McMansions have become a permanent staple of the American scene

2023-05-17T19:50:00-04:00

I started the blog McMansion Hell to document—and deride—the endless cosmetic variations of this uniquely American form of architectural blight. [...] I worry that I’ve actually reinforced the idea that McMansions are a relic of the recent past. In fact, there remains a certain allure to these seemingly soulless suburban developments [...] the McMansion is alive and well. Far from being a boom time fad, it has become a durable emblem of our American way of life.

Wagner says that, without noticing, the media’s focus on gentrification and the affordability of cities has meant that the rise of “modern farmhouses” and other forms of McMansions following the end of the great recession has gone largely unscrutinized. She claims these and other designs occupy a place between high design and vernacular architecture before finally predicting their continued dominance over the residential market owing to our penchant for consumerist displays.

"One day the McMansion, once a token of financial tomfoolery, will instead epitomize our nihilistic, environmental death drive," she writes in The Baffler. "More than half a century of urban planning prioritizing sprawl has gotten us to where we are now: choked by endless freeways, benumbed by carbon-copy strip malls, secluded in catchpenny houses with no sense of human scale."

A ‘ham-fisted ego trip’: Rowan Moore delves into Modi's divisive Central Vista project

2023-04-06T11:02:00-04:00

It is the centrepiece of the Central Vista Project, an ambitious plan to make over the city’s British-built administrative centre. Critics of the new building say that it is an unnecessary replacement of the existing parliament, that short cuts were taken with its procurement and the obtaining of permissions, and that there was minimal consultation with parliamentarians and the public.

The Prime Minister’s Bharatiya Janata Party has maintained the US$150M project is a “necessity” and expects its inauguration to take place soon after previously redying for a debut by the end of October.

Modi appeared encouraged on a “surprise” hour-long site visit last Thursday. The more modernized four-story facility will offer 40 square meters of office space to each of India’s 545 parliament members in addition to holding a lounge, dining areas, library, 5,000-piece art collection, and constitution hall meant to honor its now 75 years of independence.

Oliver Wainwright reviews Eric Owen Moss' "menacing" (W)RAPPER office tower

2023-03-20T14:28:00-04:00

The result is a menacing thing, cranking up Moss’s cyberpunk tendencies to new high-octane levels. If ever Hollywood needs a villainous headquarters for a dystopian petrol-guzzling empire, this will be first in line – with a carbon footprint to match.

The Guardian’s Oliver Wainwright spies the limits of LA-brand deconstructivism on a visit to Eric Owen Moss’ (W)RAPPER project in Culver City's Hayden Tract, an “eccentric” assembly of low-rise office buildings the critic says he has helped turn into a warped “exhibition of architectural experimentation.”

Image courtesy Google Street View (February 2023)

Moss brags about the rubberband-like steel exoskeleton that wraps the glass in the city’s second-tallest building enabling a column-free interior while enhancing the imposed verticality and is supposedly inspired by William Butler Yeats and Gustave Courbet, among many other crisscrossing intellectual references. Wainwright, unfazed, drops the dime on its poor sustainability bonafide (to which Moss returns “Is that the only measure of architecture now?”) before critiquing the greatly obstructed views and questioning the promise of so-called “creative office” designs.

Related on Archinect: Eric Owen Moss-designed (W)RAPPER tower has t...

The lessons we’re still ‘Learning from Las Vegas’ after 50 years

2023-01-27T16:32:00-05:00

What struck me when I went back to reread the book is how deliberately it works to collapse the distance, and therefore the distinction, between enthusiasm and skepticism, and ultimately between documentation and critique. Above all, “Learning from Las Vegas” argues for a curious and open-minded anti-utopianism, for understanding cities as they are rather than how planners wish they might be—and then using that knowledge, systematically and patiently won, as the basis for new architecture.

