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Renowned architectural critic and historian Joseph Rykwert passes away aged 98

2024-11-08T10:01:00-05:00

British architectural historian Joseph Rykwert has died. The influential academic and writer who was considered to be a leading critical voice of his generation, taking aim at the banality of modernism and its encroachments on the urban sphere, lived to be 98 according to his New York Times obituary.

Rykwert was the 2014 RIBA Royal Gold Medal for Architecture winner and author of more than a dozen texts on architecture and design. He also enjoyed a long and successful tenure as the Paul Philippe Cret Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design. His death follows the passing of colleagues Anthony Vidler and Jean-Louis Cohen last year.

Nikil Saval, writer and architecture critic, is now a Pennsylvania state senator

2020-11-05T11:50:00-05:00

Pennsylvania’s first state senate district, which includes most of South Philadelphia, now has an architecture critic as a representative. Nikil Saval...former editor of the literary magazine n+1, New York Times contributor, author of Cubed: Secret History of the Workplace, and community organizer — is replacing Larry Farnese Jr. a Democrat who has been state senator since 2009. He is also the first Asian American to be elected to Pennsylvania’s senate.

Curbed's Diana Budds writes: "We at Curbed are generally in favor of putting architecture and design writers in positions of power, and hope for greatness. Under Saval’s leadership, perhaps government architecture can truly become great again."

The Crumple and the Scrape: Two Archi-Textures in the Mode of Queer Gender

2020-03-05T20:59:00-05:00

Texture is the condition of possibility through which our bodies meet environments; like gender in its relationality, texture is palpable only in becoming. So did the blue carpet in my childhood bedroom enmesh gender between my toes? And if we alter texture — including how we talk about it — might we transform gender in both minute and brash ways?

Whether or not they realize it, architecture critics generally build a body into their writings. And we must allow ourselves, and others, to write bodies other than cis, straight, white, able ones into the affect of our analyses. Changing words — say, crafting new architectural metaphors for trans and queer embodiments — can alter our perceptions of bodies and buildings alike.

Lucas Crawford, the latest recipient of the Arcus/Places Prize for innovative public scholarship on gender, sexuality, and the built environment, explores how the language of architectural criticism influences the ways that we discuss the design of built space.

The Arcus/Places Prize is an ongoing collaboration between Places Journal and the Diversity Platforms Committee of the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley.

Michael Kimmelman on the future of jails in NYC

2019-12-19T19:29:00-05:00

Will New York’s new jails be places where visiting families feel welcome? Will the jails provide space for police officers and medical staff to train together? For detainees to confer with lawyers? For therapeutic assistance and recreation? Outside as well as inside, will they be scaled to their surroundings, will the city be open to other sites and will the buildings architecturally represent, as borough landmarks, our civic ideals and values?

Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic for The New York Times, provides an spirited overview of the ongoing developments in New York City regarding the planned decommissioning and relocation of the prison facilities located on Rikers Island. The large-scale infrastructure and architecture practice AECOM was recently selected to design four high-rise replacement facilities that are to be located one per borough (except on Staten Island).

Attempting to place architects at the center of the debate, Kimmelman writes, "If we’re going to keep building jails, can new architecture help heal what ails the penal system? Jails are works of architecture, after all."

Photographer discovers Chicago's hidden modernist gems along Peterson Avenue

2018-09-18T15:20:00-04:00

The buildings aren’t the work of celebrated modernist architects such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe or Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. They bear no resemblance to the towering glass and steel monuments to postwar rationalism that you see downtown. They house doctors’ offices and dry cleaners, furniture stores and accounting firms. Some are vacant, their prim hedges and topiary gone to seed.

Architectural photographer and critic Lee Bey discovered a group of quirky modernist buildings on a section of Chicago's Peterson Ave. Overlooked and unkempt, these low-rise gems draw from Southern California's modernist vernacular prompting an unexpected, sunny and 60's nostalgia on the Northwest Side of the city. Check out these hidden structures documented here.

