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."

Oliver Wainwright on Paris' claims to be the 'greenest Olympics yet'

2024-07-21T08:46:00-04:00

With its focus on mobility, greenery and renovation, the overarching legacy of the Paris Olympics looks set to be more promising than most, ultimately helping to stitch long-severed suburbs into the centre. The mental geography of most Parisians will expand, for the better. Perhaps that’s the most that could be hoped for: with its emphasis on speed and reliance on private developers, the Olympics can hardly be a vehicle for more equitable forms of development.

Oliver Wainwright unpacks the City of Lights’ vision for a green (some might say ‘greenwashed’) 2024 Olympic Games while complimenting some of the new architectural designs from Ateliers 2/3/4/, Kengo Kuma, and others. No survey would be complete, of course, without a site visit to the massive new Athletes’ Village master planned by Dominique Perrault for the gritty Saint-Denis suburb, where he counted several flaws.

“It follows a classic pattern,” author Justinien Tribillon tells him. “The development is designed to ensure that people with more money will move here, increasing local tax revenues, instead of building very ambitious, progressive, sustainable social housing for the existing inhabitants of Seine-Saint-Denis.”

The games' opening ceremony begins on the cleaned-up Seine River on Friday, July 26th, at 7:30 PM local time.

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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Oliver Wainwright on the 'elegant white steel and glass pavilion' crowned 2024 EU Mies van der Rohe Award winner

2024-04-30T11:48:00-04:00

A lightweight university study centre designed to be easily disassembled has won the prize for the best building in Europe. Longevity, permanence and a sense of immutability might be the ambition of most architects, but Gustav Düsing and Max Hacke would be delighted to see their building adapted and reconfigured, or ultimately dismantled and moved somewhere else altogether.

Wainwright reflects on the "impossibly slender" pavilion which was revealed as the winner of the 2024 EU Mies van der Rohe Award last week in an article that also includes the perspectives of the pavilion's architects, Gustav Düsing and Max Hacke.

Related on Archinect: University study pavilion wins the 2024 EU Mies van der Rohe Award with a reconfigurable design. Photo by Iwan Baan.

Located on the campus of the Technical University of Braunschweig, Germany, the pavilion has been designed to allow for variations of student activities within a flexible layout, described by the award organizers as a "counter-model to spaces of hierarchical knowledge transfer."

Another winning aspect is the hybrid structure's ability to be disassembled and remounted. Individual components are capable of reuse in line with a principle called the "future material depot," which contributes to its role in the circular economy.

The lessons we’re still ‘Learning from Las Vegas’ after 50 years

2023-01-27T16:32:00-05:00

What struck me when I went back to reread the book is how deliberately it works to collapse the distance, and therefore the distinction, between enthusiasm and skepticism, and ultimately between documentation and critique. Above all, “Learning from Las Vegas” argues for a curious and open-minded anti-utopianism, for understanding cities as they are rather than how planners wish they might be—and then using that knowledge, systematically and patiently won, as the basis for new architecture.

Yale’s new visiting critic Christopher Hawthorne considers the lasting inspirational qualities and history of Steven Izenour, Denise Scott Brown, and Robert Venturi's seminal 1972 text, whose origins can be traced to a studio the young newlyweds taught in New Haven in the fall of 1968. Hawthrone places it alongside Reynar Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies — published the year before — in an antiquated canon but says its impartial tone should be emulated by a new generation of high-minded designers hoping to dismantle or improve the pernicious social and environmental ramparts of our young century.

Related three-part feature series on Archinect: Learning from 'Learning from Las Vegas' with Denise Scott Brown, Part 1: The Foundation; Part 2: Pedagogy; Part 3: Research

“'To tear down Paris and begin again' is not so far, in spirit, from the current mood, even if the political goals of many young architects are quite different from those of the right-leaning Le Co...

'Shop of horrors': Oliver Wainwright reviews Morphosis' newly-opened Orange County Museum of Art

2022-12-13T17:20:00-05:00

Nowhere is the gulf between digital promise and physical fact more spectacularly evident than at the new Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) in California [...] Almost a generation in the making, it feels like the final death rattle of a bygone age, the last gasp of an era preoccupied with novel form for form’s sake. Perhaps it is fitting that this flimsy, paper-thin architecture is held together with tape.