Yale’s new visiting critic Christopher Hawthorne considers the lasting inspirational qualities and history of Steven Izenour, Denise Scott Brown, and Robert Venturi's seminal 1972 text, whose origins can be traced to a studio the young newlyweds taught in New Haven in the fall of 1968. Hawthrone places it alongside Reynar Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies — published the year before — in an antiquated canon but says its impartial tone should be emulated by a new generation of high-minded designers hoping to dismantle or improve the pernicious social and environmental ramparts of our young century.

Related three-part feature series on Archinect: Learning from 'Learning from Las Vegas' with Denise Scott Brown, Part 1: The Foundation; Part 2: Pedagogy; Part 3: Research

“'To tear down Paris and begin again' is not so far, in spirit, from the current mood, even if the political goals of many young architects are quite different from those of the right-leaning Le Co...

'Shop of horrors': Oliver Wainwright reviews Morphosis' newly-opened Orange County Museum of Art

2022-12-13T17:20:00-05:00

Nowhere is the gulf between digital promise and physical fact more spectacularly evident than at the new Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) in California [...] Almost a generation in the making, it feels like the final death rattle of a bygone age, the last gasp of an era preoccupied with novel form for form’s sake. Perhaps it is fitting that this flimsy, paper-thin architecture is held together with tape.

The Guardian critic paid a visit to the new museum building to offer a thoroughly dejecting assessment based on what he observed to be a disorienting entrance, confounding wayfinding system, atrium configuration, and defective cladding panels made necessary by a “performative shell” that has come to be an “expensive and elaborate” trope of its designers.

Morphosis partner-in-charge Brandon Welling claimed the firm was pushed into its October completion date and is still going through its punch list of small details that will complete the design, which Wainwright called a “$94 [million] hymn to the difference between render and reality.”

“I have no interest in completing projects,” says Thom Mayne - too bad for the Orange County Museum of Art https://t.co/RIvHSkUuZE pic.twitter.com/RdYTpOSVSo
— Olly Wainwright (@ollywainwright) December 13, 2022

Builders for the project pinned some of the issues on supply chain delays and said some of the hastily assembled stopgaps like tape and sof...

Selldorf unveils revised Sainsbury Wing plan in response to critical backlash

2022-10-21T09:00:00-04:00

Selldorf Architects has released a revised plan for the controversial overhaul of the Sainsbury Wing at London’s National Gallery following a torrent of criticism that has grown online after their initial designs were unveiled this summer.

The Architects’ Journal is reporting on the revisions, which appear to have entailed the retention of certain ground floor elements in the lobby and changes to the originally proposed placement of existing structural columns, as well as to the materials used in the balustrade and lobby walls.

Image courtesy Selldorf Architects

"I don't think of these changes as a compromise. I see them as a welcome development," Annabelle Selldorf told AJ. "In the resubmitted plans, much more of the existing fabric will remain, creating a clearer dialogue with the original building. And yet the original goals remain intact."

Image courtesy Selldorf Architects

"I took from this reaction hat people truly care about the building. And when when you perceive that, you ha...

Criticism of the 2022 Stirling Prize adds another wrinkle ahead of next week's announcement

2022-10-05T17:06:00-04:00

The debate surrounding sustainability and the Stirling Prize is heating up again in the lead-up to RIBA’s October 13th announcement of the coveted annual award.

Just eight weeks after the Institute's new president Muyiwa Oki was swept into office on a platform of change, UK-based critic Kunle Barker took to the Architects’ Journal to answer some of the organization’s more vocal critics, including the group Architects’ Climate Action Network (or ACAN), who have derided the so-called “greenwashing” presented in certain shortlisted projects and, they say, promoted tacitly by RIBA’s decision to endorse them.

Orchard Gardens, another shortlist project that drew criticism. Image: Enrique Verdugo.

“ACAN is correct on all points. However, I’m not sure its criticism has been levelled at the right party,” he wrote, stating that “we have to remember that the Stirling Prize is ostensibly an architecture competition and not a sustainability one.”

“It is impractical and unrealistic to suddenly ex...

