“Before Gould became architecture critic, there was little discussion about what was good or bad design in town. Today, Gould’s beat puts Milwaukee in an elite club: There are fewer than 50 architecture critics at newspapers across the nation, and most only write about it part time, found a 2001 survey by the National Arts Journalism Program.” Milwaukee Mag
2 Comments
thanks for the news! informative survey and postscript by paul goldberger, whose anology critic / bridge controller was simply said and funny...
i was astonished by the low numbers of architecture critics in the country, on top of knowing majority of that less than 50 critics are fluff a many of times.
interesting also, web based architecture critics were not taken into consideration. in web, you can go one step further and control the bridge which critics like to pass.
but hey, less than 50 critics in this huge country? have a heart.
some highlights;
35. What do you think a piece of architectural criticism should accomplish? (open-ended question)
"If a large part of a critic’s job is to provide a kind of bridge between the profession and the public, I think it is worth talking about what goes across that bridge, and what role a critic should have in policing it. Maybe a bridge is actually the worst possible analogy, because the last thing a critic should be providing is open, unfettered passage in both directions. A critic isn’t just the bridge itself; he or she is also the traffic cop in front of the bridge, selecting and limiting what gets across, or there is no point to his or her existence." - paul goldberger, from postscript
14. Please indicate how influential the following writers and theorists have been on your thinking as an architectural critic.
my answer would be rem koolhaas in 1979, when i read delirious new york, in new york, as a west coast architecture student doing a semester's work in manhattan, with 12 other students. at the time i was also learning from las vegas, and i was the only corbu advocate in the class, when liking corbu was complex and contradictory in archi-public except a lot of people thought the new york five was more do-able than the master. after that brief threat, corbu went on to become more immortal than before. like, immortal even in the parallel universe. ah hah.;.)
thanks again, J B Mollitt.
Whitney Gould is great!
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