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 Her review delves further into the problems of outdated and out of touch criticism: many of the essays contained in the book were originally published in the 1990s, which creates a kind of time capsule of privileged disconnect.

Christopher Hawthorne, meanwhile, finds Paul Goldberger's new biography, Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry, to be far too restrained: "The first-person Goldberger continues to show up every once in a while, but only in the footnotes. This produces the odd sense that Goldberger the critic is banging on a wall laid down at the bottom of each footnoted page by Goldberger the biographer, trying futilely to be let back into a book he was briefly allowed to control." However, Hawthorne is pleased that Goldberger does highlight Gehry's true architectural gift, which he believes has been misguidedly described as "primarily sculptural (or worse, lazily decorative)" and instead helps to illuminate what he describes as  "Gehry's creative intelligence" which, in his words, "is fundamentally a humanistic one...his goal is different: not a sense of alienation and dislocation (as in Eisenman's work) or a reflection of a deeply fragmented society (as in Mayne's) but a difficult, clear-eyed sort of resolution."