Don't expect much from King Charles' reign architecturally, these two of his constituent critics say

2022-09-26T12:25:00-04:00

Poundbury, Paisley and Perspectives all ultimately failed to conquer the complex commercial and political challenges they faced. Their royal patron’s attempts to create human-centred townscapes have led to car-dominated suburbs. His efforts to uplift grand historic buildings have carved them into dreary flats. Our King is someone who sees the right problems but, ensconced in the very establishment that prevents meaningful solutions, he can only meddle around the edges of effecting real change.

The new British King is memorably the originator of the panned Poundbury estate that has failed to fall in line with its stated goals towards sustainability and car-free pedestrian orientation, according to Phineas Harper. He thinks the scion is hemmed in by a stolid commercial banking system and arcane land ownership laws and that class differences have otherwise made Charles' ability to gain perspective on the needs of his constituents otherwise impossible. As the Open City director sees it: “His view of society, as of architecture, is restricted to what can be seen from the tinted window of a chauffeured car.”

Previously on Archinect: Richard Rogers challenges Prince Charles to public debate over built environment

Meanwhile, in a different corner of the empire, new ArchitectureAU monthly critic Elizabeth Farrelly says she felt he “proved himself thoroughly unrepentant” during his time as Prince, citing his statements in support of traditionalism, and asking, “is he, as a constitut...

Oliver Wainwright explores the architectural history behind Saudi Arabia's planned The Line megacity

2022-09-13T09:00:00-04:00

It may now be seen as a dystopian nightmare, the far-flung folly of an autocrat desperate for global approval, but the idea of building a self-contained linear city has preoccupied the imaginations of architects and planners for generations. The Line might bill itself as a “never-before-seen approach to urbanisation”, but the principles behind it have been proposed many times over – though never successfully realised.

The Guardian critic writes that the outlandish NEOM project structure resembled a “habitable supercomputer” and cites a recent Bloomberg report that names Marvel Comics designer Olivier Pron as one of its many non-architect digital designers before pinning the massive project’s “ominous dystopian undertone” on Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman’s apparent penchant for cyberpunk aesthetics. “If ever there was an urban vision that embraced our end-of-days climate apocalypse,” he laments, “then this is it.”

Previously on Archinect: The Line, the largest part of Saudi Arabia’s ambitious NEOM project, looks like a total fantasy

Wainwright then turns to the architectural history books for further insights into the history of the linear megacity concept. Examples from a young Michael Graves/Peter Eisenman pairing, Superstudio, Kenzo Tange, Le Corbusier, Edgar Chambless, constructivist Mikhail Okhitovich, and 19th-century Spanish planner Arturo Soria y Mata, whom Wainwright claims invented the...

Carolina A. Miranda thinks Tom Wiscombe's new billboard should prompt a 'reckoning in architecture'

2022-08-25T17:09:00-04:00

Formally known as the Sunset Spectacular, it consists of a trio of massive steel panels that converge at a height of 67 feet, two of their surfaces draped in irregularly shaped digital screens bearing ads for tech overlords Amazon and Meta. If a game designer for “Halo” were to imagine a billboard, this is probably what it would look like. [...] There is an important story embedded in the design of the Sunset Spectacular. It has nothing to do with its forms.

Responding to the New York Times’ recent “puff piece” on embattled SCI-Arc professor Tom Wiscombe’s long-awaited Sunset Spectacular billboard in West Hollywood, critic Carolina A. Miranda offered a rather cutting take on Joseph Giovannini‘s “extra curious” failure to mention what has become a rather viral academic and professional controversy.

Previously on Archinect: Controversy at SCI-Arc over labor practices leads to faculty members placed on leave. Isolated incident or a wake-up call for the industry at large?

Wiscombe was the centerpiece of the recent investigation into student intern labor abuse at SCI-Arc and has been placed on administrative leave as a result of his alleged actions. “To many skeptics, it seemed as if the architectural establishment were intent on scrubbing the record clean,” Miranda wrote, citing the chorus of derision that has swelled on social media. “This whole episode also calls into question how critics (myself included) write about architecture.”