The Guardian critic paid a visit to the new museum building to offer a thoroughly dejecting assessment based on what he observed to be a disorienting entrance, confounding wayfinding system, atrium configuration, and defective cladding panels made necessary by a “performative shell” that has come to be an “expensive and elaborate” trope of its designers.

Morphosis partner-in-charge Brandon Welling claimed the firm was pushed into its October completion date and is still going through its punch list of small details that will complete the design, which Wainwright called a “$94 [million] hymn to the difference between render and reality.”

“I have no interest in completing projects,” says Thom Mayne - too bad for the Orange County Museum of Art https://t.co/RIvHSkUuZE pic.twitter.com/RdYTpOSVSo
— Olly Wainwright (@ollywainwright) December 13, 2022

Builders for the project pinned some of the issues on supply chain delays and said some of the hastily assembled stopgaps like tape and sof...

Lee Bey reminds us an architecture critic can appear in many forms, even one of a famed film critic

2021-04-05T15:41:00-04:00

What defines an architecture critic? These past few months, the discourse surrounding what an architecture critic is, who they have been, and why this role needs to be re-evaluated has circulated across several publications and architecture circles. While several critics come to mind, both past and present, who exemplify the very best of what this role presents for the industry, there are a few individuals outside of the profession that architecture criticism might have needed.

WBEZ Chicago published Lee Bey's piece "Roger Ebert: An architecture critic, too" back in 2013. Throughout the article, Bey recounts his past conversations and memories with the famed film critic. Ebert's consistency and dedication to the "craft of criticism" were admired by many. Even during his final years, when illness befell him and eventually leading to his passing in 2013, Bey reminds us of Ebert's writing and architecture involvement. "He sounded the alarm against civic inattention, mercantile forces o...

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.

Justin Davidson scorches Rem's "Countryside"

2020-02-25T14:36:00-05:00

Welcome to “Countryside, the Future”: This is what you might get if you asked a celebrated European philosopher-architect to reinvent the Iowa State Fair. No mess, no smells, just acres of color printouts, cryptic homilies about nature, and a couple of pesticide-spraying drones. Did you know that agriculture is increasingly computerized?

New York Magazine's architecture critic, Justin Davidson, takes a no-holds-barred look at the Countryside, The Future exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. The exhibition, developed by a research and exhibition team led by OMA/AMO and Rem Koolhaas, explores "radical changes in the rural, remote, and wild territories [...] or the 98% of the earth’s surface not occupied by cities."

Regarding the exhibition, Davidson writes, "Given that the countryside is a site of radical reinvention, how is it possible that there are, as one wall text suggests, virtually no books about it? That’s a profound mystery, or would be if you ignored the tens of thousands of volumes published in recent years about, say, wilderness, farming, fishing, nature, the environment, small towns, communes, rural populism, folk cultures, indigenous peoples, land management, wildlife management, hunting, water, winemaking, and deserts … not to mention suburbs."

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Rowan Moore praises Bjarke Ingels as Rem Koolhaas "without the scent of intellectual and psychological complication"

2019-10-09T14:35:00-04:00

[Amager Bakke] is a work that revels in its own contrivance, a condensation and celebration of the surrounding artifice, a creation of what might be called hypernature. It is at once an energy facility, converting refuse into electricity, and a ski slope. It is arresting and striking. It’s an emblem of a culture of why-not and because-you-can that currently pops up in a number of modern cities [...]

Writing in The Guardian, architecture critic Rowan Moore heaps praise on Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) and the firm's founder in a write-up of the firm's recently completed Amager Bakke project in Copenhagen.

Describing the architect's ability to impress clients, Moore writes, "He learned the power of shock from his former boss, Rem Koolhaas, without the scent of intellectual and psychological complication that major clients sometimes find off-putting about the latter. He presents himself as a seer, intoning about the future he means to shape, about the 'world-changing power of form-giving', but a cheeky one."

Could this be the political/architectural diagram we have been waiting for?

2019-03-27T13:56:00-04:00

Can the relationship between architecture and politics ever be summarized by a well-organized diagram? San Francisco based writer Julia Galef recently offered a proposal on Twitter for distinguishing the four main political groups by their architectural preferences in a familiar format in the social media universe.

It recalls the drawings made by architect Leon Krier, who often preferred images over lengthy texts as a means of communicating architectural styles against their political intentions.

