Archinect - News

Architecture critic Mark Lamster on the inaccessible trope 'plaguing new buildings'

2024-05-22T18:43:00-04:00

Over the past decade or so, bleacher stairs have become a ubiquitous marker of contemporary public architecture. It’s time for the trend to stop. Its subsequent proliferation serves as a good example of how avant-garde design, or at least a consumerist version of it, filters down to the mainstream. The broader point is that architects need to be more inventive as they plan new public spaces, and their patrons need to demand that those spaces are accessible for the entire population.

The ubiquitous “bleacher stair” feature can be seen in designs for the Studio Museum of Harlem, Perez Art Museum Miami, and the new Gilder Center at the American Museum of Natural History (just by my count) and can be traced to Rem Koolhaas’ design for Prada’s NYC flagship in 2001, says architecture critic Mark Lamster in a look around Dallas. (He later mentions SOM’s new Schwarzman College of Computing for MIT as a positive adaptation of the trend.)

Interestingly, architect and disability advocate David Gissen tells him, “I think a giant mattress would be a more appropriate element with which to gather people together. Many disabled people have called for cities to re-imagine rest as a public good, and I think it is important that we explore the possibilities.”

Other critics have begun taking note elsewhere. How refreshing it is still to see criticism include a discussion like this that doesn’t expressly encourage “bad building.”

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Architecture critic Mark Lamster proposes a new pedestrian memorial park for Dallas

2020-01-29T13:16:00-05:00

In a recent column for The Dallas Morning News, architecture critic Mark Lamster proposes a new pedestrian-oriented vision for the district surrounding Dealey Plaza, where President John F. Kennedy was murdered, and where the Dallas authorities are currently planning a new municipal memorial for the victims of racial violence. The memorial will be set in Martyrs Park, a grassy, triangular knoll surrounded on all sides by highway infrastructure and roads.

"Make no mistake: The geography of Dallas is a geography of race," Lamster writes, highlighting that historically speaking, "systematic discrimination forced African Americans into the least desirable spaces of the city—areas prone to flooding, near industry, caught on the wrong side of train tracks and highways, and always ripe for appropriation if and when the need arose" and that the same logic is currently at play with regards to the location of the proposed Martyrs Park memorial.

Satellite view of Dealey Plaza and Martyrs Park ...

The Man in the Glass House: new Philip Johnson biography traces the architect's Fascist past

2018-12-17T18:37:00-05:00

In “The Man in the Glass House,” Mark Lamster’s brisk, clear-eyed new biography of Johnson, we are asked to contemplate why the impresario of twentieth-century architecture descended into such a morass of far-right politics—and how, given the depths to which he fell, he managed to clamber his way not just out of it, but to the top. [...] Johnson managed to abjure his past and, on the march toward an exceptionally successful career, leave it behind.

The New Yorker reviews the new Philip Johnson biography, The Man in the Glass House by architecture critic and professor Mark Lamster, and examines how Johnson eagerly embraced Fascism before WWII and still rose to great fame as America's iconic 20th-century architect.

"Indeed, it is difficult to think of an American as successful as Johnson who indulged a love for Fascism as ardently and as openly," writes Nikil Saval in his The New Yorker piece. "His design for Father Coughlin’s rally had been inspired by his tours of Italian Fascist architecture—though the white stage was drywall, it was meant to look like marble—and, critically, by the 'febrile excitement' that attended his visit to a National Socialist youth event in Potsdam, in 1932."

Lynching memorial heralded as greatest 21st Century American architectural achievement

2018-08-30T15:19:00-04:00

These conjoined entities are the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the latter more commonly identified as a memorial to the victims of lynching. They are both extraordinary, though it is the second that behooves a pilgrimage. To my mind, it is the single greatest work of American architecture of the 21st century, and the most successful memorial design since the 1982 debut of Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which opened to the public this past April, is the first memorial dedicated to the victims of lynching and racial prejudice in the US. The design, a collaborative effort between MASS Design Group and the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), was recently acclaimed by architecture critic Mark Lamster as "the single greatest work of American architecture of the 21st century."

National Memorial for Peace and Justice by MASS Design Group, located in Montgomery, AL. Image: Equal Justice Initiative.

An investigation by the EJI documented over 4,400 lynchings between 1877 and 1950. Lamster upholds the memorial's design for its ability to convey the devastating reality of this number in a physically powerful experience.

Architecture critic Mark Lamster on the manipulative design of CVS Pharmacy stores

2018-07-12T15:21:00-04:00

[T]hough in practice CVS is context agnostic: A CVS looks like a CVS no matter where it is. It is a structure without character or distinction, and to walk along such a building is an unpleasant experience that degrades pedestrian life, the civic space and all the other properties around it.

Architecture critic Mark Lamster of The Dallas Morning News gives his two cents on why CVS Pharmacy, America's largest pharmacy chain, should rethink the “manipulative designs” of their retail stores, describing it as a case of “urban malpractice by chain retailers”.

“As a CVS customer, I would like to see the company do a better job of embracing the city on which it depends [...],” Lamster writes in the piece. “In areas where there is a growing pedestrianism, where the city is discovering a new walkability, it needs to rethink its designs.”