...

Rowan Moore issues a blow to the Selldorf-led Sainsbury Wing redevelopment

2022-06-23T09:00:00-04:00

The problem is that the proposed new work is something else altogether to Venturi and Scott Brown’s playfulness and personality. It has curving glass balustrades, white walls and oak-clad pillars, and expanses of plain paving outside. It is an architecture of near-emptiness, the default style of international art-world good taste.

Moore ran through the litany of changes Annabelle Selldorf is making in replacement of the current iteration’s “bum notes,” which the critic pinned on a rift between the original expansion's benefactors and what was then called Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates.

This is now the second Denise Scott Brown-designed museum that Selldorf has laid her (very capable) hands-on after the recently opened Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego revamp, which she said engendered a “greater clarity across the history of all the building types.” Moore, seizing on the difference in intrusion levels between the two similar projects, said “there could be more rapport between the current and the proposed and more cleverness and wit” before making a surprising turn to his own long-distant past.

Moore concluded, “by refusing to align themselves with any one architectural camp, trad...

UIC has named Florencia Rodriguez as its new director

2022-06-16T12:26:00-04:00

The University of Illinois Chicago’s School of Architecture now officially has a new leader following Wednesday’s announcement that editor, writer, and academic Florencia Rodriguez has been named its next director.

Rodriguez will step into the role beginning in August. A statement from the school promised her tenure would encapsulate a desire to “promote the school’s pursuit to liberate and install new forms of collective association and material arrangement through all media of architectural design and research.”

A native Argentinian, Rodriguez comes to the position having lectured and taught theory courses at Boston Architectural College, Universidad del Litoral, and ITESM. Before moving to her post at Harvard GSD, she was a visiting professor at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella’s School of Architecture and Universidad de Palermo. She was a Loeb Fellow in 2013 and pursued her own degrees in architecture at the Universidad de Belgrano between 1993 and 2000.

Rodriguez is known for ...

Oliver Wainwright has seen this movie before with Heatherwick’s Tree of Trees installation

2022-06-01T17:40:00-04:00

Heatherwick himself has become the puckish poster boy for the current bout of arboreal mania. He has even incorporated his trademark plant-pots-on-sticks into a range of office furniture. If in doubt, the studio mantra seems to go – just smother the design with a garnish of greenery.

The Guardian critic echoed colleague Rowan Moore's derisive critique of Heatherwick’s continued “abuse of metaphors” published in late April and added his own criticism that the 350-tree structure, just like the MVRDV-designed Marble Arch Mound, offers “yet another example of the recent fetish among certain architects and designers for conjuring a cartoonish version of nature, suspending shrubbery and balancing trees in ways that make the plants look decidedly unhappy to be there.”

Previously on Archinect: An 'abuse of metaphors': Rowan Moore on Thomas Heatherwick’s tree-inspired jubilee design (and other UK public monument debates)

Spike Lee re-edits HBO series following backlash over inclusion of 9/11 conspiracy theorists

2021-08-26T15:17:00-04:00

Facing mounting criticism for spotlighting conspiracy theorists in his new HBO documentary series about the Sept. 11 attacks on New York, the filmmaker Spike Lee said Wednesday that he was re-editing the final episode.

The final episode of Lee’s four-part docuseries “NYC Epicenters 9/11-2021½,” which explores New York’s greatest challenges in the 21st century, including the attacks on 9/11 and the COVID-19 pandemic, featured members of the conspiracy organization Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, who believe the World Trade Center was destroyed by a controlled demolition. The filmmaker faced criticism and backlash over the group's inclusion in the show after it was made available for preview.

Critics stated that the episode appeared to balance the perspectives and even at times side with the perspectives of the conspiracy theorists.

Lee’s response in a statement to the media reads: “I’m Back In The Editing Room And Looking At The Eighth And Final Chapter Of NYC EPICENTERS 9/11➔2021½. I Respectfully Ask You To Hold Your Judgment Until You See The FINAL CUT.”

