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...

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