Hawthorne and Wagner on Robert Venturi's theory impact

2018-10-01T14:01:00-04:00

The idea of the “both-and” suggested a new pluralism, and maybe a new tolerance, in architecture. But the phrase turned out to have its limits. To the extent that Venturi was making an argument in favor of a kind of big-tent populism in architecture, it was a space for new styles instead of new voices, new forms rather than new people. In fact, tucked inside Complexity and Contradiction is an argument for a renewed insularity in the profession [...].

Christoper Hawthorne, former LA Times architecture critic and now Design Officer for the City of Los Angeles, dissects Robert Venturi's 1966 book, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (which famously scoffs at the Miessian classical Modernism with the "less is a bore" tagline), and argues in his piece in The Atlantic that the array of new choices the book offered also limited architecture's broader access to the public and diversity in the profession.

Meanwhile in another publication of the Atlantic network, McMansion Hell blogger Kate Wagner is out with a CityLab article on how Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour's 1972 Learning from Las Vegas influenced an entire generation of architects, and her personally: "I came from Anywhere, U.S.A., far, far away from any great works of architecture," she writes. "Venturi’s elevation of everyday buildings made me feel seen, made me feel like the places I had observed, and my appreciation for them, were valid and me...

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.

Zaha Hadid Architects director defends criticisms of the London tower design

2018-01-22T14:17:00-05:00

Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) has defended proposals for a high-rise, mixed-use scheme in London – described as a ‘breakthrough project’ for the practice – following criticism over its size and location. Shortly before Christmas, the firm submitted plans to Lambeth Council [...] The scheme, the practice’s first major mixed-use residential and commercial development in the UK, has been dubbed a ‘two-fingered salute’ by opponents, who claim the proposals are too big for the site.

Zaha Hadid Architects combatted criticism of their proposal for the Vauxhall Cross Island site in London. Critiques of ZHA's plan claim the design overcrowds the area with towers that are too tall overshadowing the surrounding area and creating traffic congestion.

ZHA director Jim Heverin responded to the criticisms dismissing claims of congestion stating the design fits within a masterplan overseen by Transport for London (TfL). Heverin justifies ZHA plans asserting the design does not create more overshadowing than what is already permitted in surrounding development plans.

Heverin revealed the importance of this project for the firm stating, "We had been keen to show that we can do this type of project and how the office is moving in this direction."

"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.

Bro, Do You Even Quoin? A conversation with McMansion Hell's Kate Wagner

2017-07-13T16:41:00-04:00

On this week's episode we’re joined with Kate Wagner, the author of McMansion Hell, a blog that balances serious essays on architecture and urbanism, with brilliantly funny analysis of the absurd trends in American suburban architecture. Kate has recently emerged, triumphantly, from a widely publicized threat from Zillow to stop using their imagery. As reported on Archinect recently, Zillow withdrew their legal threats after the Electronic Frontier Foundation responded on behalf of Kate, and McMansion Hell is back in business, with a larger following than ever.

A taste of what McMansion Hell offers

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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...

Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic Blair Kamin on why his profession isn't dead

2015-07-21T13:06:00-04:00

Clearly, the days of the critic’s hegemony are done. [...] Yet as I know from years of blogging and tweeting, there is often wisdom in the crowd. The people who live in a neighborhood or work in a building often know more about it than the lazy critic who makes only a cursory inspection. My take on all this is that architecture criticism is not dead ... They fail to recognize that the circumstances of our time offer promise as well as peril.

In a speech delivered this past spring at Chicago's Society of Architectural Historians, Blair Kamin, architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune, addressed the nature of architecture criticism in today's media landscape. The talk came after Kamin's contentious Twitter exchange with "comb-over vulgarian" (Kamin's words) and now Presidential contender, Donald Trump, prompting a discussion of the critic's influence when their subjects (or anyone) can launch rebukes on social media.

Nieman Reports has collected select excerpts from his talk, covering not only Kamin's approach and ideology towards architecture criticism, but why calling it "dead" is short-sighted. Here, Kamin outlines the five core questions he asks himself when assessing a structure:

"First, quality: Does the design elevate prosaic materials to visual poetry, as does the extraordinary brickwork of Henry Hobson Richardson’s Sever Hall at Harvard? Or, like Peter Eisenman’s Aronoff Center for Design and Art at the Universit...