In a recent interview with The New York Times, Lee defends the inclusion of the conspiracy group stating, “I mean, I got questions. And...

Lee Bey reminds us an architecture critic can appear in many forms, even one of a famed film critic

2021-04-05T15:41:00-04:00

What defines an architecture critic? These past few months, the discourse surrounding what an architecture critic is, who they have been, and why this role needs to be re-evaluated has circulated across several publications and architecture circles. While several critics come to mind, both past and present, who exemplify the very best of what this role presents for the industry, there are a few individuals outside of the profession that architecture criticism might have needed.

WBEZ Chicago published Lee Bey's piece "Roger Ebert: An architecture critic, too" back in 2013. Throughout the article, Bey recounts his past conversations and memories with the famed film critic. Ebert's consistency and dedication to the "craft of criticism" were admired by many. Even during his final years, when illness befell him and eventually leading to his passing in 2013, Bey reminds us of Ebert's writing and architecture involvement. "He sounded the alarm against civic inattention, mercantile forces o...

How revolutionary are design proposals for homes of the future?

2020-12-08T14:48:00-05:00

What will homes of the future look like? According to a recent UK housing competition, Home of 2030, selected winners have an idea. However, are these ideas all that new? The Guardian's Oliver Wainwright unpacks these winning design proposals and explains, "according to the winning architects, most of the best ideas have been around for generations."

RIBA and the BRE organized the HOME of 2030 competition on behalf of government departments within the UK. The winning projects were asked to design "environmentally friendly homes that support people in leading independent, fulfilling lives as our society ages."

Connector Housing designed by Openstudio with Hoare Lea, LDA Design and Gardiner & Theobald are joint winners of the competition alongside igloo Regeneration. Image courtesy of OpenStudio/Home2030

Wainwright chats with Openstudio's Jennifer Beningfield to unpack their project Connector Housing. Beningfield explains, "You can't get much more flexible and adaptable than the Georg...

Does a critique of Austin's 1980s skyline hold up?

2019-12-06T12:56:00-05:00

Was Postmodernism ever popular? In 1986, at the height of the Po-Mo era, Newsweek's art and architecture critic Douglas Davis wrote a scathing review of Austin's newly built-up skyline, pinpointing his "disgust" towards the “riot of wretched excess” symbolized by the new Postmodern style buildings that filled the downtown area during that time. James Rambin of Towers provides us with a reminder of Davis' perspective, specifically regarding the One American Center, a tower designed by architects Morris-Aubry (the company merged with Dallas-based Huitt-Zollar in 2012) that is now known as 600 Congress.

Rambin shares an excerpt from Davis's 1986 critic: "By common consent, the old glass boxes were boring. But they were at least reticent. Their successors, in contrast, are often aggressively ugly, as unforgettable as bad dreams.”

One American Center now rebranded as 600 Congress. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Nearly 33 years later, however, downtown Austin and the buildings along ...

How do you critique a city? What is city criticism, and why is it important?

2019-10-29T11:18:00-04:00

Criticism: Everyone in architecture experiences it regularly. The importance of this consistent facet of the profession provides ongoing possibilities for discourse and improvement. However, like other areas where criticism plays a necessary part of establishing a significant impression or progression within society, it’s not always easy to have others detract or contradict the ideas embodied by your work.

Colin Marshall of the Guardian brings up a specific category within criticism that has particular relevance today, "the city critic." Marshall argues, "In our increasingly urban world, perhaps city criticism should be recognized as distinct and necessary." So, where does "city criticism" differ from "architecture criticism," and why should it be recognized as an integral part of understanding the built environment?

Jane Jacobs. Image via Wikipedia Commons.

Marshall speaks with critics and editors alike to help further understand and decipher what this distinct subject of criticis...

Is architecture notorious for praising bad design without reprimanding others?

