Archinect - News

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.

Archinect's critical round-up of Los Angeles' Broad Museum

2015-09-23T15:50:00-04:00

From a super-sized cheese grater, to a contraceptive sponge, to an inadvertent fun house ride, the critics have thoroughly analogized the new Broad museum in mostly positive (if occasionally biting) reviews. To follow up with Amelia's review, published earlier today, we offer some other critical perspectives on LA's latest architectural landmark.

The L.A. Times' Christopher Hawthorne frames the museum's relative success principally in terms of the political and physical struggle it took to realize it (Broad is currently suing the structure's skin fabricators for what he claims were costly, time-delaying fabrication errors). "It wouldn't be fair to say that the museum, which has moments of real charm, buckles under the burden of those expectations and conflicts. But in a number of places, including its surprisingly punchless facade, it shows the considerable strain of holding up that weight."

Hawthorne also reflects on the building in terms of Diller Scofidio + Renfro's overall body of...

Art/Architecture critic Philip Kennicott wins Pulitzer Prize for criticism

2013-04-17T19:42:00-04:00

Kennicott’s entry included several pieces published in the Style section last year. One was a review in June of an exhibit of creations by the architect Kevin Roche at the National Building Museum.

Assessing Roche’s work, Kennicott wrote, “In the end, Roche’s reputation will rise or fall depending on what becomes of the corporate world he served. If the end of corporate America is a dystopian hell of environmental catastrophe, vast economic inequity and social instability, the corporate architects of our age will not be remembered fondly. But if our age yields to a better one, just as the tyrannies and kleptocracies of past centuries sometimes yielded (perhaps temporarily) to more enlightened, democratic societies, then Roche’s work might have the charm of baroque palaces, Egyptian pyramids and Parisian avenues.”

Philip Kennicott’s top art and architecture of 2011

2011-12-09T13:34:00-05:00

It was a year without theme or focus, haunted by financial and political anxieties, but culturally diffuse. Which is to say, a year like most others in this age of no discernible isms or movements, no dominant ideologies, no marching to a single manifesto.