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."

Our Cubicles, Ourselves: How the Modern Office Shapes American Life

2014-04-15T13:44:00-04:00

And hierarchies don’t disappear when you place everyone at a communal table or “superdesk”; they persist in more subtle modes of workplace interaction. I suspect that people thrown into open plans might even miss their cubicles. And there are features of cubicles—such as the need to partition wide spaces—that I suspect will continue to be useful and never go away; these needs precede the invention of the cubicle itself.

Read more about the development of the American workplace in Archinect's feature article, Aftershock #2: "Serendipity Machines" and the Future of Workplace Design.

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

Our Cubicles, Ourselves: How the Modern Office Shapes American Life