He’s now the subject of a modest but riveting retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan, organized by Abraham Thomas, called 'Materialized Space: The Architecture of Paul Rudolph,' whose first order of business is obviously to answer a question people outside architecture circles will ask, namely: Who was he? — The New York Times

The show is a gem. It focuses on domestic design from six countries (Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Chile and Venezuela), produced between 1940 and 1980. Latin America had entered a period of transformation, industrial expansion and creativity. Across the region, design was becoming institutionalized as a profession, opening up new avenues, especially for women. — The New York Times

“It really pisses me off,” Clark said while standing in the plaza in front of the Flatiron Building on Fifth Avenue, a few blocks south of the dueling skyscrapers. “The whole New York skyline has been destroyed. When I moved here I was thrilled with it, and now it’s just getting disgusting. These new buildings have no identity, no design to them. We’ve lost the character of New York, and it breaks my heart.” — The Guardian

It wasn’t a visual spectacle, but it was handsome and dignified, standing out with its prefab metal facade not just in a neighborhood of empty lots, aging apartment blocks and derelict rail tracks but also against a backdrop of dreary, bare-bones affordable housing developments all across the city.

Most important, its goal was larger than itself: to reimagine subsidized housing for a new century. I promised in that column to report back on whether it succeeded.

Did it? — The New York Times

A generation ago, the New York skyline was a global icon, shaped more or less like a suspension bridge stretched between the Empire State and the Twin Towers, making it possible to, say, pop out of some unfamiliar subway station, gaze up toward the clouds and orient oneself along the skyline’s north-south axis. Today, the skyline is vastly more complex, far-flung and difficult to picture, and it’s common to hear complaints that the city has lost its bearings. — The New York Times

The only thing everyone seems to know for certain is that nothing meaningful ever really happens to improve North America’s busiest and most miserable train hub, despite decades of demands and promises. Hope has long gone to die on the 6:50 to Secaucus.

But now may actually be different. — The New York Times

In this case, architecture is the issue and the engine of renewal. With its triple-height library and exalting, barrel-vaulted classrooms with huge punched windows overlooking Manhattan, the redesigned ice plant becomes one of the most spectacular school buildings in the city.

[...] the historical arc of 20 Bruckner, as the building is called, is instructive and tells a larger tale about the Bronx, change and renewal. — The New York Times

Writing about Twin Parks in 1973, The Times’s former architecture critic, Paul Goldberger, speculated that the project might “turn out to be important in the history of housing design.” [...] design, however compassionate, can mean only so much against the obstacles that make up the housing problem today.”

The calculus is the same half a century later. But the South Bronx isn’t. Gradually, it has been remade. Progress isn’t impossible, it’s a process. — The New York Times

What’s below is a conversation with members of the Black Reconstruction Collective, which came together during the past year and a half, in tandem with an exhibition now at the Museum of Modern Art called “Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America.” The collective’s members are the 10 architects, artists and designers in the exhibition. — The New York Times

Thirty years on, the A.D.A. has reshaped American architecture and the way designers and the public have come to think about civil rights and the built world. We take for granted the ubiquity of entry ramps, Braille signage, push buttons at front doors, lever handles in lieu of doorknobs, widened public toilets, and warning tiles on street corners and subway platforms. [...] The A.D.A. has baked a more egalitarian aesthetic of forms and spaces into the civic DNA. — The New York Times

But death chambers and many solitary confinement cells — they’re officially called segregation units, not incidentally — are extreme cases. Architects should not contribute their expertise to the most egregious aspects of a system that commits exceptional violence against African-Americans and other minorities.

The least the American Institute of Architects can do now is agree. — The New York Times

Over the years, architects have not been the only ones to inscribe New York’s skyline — the signature image of the last American century — across the urban ether.

Among others, structural engineers, practical poets of often towering imagination and import, have also figured out how to scale those heights. Skyscrapers are team efforts, after all. — The New York Times

I find it interesting that theaters are so resilient. They can have many lives. [...] For architects, set design can be a lesson in the fact that nothing is permanent. Permanence can be a little restricting, it turns out. Theater isn’t permanent. It exists when there is an audience. — David Rockwell in The New York Times

Pandemics [...] are anti-urban. They exploit our impulse to congregate. And our response so far — social distancing — not only runs up against our fundamental desires to interact, but also against the way we have built our cities and plazas, subways and skyscrapers. They are all designed to be occupied and animated collectively. For many urban systems to work properly, density is the goal, not the enemy. — The New York Times

Will New York’s new jails be places where visiting families feel welcome? Will the jails provide space for police officers and medical staff to train together? For detainees to confer with lawyers? For therapeutic assistance and recreation?

Outside as well as inside, will they be scaled to their surroundings, will the city be open to other sites and will the buildings architecturally represent, as borough landmarks, our civic ideals and values? — The New York Times