2019-09-30T12:10:00-04:00

Where is architecture missing the mark when it comes to awarding praise to "successful" designs? In a recent piece by Charles Rosenblum from the Pittsburgh City Paper, he expresses concern for the lack of outside architectural critique from organizations like the AIA. "If we don't speak up, we are on track to get more."

Other than visual aesthetics, the notable architecture critic from Pittsburgh highlights the issues with specific organizations praising projects and design proposals that poorly execute a good design. Rosenblum points out variables such as affordability, landscape, traffic, and parking are no longer in the discussion when assessing and awarding projects.

"Why are the designers proposing a kind of building that has been discredited nationally when better design approaches are available? Why does the profession praise its achievers, but not self-police its laggards, hacks, and profiteers?" explains Rosenblum. "No one goes to a restaurant run by nice people if it has b...

Oliver Wainwright on rethinking the Serpentine Pavilion

2019-06-18T15:49:00-04:00

Ishigami’s structure is a striking object, but it could have been so much better, and it is a frustrating outcome in what has been a troubled year for the Serpentine. [...] After almost 20 years of commissioning novelty structures to host summer parties for sponsors, it feels like the format could do with a rethink and look beyond the bounds of the gallery’s garden, and the collectors’ estates where the structures end up.

A few days before the opening of the 2019 Serpentine Pavilion, Oliver Wainwright of The Guardian wrote a piece calling for the Serpentine Galleries to consider rethinking the format of the yearly Serpentine Pavilion program (like appointing the architects earlier, for starters). It's been a rough year wrought with controversy for the Serpentine — from Junya Ishigami's practice being criticized for employing unpaid interns, to the troubles of working with a tight construction schedule for highly conceptual pavilion designs (and it shows in this year's pavilion), to the sudden resignation of the gallery's CEO Yana Peel.

2019 Serpentine Pavilion architect Junya Ishigami draws criticism for unpaid internships in Japan

2019-03-22T16:01:00-04:00

A few weeks after being commissioned to design the 2019 Serpentine Pavilion, Junya Ishigami + Associates and the Serpentine Galleries are now under fire after it emerged that the big-name firm uses unpaid interns in Japan, the Architects' Journal reported today.

An email sent by Junya Ishigami + Associates in response to a student seeking an internship opportunity lists a set of “conditions”, which include unpaid interns having to provide their own software and computer equipment, and working Monday-Saturday from 11 a.m. to midnight for a period of at least 8-12 weeks. Artist/designer Adam Nathaniel Furman tweeted a screenshot of the email last week...

Though controversial in the UK, unpaid internships are still common practice in Japan. Before opening his own practice, Ishigami worked for SANAA — who has also been criticized in the past for not paying their interns — until 2004.

According to the Architects' Journal, the Serpentine Gallery said “it was not aware the practice used ...

Hawthorne and Wagner on Robert Venturi's theory impact

2018-10-01T14:01:00-04:00

The idea of the “both-and” suggested a new pluralism, and maybe a new tolerance, in architecture. But the phrase turned out to have its limits. To the extent that Venturi was making an argument in favor of a kind of big-tent populism in architecture, it was a space for new styles instead of new voices, new forms rather than new people. In fact, tucked inside Complexity and Contradiction is an argument for a renewed insularity in the profession [...].

Christoper Hawthorne, former LA Times architecture critic and now Design Officer for the City of Los Angeles, dissects Robert Venturi's 1966 book, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (which famously scoffs at the Miessian classical Modernism with the "less is a bore" tagline), and argues in his piece in The Atlantic that the array of new choices the book offered also limited architecture's broader access to the public and diversity in the profession.

Meanwhile in another publication of the Atlantic network, McMansion Hell blogger Kate Wagner is out with a CityLab article on how Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour's 1972 Learning from Las Vegas influenced an entire generation of architects, and her personally: "I came from Anywhere, U.S.A., far, far away from any great works of architecture," she writes. "Venturi’s elevation of everyday buildings made me feel seen, made me feel like the places I had observed, and my appreciation for them, were valid and me...