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.

Tom Wolfe, innovative journalist and critic of modern architecture, dies at 88

2018-05-16T15:31:00-04:00

“From Bauhaus to Our House,” Mr. Wolfe attacked modern architecture and what he saw as its determination to put dogma before buildings. Published in 1981, it met with the same derisive response from critics. “The problem, I think,” Paul Goldberger wrote in The Times Book Review, “is that Tom Wolfe has no eye.”

Tom Wolfe, an innovative journalist and novelist, died on Monday in Manhattan at the age of 88. Wolf lived in New York since joining The New York Herald Tribune as a reporter in 1962, and went on to influence what is known as New Journalism. Inciting hostile reactions to some of his work, Wolf notably condemned modern architecture receiving harsh backlash from critics.

"Accidental minimalism": An architecture critic's take on the Trump border wall

2018-01-03T15:48:00-05:00

The slabs in front of me seemed at once the most and least architectural objects I’d ever seen. They were banal and startling, full and empty of meaning. Here were the techniques of Land Art, medieval construction, marketing and promotion, architectural exhibition and the new nativism rolled uncomfortably if somehow inevitably into one.

LA Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne takes a trip down to the U.S.-Mexican border in San Diego to attempt the challenge of critiquing Trump's border wall prototypes, "alternating bands of substance and absence, aspiration and impossibility".

Image: U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Every City Needs a Crank; A conversation with architecture critic Inga Saffron

2017-08-17T20:07:00-04:00

This week we're joined by Inga Saffron, the Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer. If you haven't read her latest piece on Henry Wilcots, the relatively unknown architect responsible for finishing Louis Kahn's masterpiece in Dhaka, go read it now. We talk with Inga about her experience meeting with Wilcots, architecture criticism pre and post-internet, Philadelphia and more.

Photo from 1970 of Wilcots and Kahn discussing the roof structure of the National Assembly building in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

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Within and Without Architecture

2017-01-11T17:36:00-05:00

The imaginative possibilities of miniature things lie not in their being shrunken versions of a larger thing. The world of the miniature opens to reveal a secret life.

Sometimes you encounter a thing that is not “properly” architectural, but which yet has something profound to say about the discipline. In her latest article for Places, columnist Naomi Stead is drawn by a cartoon from The New Yorker to consider the relationships between the miniature, the uncanny, and mise en abyme in architecture.

Blair Kamin's tempestuous relationship with Donald Trump

2016-10-07T17:38:00-04:00

Over the years, Trump has courted me, comforted me, criticized me and sent me a handful of sometimes-fawning letters and notes. I saved the correspondence. Wouldn't you? [...] And the missives are telling. Combined with other things he's said and written, they show that Candidate Trump isn't all that different from Developer Trump. He remains a master media manipulator who can be charming, mercurial and vengeful. Only now he wants to be the most powerful man on earth.

In this relatively personal piece for the Tribune, architecture critic Blair Kamin recounts his tumultuous personal and professional relationship with Trump over 10+ years, talking (as developers and architecture critics do) about buildings.

Kamin explains that there were times when Trump was supportive (regarding a health issue), and praising of his criticism. But whenever the criticism didn't go Trump's way, he bucked at Kamin. Their back-and-forth frothed to a head in 2009, over Kamin's criticism of Trump's condo and hotel tower in Chicago—before it was emblazoned with the "TRUMP" sign:

"It's a good building," I said, praising the tower's glistening exterior but faulting its uninspired spire and riverfront bulk.

There was a pause.

"Good?" Trump said, sounding shocked. He had "sucked up" to me for all these years, he said, "and all I get is good?"

When Kamin did criticize the TRUMP signage in 2014, Trump called Kamin "dopey" and "a lightweight". Trump lumps Goldberger and Kamin to...

