Archinect's round-up of the week's architectural critiques

2015-09-16T13:36:00-04:00

What is the role of creative exploration in architecture? From the L.A. Times to The New Republic, this question is very much on critical minds. In a piece entitled "How to Make Architecture Human," Anna Wiener reviews Witold Rybczynski's latest collection of essays, Mysteries of the Mall, which sets out to explore the "mundane" locales of architecture and quickly proclaims a distaste for the avant-garde in favor of lasting value.

Wiener notes that "Rybczynski is right to call out architects who submit designs for cities they have little relationship to, but work that favors experimentation—in aesthetics, in use, in design process—occupies a valuable space in the culture, too. 'Lasting value' is subjective and arbitrary; it serves a culture well to explore its desires and curiosities, however eccentric, and expand beyond the mainstream comfort-zone." Her review delves further into the problems of outdated and out of touch criticism: many of the essays contained in the book were origi...

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Archinect's round-up of the week's architectural critiques