Pennsylvania’s first state senate district, which includes most of South Philadelphia, now has an architecture critic as a representative. Nikil Saval...former editor of the literary magazine n+1, New York Times contributor, author of Cubed: Secret History of the Workplace, and community organizer — is replacing Larry Farnese Jr. a Democrat who has been state senator since 2009. He is also the first Asian American to be elected to Pennsylvania’s senate. — Curbed

Texture is the condition of possibility through which our bodies meet environments; like gender in its relationality, texture is palpable only in becoming. So did the blue carpet in my childhood bedroom enmesh gender between my toes? And if we alter texture — including how we talk about it — might we transform gender in both minute and brash ways? — Places Journal

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

The buildings aren’t the work of celebrated modernist architects such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe or Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. They bear no resemblance to the towering glass and steel monuments to postwar rationalism that you see downtown. They house doctors’ offices and dry cleaners, furniture stores and accounting firms. Some are vacant, their prim hedges and topiary gone to seed. — chicagomag.com

These conjoined entities are the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the latter more commonly identified as a memorial to the victims of lynching. They are both extraordinary, though it is the second that behooves a pilgrimage. To my mind, it is the single greatest work of American architecture of the 21st century, and the most successful memorial design since the 1982 debut of Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. — Dallas News

“From Bauhaus to Our House,” Mr. Wolfe attacked modern architecture and what he saw as its determination to put dogma before buildings. Published in 1981, it met with the same derisive response from critics. “The problem, I think,” Paul Goldberger wrote in The Times Book Review, “is that Tom Wolfe has no eye.” — The New York Times

The slabs in front of me seemed at once the most and least architectural objects I’d ever seen. They were banal and startling, full and empty of meaning. Here were the techniques of Land Art, medieval construction, marketing and promotion, architectural exhibition and the new nativism rolled uncomfortably if somehow inevitably into one. — Los Angeles Times

The imaginative possibilities of miniature things lie not in their being shrunken versions of a larger thing. The world of the miniature opens to reveal a secret life. — Places Journal

Over the years, Trump has courted me, comforted me, criticized me and sent me a handful of sometimes-fawning letters and notes. I saved the correspondence. Wouldn't you? [...]

And the missives are telling. Combined with other things he's said and written, they show that Candidate Trump isn't all that different from Developer Trump. He remains a master media manipulator who can be charming, mercurial and vengeful. Only now he wants to be the most powerful man on earth. — Blair Kamin – Chicago Tribune

To understand how strange this pairing of client and architect is, you have to contemplate two things: the deeply embedded social progressivism that has become the standard worldview of international architectural firms such as BIG; and organizations such as the NFL, a private club for 1 percenters that bullies municipalities and treats its own players’ health with indifference. Can this marriage last? Is BIG motivated by naivete or cynicism? — The Washington Post

You may recall an entertaining Twitter spat that broke out between ... Donald Trump and Pulitzer-winning Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin. [...]

Kamin got off easy compared to his predecessor, the late Paul Gapp, who was also a Pulitzer-winning architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune. [...]

But [Gapp's] achievements were overshadowed by his run-in with The Donald: a $500 million lawsuit over one column, about Trump’s plan to build the tallest building in America in Manhattan. — chicagomag.com

The published renderings that accompanied the announcement were not terribly reassuring, as they depicted a very long curved terminal with gangly tentacles raised over plane taxiways that hinted at torsos of praying mantises: an awkward rather than a graceful vault. — 6sqft.com

Hadid, who was born in Baghdad and is now a British citizen, claimed that Filler falsely implied she was indifferent to the alleged difficult working conditions of migrant workers on high-profile construction projects in the Middle East, including her own.

She also claimed Filler used large portions of his June 5 review of Rowan Moore's "Why We Build: Power and Desire in Architecture" to question her success and fault her personality, although she was not a prominent character in the book. — whtc.com