Bjarke Ingels shouldn't be proud to have the Washington Redskins as a client, according to critic Philip Kennicott

2016-01-22T20:04:00-05:00

To understand how strange this pairing of client and architect is, you have to contemplate two things: the deeply embedded social progressivism that has become the standard worldview of international architectural firms such as BIG; and organizations such as the NFL, a private club for 1 percenters that bullies municipalities and treats its own players’ health with indifference. Can this marriage last? Is BIG motivated by naivete or cynicism?

WaPo's art and architecture critic Philip Kennicott discusses the oddities of BIG's recent commission to design a new stadium for the Washington Redskins — and the team's problematic name is just the tip of the iceberg.

Before Donald Trump's beef with Blair Kamin, he tried to sue the Chicago Tribune over a drawing

2015-08-24T17:29:00-04:00

You may recall an entertaining Twitter spat that broke out between ... Donald Trump and Pulitzer-winning Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin. [...] Kamin got off easy compared to his predecessor, the late Paul Gapp, who was also a Pulitzer-winning architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune. [...] But [Gapp's] achievements were overshadowed by his run-in with The Donald: a $500 million lawsuit over one column, about Trump’s plan to build the tallest building in America in Manhattan.

More news from Trump and the Windy City:

The New LaGuardia Airport: Not Functional, Not Inspiring, Not an Icon

2015-08-10T13:06:00-04:00

The published renderings that accompanied the announcement were not terribly reassuring, as they depicted a very long curved terminal with gangly tentacles raised over plane taxiways that hinted at torsos of praying mantises: an awkward rather than a graceful vault.

Zaha Hadid sues architecture critic Martin Filler over book review

2014-08-22T12:40:00-04:00

Hadid, who was born in Baghdad and is now a British citizen, claimed that Filler falsely implied she was indifferent to the alleged difficult working conditions of migrant workers on high-profile construction projects in the Middle East, including her own. She also claimed Filler used large portions of his June 5 review of Rowan Moore's "Why We Build: Power and Desire in Architecture" to question her success and fault her personality, although she was not a prominent character in the book.

The NY Times interviews architecture critic Witold Rybczynski

2014-05-08T18:17:00-04:00

His writing has a patient, deliberate quality that is rare at a moment when the dominant medium of architectural discourse is Twitter. Perhaps this is why Mr. Rybczynski, despite himself, is suddenly all the rage.

Inga Saffron: It's not just architecture, it's city life criticism

2014-04-21T14:29:00-04:00

Inga Saffron, who writes the "Changing Skyline" column for the Philadelphia Inquirer, won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism this week. She talks with Dave Heller about the state of criticism today, and the changing attitudes towards cities.

Previously: Inquirer's architecture critic Inga Saffron wins Pulitzer Prize for criticism

Inquirer's architecture critic Inga Saffron wins Pulitzer Prize for criticism

2014-04-14T18:01:00-04:00

Inquirer architecture critic Inga Saffron on Monday won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism. In its citation, the Pulitzer Committee cited Saffron "for her criticism of architecture that blends expertise, civic passion and sheer readability into arguments that consistently stimulate and surprise."

NYT Architecture Critic Michael Kimmelman to Receive the 2014 Brendan Gill Prize

2014-03-11T18:00:00-04:00

MAS is proud to announce that Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic of The New York Times, has been named the winner of the 2014 Brendan Gill Prize. [...] The jury singled out Kimmelman’s exceptional coverage of the challenges posed by an overstressed Penn Station, challenging New Yorkers and their regional neighbors to no longer settle for anything less than planning and design excellence that befits the busiest transportation hub in North America.

Henry Hope Reed, Architecture Historian, Dies at 97

2013-05-03T13:38:00-04:00

Henry Hope Reed, an architecture critic and historian whose ardent opposition to modernism was purveyed in books, walking tours of New York City and a host of curmudgeonly barbs directed at advocates of the austere, the functional and unornamented in public buildings and spaces, died Wednesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 97.

