What would the news be without controversy? You could say it’s way too much of a focus in the overall media landscape, and our small corner of the business certainly is not immune to its pull either. Coming out of the pandemic-dominated 2020 has provided us with quite a bit of contentious architectural items to report on. Here are the most controversial stories from our pages as we look back on the year that was.

Munger Hall led the way with a still-unraveling saga that might never have begun except for the moral probity of architect Dennis McFadden. His October 25th resignation letter, written to the UCSB Design Review Committee and republished by The Santa Barbara Independent’s Tyler Hayden (whom I think should win the Pulitzer), ignited a firestorm online, even causing the rare occurrence of having an architectural story to land in the national news outlets. 

The proposed dorm itself is a depressing statement on the architectural standards we have for young people as well as a sad byproduct of the statewide lack of available student housing. But the real story in my view is about a wealthy financier buying himself what in the end is essentially a massive burden on a public institution in the form of a vanity project that has a reported price tag north of $1.5 billion.

Speaking of architects and academia, another story that captivated readers was the news that former Princeton School of Architecture Dean Alejandro Zaera-Polo was officially out at the university following a yearslong row with the administration that culminated in an ad-hoc committee vote to remove the AZPA founder from his teaching post and his own wild “Gonzo-style” polemic aimed not only at Princeton but at the academic apparatus as a whole.

Another Industry critique came in the form of Norman Foster’s late August appearance on Bloomberg Television which drew quite a bit of backlash over the architect’s continued recalcitrance as to whether or not airport infrastructure constitutes a break from the green principles outlined by the group Architects Declare, the initiative he himself backed early on and then later left over the issue, which he characterized as a “hypocritical moral stance.” 

In the way of such stances, Phillip Johnson’s name was finally covered up by the MoMA in a spillover from one of last year’s biggest stories. The face-saving gesture was temporarily installed to coincide with the museum’s superb exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America.

Employment offered even more areas for discord in 2021, with the controversy surrounding the appalling Newfields job posting providing us with yet another example of the permeance of white supremacy expressed by Johnson and imbibed by the MoMA and other cultural institutions to this day. 

No annual review would be complete without an overview of the opposition to certain projects that crop up in a given year. 2021 was no exception. Other than Munger Hall there were resolutions to a host of concerted efforts to halt, among others, the interior restoration of Notre Dame Cathedral, the building of Herzog & de Meuron's Tour Triangle, and SANAA’s high-priced overhaul of the La Samaritaine department store –– and that’s just in Paris.

Elsewhere there were similar resolutions rendered in the back-and-forths over India’s parliamentary redesign and the Obama Presidential Library in Chicago. A missive was fired against London’s rueful MSG Sphere by one of the world’s most influential critics, while its once-promising Tulip Tower was surprisingly shut down, which should have been the fate of MVRDV’s terrible Marble Arch Mound (although at least the city’s UK Holocaust Memorial appears finally to be moving forward). There was a successful pushback against disgraced Governor Andrew Cuomo’s politically-motivated LaGuardia AirTrain project, a resounding defeat for the bridge and tunnel crowd, and yet another tragically preventable suicide at Thomas Heatherwick’s Vessel in Hudson Yards.

But, more than anything, the HDR surveillance story is what shocked and infuriated me this year. The freedom of expression is fundamental to a democratic society, and it is everywhere under threat thanks in large measure to similar McCarthyist tactics which are born out of our high-tech surveillance state and the well-documented collusion between governments and corporate entities against what always seems to be progressive activists. 

HDR’s leadership willfully engaged in a criminal and racist high-tech spy campaign brought against innocent people who were opposed to a highway project that would have run through a site considered sacred to Indigenous communities in Arizona, in addition to other groups of community activists arrayed against penitentiaries planned from Ohio to Massachusetts. 

Better words than I can offer have been produced throughout time essentially saying that it is far better choosing a righteous path, and that history remembers those who went the other way in poor favor. The only place for those who deny the freedom of others themselves is a prison. I sincerely hope the architectural community will come together in the new year to offer a full rebuke of this and other types of unethical business practices.