Archinect - News

Blair Kamin: ‘Writer underwriting writer’

2024-10-24T17:59:00-04:00

The [Chicago] Tribune, which had been reducing staff and budgets for years before Alden Global Capital accelerated the process with its May 2021 purchase of Tribune Publishing, did not replace Kamin, just as it did not replace several other culture writers who left the paper. So the retired critic took matters into his own hands.

We covered the debut of the Windy City’s newest critic Edward Keegan back in August along with the restart of work on 400 Lake Shore Drive. His position is being funded by Blair Kamin after Kamin stepped aside in January 2021. He explains the situation to Northwestern's vaunted J-school's Local News Initiative blog.

"I decided that if initially they weren’t going to make a grant, that I would make a grant myself to do this," he tells of his personal philanthropy. "But it’s complicated, because when you have a so-called donor-advised fund, you can’t give money legally to a for-profit enterprise. So you need to find a nonprofit to give the money to, and they, in turn, will give the money to the for-profit. So it took forever going through a variety of possibilities."

When Facebook and Instagram went dark, architecture Twitter was there for the laughs

2021-10-05T11:46:00-04:00

In my opinion, remembering what it was like before social media and high-speed internet access is a gift. The early days of social media barely resemble the landscape of how impressionable and profit-driven it is today. Data privacy wasn't considered "a thing," and promoting a product or service back then was influential thanks to television, radio, and print media. However, when social media titans Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp went down, many came flooding back to Twitter to stay connected. Thanks to this 6-hour social media outage, 'architecture Twitter' was there to express what many of us were thinking.

Social media is defined as "forms of electronic communication (such as websites for social networking and microblogging) through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content (such as videos)." Today, this term has become synonymous with platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, and Twitter to name a few...

Kristen Richards, founder of architecture online news source ArchNewsNow, has passed away at 69

2021-07-02T17:29:00-04:00

For those who knew Kristen Richards, her presence within the architecture industry was a primary example of an individual who championed architecture. As a renowned writer, editor, photographer, and architecture advocate, she's responsible for creating ArchNewsNow (ANN) as its Co-founder and Editor-in-Chief. While she's attributed part of ANN's success to the collaborative efforts of her husband, software engineer George Yates, ANN has served as a website dedicated to delivering "the most comprehensive coverage of international news, projects, and events in the world of architecture and design." This morning Richards' husband shared with Fred A. Bernstein of the Architectural Record that the cause of her passing was due to cancer.

From February 2002, when the platform first launched, Richards dedicated her time reading and collecting architecture news, projects, and resources from various AEC platforms to curate a "daily dispatch" described by Bernstein. After learning of her passi...