Editor's Picks #305

2013-03-05T11:42:00-05:00

vado retro summed up the design "a box within a box and one box the one inside, the inside box is at an angle. oh and there are trees" but Alex Gomez added "Although the facade is superficial, I feel it will succeed in attracting ‘qualitative and quantitative tourist flows in the area,’

News
Over at Bustler.net, Bernard Tschumi Architects unveiled the schematic design for the firm's first work in Italy: ANIMA, a new cultural center in the city of Grottammare. The project has been commissioned by the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Ascoli Piceno and the Municipality of Grottammare and is expected to be completed by 2016.

In the description of the project, it states: “Could one design a facade without resorting to formal composition? Could one design a facade that would be neither abstract nor figurative, but formless, so to speak? Our motivation in raising these questions was both economic and cultural: At a time of economic crisis, to indulge in formal geometries made out of complex volumetric curves did not seem a responsible option. The time of ‘Iconism’ seemed to be over".

vado retro summed up the design "a box within a box and one box the one inside, the inside box is at an angle. oh and there are trees" but Alex Gomez added "Although the facade is s...

Architecture Critic Ada Louise Huxtable Dies

2013-01-07T19:22:00-05:00

Ada Louise Huxtable, the dean of American architecture critics, died Monday at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan. She was 91.

Why Don’t We Read About Architecture?

2012-03-03T09:28:00-05:00

Buildings are discussed — indeed aspects of them obsessed upon — but almost exclusively in the context of economics. This building went over budget, that surplus of houses led to the foreclosure crisis, that condo broke the record for residential real estate, etc. To the layman, then, architecture is conveyed as little more than something that costs a lot and causes a lot of grief, rather than something with the potential to enhance our daily lives.

Architecture criticism needs that kind of bold reinvention

2011-12-08T19:17:00-05:00

The underwater mortgages and overleveraged loans that underlie this latest great contraction result in significant part from valuing both residential and commercial buildings merely as investment vehicles rather than as complex and consequential things-in-the-world. And on this urgent issue, which places buildings at the very center of key political and economic debates, architecture critics have been mostly missing in action.

Thomas Fisher dean of the College of Design at the University of Minnesota, reviews the state of architectural criticism. Are the days of a professional critic who writes for a major newspaper over? Has architectural criticism been weakened by the globalization and commodification of the architectural profession? Dean Fisher goes on to argue that aspiring critics "can take at least three lessons from Chuck Close's nervy reinvention of portraiture". His suggestions then draw parallels to the work of three historically important critics: Lewis Mumford, Ada Louise Huxtable and Jane Jacobs. In the comments and discussion that follows John Thackara argues "The addition of two words would transform architecture criticism profoundly: 'and energy'."

How Michael Kimmelman's First Architecture Review Made the Front Page of The Times

2011-09-26T10:24:03-04:00

Times Culture Editor Jonathan Landman: In this case, Michael had some things to say about the approach he will take to this beat that I and my bosses thought were worth amplifying. The old-writer-new-mantle thing played a part, but there’s certainly no guarantee that a writer gets a Page 1 story when he or she switches beats.

In his first review, MIchael Kimmelman goes to the South Bronx of all places, sending a message that he may just be up to the task of replacing, even besting, Nicolai Ourossoff.

Michael Kimmelman observed

2011-08-11T17:34:13-04:00

Ada Louise has a voice (acerbic defender of the city); Goldberger has a voice (the artful company man); Muschamp had a voice (champion of glamour). Nicolai, alas, has no voice. Kimmelman will need to stake out some critical territory for himself, a voice on the subject. …

Ms. Julie Iovine an ex editor of NYT's Home Magazine whose quotes were relied upon in this article, noted “There’s a worry now, that someone who is known as an art critic—an appraiser of the object—will be tempted to also treat architecture as an object. It ain’t so! Especially right now—the idea of the starchitect is entirely passé. No one practices that way anymore. It’s over, done, good riddance.”